ntil Housewife
Honeyvoice devised the plan of putting her to bed in a basket, with a
cork dangling from the handle for her to play with in her dreams.

Joy-of-Life was ill that winter and, because the kitten's pranks would
now and then divert a suffering hour, we bore with Daisy as long as
patience could, until, indeed, she forsook the house and set up an
independent establishment with a battered ruffian of a cat under our
south porch. Before forsaking the house, she had derided everything in
it. She had, indeed, an uncanny gift of singling out for her most
profane attentions the special objects that humankind holds sacred. On
the top of my desk stands a small Florentine bust of Dante, whose
austere countenance she loved to slap. Beyond it hangs a cross of
inlaid olivewood from Jerusalem, apparently inaccessible, but this
infant athlete, precariously balancing with one foot on the curved
woodwork of the desk and two feet clawing the wall, would stretch
herself out like an elastic until her free foot could give the lower
tip of the cross a smart rap and set it swinging. Punished, she would
strike back, hitting us in the face with an absurd, soft paw; called,
she would run away; caught, she would kick and bite. Our most tactful
cajolery she met with suspicion and disdain, if not with open ridicule.
Graceful as a whirling leaf, she was untamable as the wind that whirls
it,--the wildest wisp of kittenhood that ever left an aching memory.

Since the tragic exit of Daisy, whose confidence I could never
win,--and her cynical little ghost bids me admit that her distrust was
borne out by the event,--I have counted myself unworthy to take any
kitten to hearth and home. I doubt if any would come. My neighbors
across the way have a lordly old Thomas, who, smelling dog on my
skirts, spits at me as I mount the steps. My neighbors of the cross-cut
have a glossy black puss in a resplendent red collar, who politely but
unrelentingly evades all my advances. The feline heart has found me
out. Yet I still cherish a wistful regard for these delicate-footed,
wary creatures, who develop so suddenly from madcap frolic into
dignity, discretion and reserve, keeping even in the most domestic
surroundings a latent sense of a free life elder than civilization,
when, as Swinburne tells his silken crony:

"Wild on woodland ways your sires
Flashed like fires."

A friend of mine, a scholar, and therefore proud in thought and poor in
pu