ticked once how fortunately I was alone.

XIV

Maltby Phar was responsible for Togo; he had given him--a little black
fluff-ball with shoe-button eyes--to Susan, about six months after she
first came to live with me. Togo is a Chow; and a Chow is biologically
classified as a dog. But if a Chow is a dog, then a Russian sable muff
is a dish rag. Your Chow--black, smoke blue, or red--is a creation
apart. He is to dogdom what Hillhouse Avenue is to Birch Street--the
wrong end, _bien entendu_. His blood is so blue that his tongue is
purple; and, like Susan's conception of Gertrude, he is a living
confession of faith in the rightness of the right people, a living
rebuke to the wrongness of the wrong; the right people being, of course,
that master god or mistress goddess whom he worships, with their
immediate _entourage_. No others need apply for even cursory notice,
much less respect.

I am told they eat Chows in China, their native land. If they do, it
must be from the motive that drove Plutarch's Athenian to vote the
banishment of Aristides--ennui, to wit, kindling to rage; he had wearied
to madness of hearing him always named "the Just." Back, too, in
America--for I write from France--there will one day be proletarian
reprisals against the Chow; for in the art of cutting one dead your Chow
is supreme. He goes by you casually, on tiptoe, with the glazed eye of
indifference. He sees you and does not see you--and will not. You may
cluck, you may whistle, you may call; interest will not excite him, nor
flattery move him; he passes; he "goes his unremembering way." But let
him beware! If Americans are slow to anger, they are terrible when
roused. I have frequently explained this to Togo--more for Susan's sake
than his own--and been yawned at for my pains.

Personally, I have no complaint to make. In Togo's eyes I am one of the
right people. He has always treated me with a certain tact, though with
a certain reserve. Only to Susan does he prostrate himself with an
almost mystical ecstasy of devotion. Only for her does his feathered
tail-arc quiver, do his ears lie back, his calm ebon lips part in an
unmistakably adoring smile. But there is much else, I admit, to be said
for him; he never barks his deep menacing bark without cause; and as a
mere _objet d'art_, when well combed, he is superb. Ming porcelains are
nothing to him; he is perhaps the greatest decorative achievement of the
unapproachably decorative East....

But