'But, my dear child, you don't know anybody there.'
'That's just the point. I shall change the scene completely and get out of myself.'
That seems an odd and impossible sort of thing to do, but it isn't the first time I have heard people speak of performing this feat. Cats can't, and wouldn't want to, I fancy.
The old man said he couldn't think of allowing it, and she at once wrote for rooms to an address she knew. He said it would never do, and she answered the woman's letter who kept the pension and took the rooms for a month.
Then we were the difficulty. She could not think of leaving us to Mary, who was good but careless, and she thought of a certain place she had heard of at Gunnersbury where they boarded cats.
Mother disliked the idea very much, but what could she do? We were all three put in baskets and taken in a cab. Gunnersbury seemed partly country when we got out, but I saw very little, for we were hustled into the house, and our fastenings not undone till we were in a garden with wire cages or houses in it that they called 'cat-runs.'
A young lady in a grey voile frock trimmed with blue ribbons was sweeping one of the wire places out, and she seemed to be no relation to the mistress of the cattery, just a friend.
'I am single-handed just now,' the old lady said. 'My daughter, who helps me, is away, taking King Henry the Eighth to a cat-show, but Miss Joldwin—such a nice girl, and so well connected!—is good enough to come here and help me turn out the cages twice a day!'
I don't see why because Miss Joldwin was a pedigree-woman she should be too good to sweep out a cattery, but I do think she might have put a pinafore on, and said so.
'Dear little fellow, he is very lively and talkative!' said the old woman to me. 'I know I shall make a pet of you, I shall.'