'But don't they cry out and rend your heart? That one, for instance,' she pointed to Fred, who was crawling up her at the moment.
'This one!' said Auntie May, stooping to pick up Fred. 'Oh, Fred never cries—he breaks. If I put him to sleep alone in my study, he does what he can to show me that it won't do. Many's the time I have come in apprehensively in the morning and found a mush of fragments of china or glass on the floor. He writes his name in ink across blank sheets of paper, he pulls all my correspondence out of my pigeon-holes and lays it in rows for me to see without labour, he separates shoes and earrings and gloves and everything that likes to live in a pair. Oh, he is a regular demon, I must get rid of him some day.'
'Don't sell him to me,' said the lady affectedly, 'after the character you have given him.'
By six o'clock carriages were ordered. There was a great chivying, and would any one believe that some of them did not know their own cats? Auntie May knew hers, no fear. Some of us had been sick, but the hostess said it didn't matter, as she had put a drugget down to avert the evils of such a contingency. I am not a bit ashamed of being sick any more than Auntie May is ashamed of blowing her nose. It is a perfectly natural action.
We none of us said Goodbye to each other. They never gave us time. Fred and his white cat were really a little sorry to part, but they said nothing, only she gave him a look over her mistress's shoulder which seemed to say, 'I hope we shall meet again.'
I did not want to see any one of them again except the theatrical cat, who was a jolly sort of cheerful beast. I forgot to say there was a Manx cat there, without a tail; its mother had bitten it off in a temper when it was young, I suppose. It was an awkward creature, and the white cat spat at him and told him he wasn't the only cat on the tiles. He had been making himself very civil to her, but she was a very unconventional young lady, I was told, and if she liked you she did, and if she didn't she wouldn't stop in the same room with you, and thickened all the way down when she was forced to obey.
I DID NOT WANT TO SEE ANY ONE OF THEM AGAIN.