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intermittently and always on their terms. No cat, she thought, would make a sacrifice for its owner, whereas dogs did—readily and without question—and meant it too.
    Stories of friendship between people and lions were dubious, in Isabel’s view. Elsa, the famous lioness of
Born Free,
put on a good act of being on the side of the Adamsons but would have eaten them if she had been
really
hungry. And had that happened, the story of
Born Free
might have been somewhat different. The publishers would have had to publish an incomplete manuscript, explaining in the introduction that the book would have been a bit longer had the authors not been consumed by the subject of their story, but asking, nonetheless, for the reader’s understanding.
    The lions in Edinburgh Zoo were certainly well fed and well looked-after—a pensionable position, with lots of raw meat, that any lion in the wild might gladly accept. Yet there were some places that large animals simply should not be. She recalled a story told her by a friend who had been obliged to attend a conference in Las Vegas and who had stayed in one of the large hotels there. This hotel had, as many of them did, a casino on its ground floor, and the hotel guests were compelled to walk through this casino in order to get to their rooms. “I was walking,” said her friend, “through this hell of tinkling, flashing gambling machines and was suddenly confronted with a large glass-walled cage—in which there was a lion. A live lion.”
    Isabel had been speechless. She was only half American—through her sainted mother—but that was enough to make her blush with shame for the mere fact that Las Vegas existed. There was so much of which America could be proud: it had made New York and San Francisco, along with a hundred other cities with parks and art galleries and universities, but then it had gone and spawned Las Vegas, a place that carried vulgarity and venality to undreamed-of heights. And yet people loved it, and flocked there in their millions, to marvel at the entirely false, to be married in Elvis chapels, to lose money and to listen to flashy crooners singing about love. Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps Las Vegas was just a great big cultural burp, of the sort that you are bound to get in a free society where people can burp if they wish. Perhaps lions in casinos were what you got if you said:
There are no limits—everything is possible.
She imagined, though, the casino lion escaping—delicious thought—and suddenly finding a way out of its durance vile, romping through the crowds of gamblers, scattering the croupiers, sending the pole dancers up their poles to escape, pouncing on the waitresses with their trays of complimentary drinks, drowning the sound of cascading money with its roars of anguish and anger.
    “People were tapping on the glass,” her friend continued, “and the lion paced backwards and forwards. There were the bones of its dinner on the floor. It lived there, it seemed.” She paused, and looked at Isabel with melancholy eyes. “It lived there.”
    This memory of human perversity made her frown, and Jamie noticed it. He was accustomed to Isabel’s patterns of thought, and knew that there were unanticipated avenues always opening up. Down one of these she might suddenly wander, even if only for a few seconds, while she wrestled with some question that most of us rarely thought about, or never dreamed existed.
I am married to a philosopher,
he thought.
What else can I expect?
    “Thinking?” he asked.
    “Of meerkats,” answered Charlie.
    Jamie ruffled the boy’s hair. “Not you—Mummy.”
    “Yes,” said Isabel. “Of lions…and what it is to be a lion.”
    “I never think of lions,” said Jamie. “Or hardly ever.”
    “I don’t exactly make a habit of it,” said Isabel. And turning to Charlie, she reached down and picked