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

I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to
forgive her even the torture of the bath.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (_interested_)

You do? Tell me how it feels. It makes me shiver all over, just to see
her putting you in the water.

TOBY-DOG

Alas.... Listen then, and pity me. Sometimes, when She's come out of her
tub with not