I used to help her to undress, playing with her strings and stay-laces, and anything in the least taggy, and placing her slippers in different ends of the room ready for her to find in the morning. Then when she was in bed, I used to take a header off the high bureau and light on her. She kissed my head for about five minutes and I purred, and then having said good-night to her properly so, I lay down on the lower part of the bed, for I was getting such a big cat that my weight was too much for her shoulder where I used to like to lie. She put out her hand and stroked me sometimes in the middle of the night; she liked to feel I was there. If she was too sleepy to wake up, I generally crept up and just touched the tip of her nose and so back again without waking her. I didn't attempt to prise her eyelids open, as Fred did once when he had the privilege of sleeping with her. He never had it again. Auntie May values her eyes above anything, and she said it was too dangerous. I never woke her in the morning, for I thought she wanted all the sleep she could get. Manxie used to come and look at her sometimes when she was asleep, and pry into her drawers. I always kept one eye on her, and she knew it. The funny thing is it frightened her, though, of course, she knew that I could not tell tales of her.
At last poor Auntie May stayed in bed altogether, and the doctor brought his friend Mrs. Jay.
She was a nice woman and I adored her, although she played a funny little trick on me. She used to take me up when she came in, and I used to mew.
'It is an odd thing,' Auntie May said to her, after Mrs. Jay had been to see her two or three times and they were great friends, 'that you love cats so much and yet they mew when you hold them!'
'Isn't it odd?' said Mrs. Jay, smiling. She had a very pretty voice. 'I cannot suggest any explanation.'
I could have explained it. Mrs. Jay bit my neck every time, not hard or cruelly, but just so that I could not help crying out.
She was not a naturally unkind woman, but she had a mania for experimenting on people by teasing them as well as being good to them. She saved Auntie May's life, I think.
She came one day and said very decidedly:
'Now, Miss May Graham, I am going to take you away from here, bag and baggage, cat and cattage. That dreadful Pettigrew—'