Now, surely this attitude on the part of a small and helpless beast, dependent upon our bounty for food and shelter, and upon our sense of equity for the right to live, is worthy of note, and, to the generous mind, is worthy of respect.  Yet there are people who most ungenerously resent it.  They say the cat is treacherous and ungrateful, by which they mean that she does not relish unsolicited fondling, and that, like Mr. Chesterton, she will not recognize imaginary obligations.  If we keep a cat because there are mice in our kitchen or rats in our cellar, what claim have we to gratitude?  If we keep a cat for the sake of her beauty, and because our hearth is but a poor affair without her, she repays her debt with interest when she dozes by our fire.  She is the most decorative creature the domestic world can show.  She harmonizes with the kitchen’s homely comfort, and with the austere seclusion of the library.  She gratifies our sense of fitness and our sense of distinction, if we chance to possess these qualities.  Did not Isabella d’ Este, Marchioness of Mantua, and the finest exponent of distinction in her lordly age, send far and wide for cats to grace her palace?  Did she not instruct her agents to make especial search through the Venetian convents, where might be found the deep-furred pussies of Syria and Thibet?  Alas for the poor nuns, whose cherished pets were snatched away to gratify the caprice of a great and grasping lady, who habitually coveted all that was beautiful in the world.

The cat seldom invites affection, and still more seldom responds to it.  A well-bred tolerance is her nearest approach to demonstration.  The dog strives with pathetic insistence to break down the barriers between his intelligence and his master’s, to understand and to be understood.  The wise cat cherishes her isolation, and permits us to play but a secondary part in her solitary and meditative life.  Her intelligence, less facile than the dog’s, and far less highly differentiated, owes little to our tutelage; her character has not been moulded by our hands.  The changing centuries have left no mark upon her; and, from a past inconceivably remote, she has come down to us, a creature self-absorbed and self-communing, undisturbed by our feverish activity, a dreamer of dreams, a lover of the mysteries of night.

And yet a friend.  No one who knows anything about the cat will deny her capacity for friendship.  Rationally, without enthusiasm, without illusions, she offers us companionship on terms of equality.  She will not come when she is summoned,—­unless the summons be for dinner,—­but she will come of her own sweet will, and bear us company for hours, sleeping contentedly in her armchair, or watching with half-shut eyes the quiet progress of our work.  A lover of routine, she expects to find us in the same place at the same hour every day; and when her expectations are fulfilled (cats have some secret method of their own for telling time), she purrs approval