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Ransome’s gradually relaxing bulk and raised a long-haired, quizzical eyebrow, as if he rather enjoyed the man’s discomfiture.
    Ransome withstood the cat’s gaze with suavity, and stretched himself out on the bed with every bit of Fluffy’s own easy grace. “Well,” he said amusedly, “you gave me a jolt! Weren’t you taught to knock before you entered a gentleman’s boudoir?”
    Fluffy raised a velvet paw and touched it pinkly with his tongue. “Do you take me for a barbarian?” he asked.
    Ransome’s lids seemed to get heavy, the only sign he ever gave of being taken aback. He didn’t believe for a moment that the cat had really spoken, but there was something about the voice he had heard that was more than a little familiar. This was, of course, someone’s idea of a joke.
    Good God—it had to be a joke!
    Well, he had to hear that voice again before he could place it. “You didn’t say anything of course,” he told the cat, “but if you did, what was it?”
    “You heard me the first time,” said the cat, and jumped up on the foot of his bed. Ransome inched back from the animal. “Yes,” he said, “I—thought I did.” Where on earth had he heard that voice before? “You know,” he said, with an attempt at jocularity, “you should, under these circumstances, have written me a note before you knocked.”
    “I refuse to be burdened with the so-called social amenities,” said Fluffy. His coat was spotlessly clean, and he looked like an advertising photograph for eiderdown, but he began to wash carefully. “I don’t like you, Ransome.”
    “Thanks,” chuckled Ransome, surprised. “I don’t like you either.”
    “Why?” asked Fluffy.
    Ransome told himself silently that he was damned. He had recognized the cat’s voice, and it was a credit to his powers of observation that he had. It was his own voice. He held tight to a mind that would begin to reel on slight provocation, and, as usual when bemused, he flung out a smoke screen of his own variety of glib chatter.
    “Reasons for not liking you,” he said, “are legion. They are all included in the one phrase—‘You are a cat!’ ”
    “I have heard you say that at least twice before,” said Fluffy, “except that you have now substituted ‘cat’ for ‘woman.’ ”
    “Your attitude is offensive. Is any given truth any the less true for having been uttered more than once?”
    “No,” said the cat with equanimity. “But it is just that much more clichéd.”
    Ransome laughed. “Quite aside from the fact that you can talk, I find you most refreshing. No one has ever criticized my particular variety of repartee before.”
    “No one was ever wise to you before,” said the cat. “Why don’t you like cats?”
    A question like that was, to Ransome, the pressing of a button which released ordered phrases. “Cats,” he said oratorically, “are without doubt the most self-centered, ungrateful, hypocritical creatures on this or any other earth. Spawned from a mésalliance between Lilith and Satan—”
    Fluffy’s eyes widened. “Ah! An antiquarian!” he whispered.
    “—they have the worst traits of both. Their best qualities are their beauty of form and of motion, and even these breathe evil. Women are the ficklest of bipeds, but few women are as fickle as, by nature, any cat is. Cats are not true. They are impossibilities, as perfection is impossible. No other living creature moves with utterly perfect grace. Only the dead can so perfectly relax. And nothing—simply nothing at all—transcends a cat’s incomparable insincerity.”
    Fluffy purred.
    “Pussy! Sit-by-the-fire and sing!” spat Ransome. “Smiling up all toadying and yellow-eyed at the bearers of liver and salmon and catnip! Soft little puffball, bundle of joy, playing with a ball on a string; making children clap their soft hands to see you, while your mean little brain is viciously alight with the pictures your play calls up for you. Bite it to make it bleed;