Nicky would even sit still in the open air to watch Jerry as he stalked bees in the grass, or played by himself, over and over again, his own enchanted game.  He always played it in the same way.  He started from the same clump in the border, to run in one long careening curve across the grass; at the same spot in the lawn he bounded sideways and gave the same little barking grunt and dashed off into the bushes.  When you tried to catch him midway he stood on his hind legs and bowed to you slantwise, waving his forepaws, or rushed like lightning up the tree of Heaven, and climbed into the highest branches and clung there, looking down at you.  His yellow eyes shone through the green leaves; they quivered; they played; they mocked you with some challenge, some charm, secret and divine and savage.

“The soul of Nicky is in that cat,” Frances said.

Jerry knew that he was Nicky’s cat.  When other people caught him he scrabbled over their shoulders with his claws and got away from them.  When Nicky caught him he lay quiet and heavy in his arms, pressing down and spreading his soft body.  Nicky’s sense of touch had been hardened by violent impacts and collisions, by experiments with jack-knives and saws and chisels and gouges, and by struggling with the material of his everlasting inventions.  Through communion with Jerry it became tender and sensitive again.  It delighted in the cat’s throbbing purr and the thrill of his feet, as Jerry, serious and earnest, padded down his bed on Nicky’s knee.

“I like him best, though,” said Nicky, “when he’s sleepy and at the same time bitesome.”

“You mustn’t let him bite you,” Frances said.

“I don’t mind,” said Nicky.  “He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t like me.”

Jerry had dropped off to sleep with his jaws closing drowsily on Nicky’s arm.  When it moved his hind legs kicked at it and tore.

“He’s dreaming when he does that,” said Nicky.  “He thinks he’s a panther and I’m buffaloes.”

Mr. Parsons laughed at him.  “Nicky and his cat!” he said.  Nicky didn’t care.  Mr. Parsons was always ragging him.

The tutor preferred dogs himself.  He couldn’t afford any of the expensive breeds; but that summer he was taking care of a Russian wolfhound for a friend of his.  When Mr. Parsons ran with Michael and Nicky round the Heath, the great borzoi ran before them with long leaps, head downwards, setting an impossible pace.  Michael and Dorothy adored Boris openly.  Nicky, out of loyalty to Jerry, stifled a secret admiration.  For Mr. Parsons held that a devotion to a cat was incompatible with a proper feeling for a dog, whence Nicky had inferred that any feeling for a dog must do violence to the nobler passion.

Mr. Parsons tried to wean Nicky from what he pretended to regard as his unmanly weakness.  “Wait, Nicky,” he said, “till you’ve got a dog of your own.”

“I don’t want a dog of my own,” said Nicky.  “I don’t want anything but Jerry.”  Boris, he said, was not clever, like Jerry.  He had a silly face.