KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (insincere)

I don’t accuse Them.  After all, psychological subtleties are not in your line.

TOBY-DOG

Don’t speak so fast.  I need time to understand.  It seems to me—­

KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (slyly)

Pray, don’t hurry!  Your digestion might suffer in consequence.

TOBY-DOG, (unconscious of the irony)

You’re right!  I’ve some trouble in expressing myself to-day.—­Well, here goes:  it seems to me that of the two of us it’s you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

A dog’s logic, that!  The more one gives the more I demand.

TOBY-DOG

That’s wrong.  It’s indiscreet.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Not at all.  I have a right to everything.

TOBY-DOG

To everything?  And I?

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

I don’t imagine you lack anything, do you?

TOBY-DOG

Ah, I don’t know.  Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying.  My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me.  I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come....

KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (jeering)

And then what dreadful thing happens?

TOBY-DOG

You know very well!  Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it—­Castor Oil!  Wilful and unfeeling, she holds me between her strong knees, opens my jaws—­ KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Close them tighter!

TOBY-DOG

But I’m afraid of hurting her—­and my tongue, horrified, tastes the slimy mawkish stuff.  I choke and spit, my poor face is convulsed and the end of this torture is long in coming....  You’ve seen me afterwards dragging myself around, melancholy, my head hanging, listening to the unwholesome glouglou the oil makes in my stomach....

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil.  I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again.  Ha!  She must have thought she held the devil between her knees.  I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally—­disappeared as if by magic.

TOBY-DOG