eauty, 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 of our punctuality.
What she detests are noise, confusion, people who bustle in and out
of rooms, and the