If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never marry.  Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the air-shaft—­that’s about all there is to it.  Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won’t show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.

I led a dog’s life in that flat.  ’Most all day I lay there in my corner watching that fat woman kill time.  I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do.  Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose—­but what could I do?  A dog can’t chew cloves.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t.  We looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the streets that Morgan’s cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles of last December’s snow on the streets where cheap people live.

One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn’t have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn’s wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way: 

“What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster?  She don’t kiss you.  You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus.  You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog.  Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone.”

The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence in his face.

“Why, doggie,” says he, “good doggie.  You almost look like you could speak.  What is it, doggie—­Cats?”

Cats!  Could speak!

But, of course, he couldn’t understand.  Humans were denied the speech of animals.  The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier.  Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling.  One day I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation.

“See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,” I says, “you know that it ain’t the nature of a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public.  I never saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn’t look like he’d like to lick every other man that looked at him.  But your boss comes in every day as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick.  How does he do it?  Don’t tell me he likes it.”