would have left nothing at loose
ends. So endowed, she would have emphasized her not excessive age by a
slightly excessive gravity of dress and of deportment; and would have
adorned it, and her dignified widowhood, by becoming devote: and
thereafter, clinging with a modest ostentation only to her piety, would
have radiated, as time made its marches, an always increasingly
exemplary grace. But as Madame Jolicoeur did not possess a
temperament that even bordered on severity, and as her mind was a sort
that made itself up in at least twenty different directions in a single
moment--as she was, in short, an entirely typical and therefore an
entirely delightful Provencale--the situation was so much too much for
her that, by the process of formulating a great variety of
irreconcilable conclusions, she left everything at loose ends by not
making any choice at all.

In effect, she simply stood attendant upon what the future had in store
for her: and meanwhile avowedly clung only, in default of piety, to her
adored Shah de Perse--to whom was given, as she declared in disconsolate
negligence of her still provocatively fresh plumpness, all of the
bestowable affection that remained in the devastated recesses of her
withered heart.

To preclude any possibility of compromising misunderstanding, it is but
just to Madame Jolicoeur to explain at once that the personage thus in
receipt of the contingent remainder of her blighted affections--far from
being, as his name would suggest, an Oriental potentate temporarily
domiciled in Marseille to whom she had taken something more than a
passing fancy--was a Persian superb black cat; and a cat of such rare
excellencies of character and of acquirements as fully to deserve all of
the affection that any heart of the right sort--withered, or
otherwise--was disposed to bestow upon him.

Cats of his perfect beauty, of his perfect grace, possibly might be
found, Madame Jolicoeur grudgingly admitted, in the Persian royal
catteries; but nowhere else in the Orient, and nowhere at all in the
Occident, she declared with an energetic conviction, possibly could
there be found a cat who even approached him in intellectual
development, in wealth of interesting accomplishments, and, above all,
in natural sweetness of disposition--a sweetness so marked that even
under extreme provocation he never had been known to thrust out an angry
paw. This is not to say that the Shah de Perse was a characterless cat,
a