“’Say, this guy is the happiest you ever see one when Kate has about four more of ’em licked to a standstill in jigtime.  He says he has one more favour to ask of me:  Will I allow his sister to come up some day and see the lovely carnage?  And I says, Sure!  Kate will be glad to oblige any time.  He says he’ll fetch her up the first time the pack is able to get out again, and he keeps on chattering like a child that’s found a new play-pretty.

“’I can’t hardly get him off the place, he’s so greatful to me.  He tells me his biography and about how this here blond guy has been roughing him all over Europe and Asia, and how it had got to stop right here, because a man has a right to live his own life, after all; and then he branches off in a nutty way to tell me that he always takes a cold shower every morning, winter and summer, and he never could read a line of Sir Walter Scott, and why don’t some genius invent a fountain pen that will work at all times? and so on, till it sounded delirious.  But he left at last.

“’And we had some good ripping sport when him and sister come up.  I never seen such a blood-thirsty female.  She’d nearly laugh her head off when Kitty was gouging the eye out of one of these cunning little scamps.  She said if I’d ever seen the nasty curs pile on to one poor defenseless little bunny I’d understand why she was so keen about my beetle-cat.  That’s what she called Kate.

“’Kate, he got kind of bored with the whole business after that.  He hadn’t actually eat one yet, and mebbe that was all that kept him going—­wanting to see if they’d taste any better than regular rabbits.  But you bet they knew now that Kate wasn’t any kind of a rabbit.  They didn’t have any more arguments on that point—­they knew darn’ well he didn’t have a drop of rabbit blood in his veins.  Oh, he’s some beetle-cat, all right!’

“That’s Cousin Egbert for you!  Can you beat him—­changing round and being proud of this mixed marriage that he had formerly held to be a scandal!

“Well, I go back home, and here is mother waiting for me.  And she’s a changed woman.  She’s actually give up trying to make anything out of her chits, because after considerable browbeating and third-degree stuff, they’ve come through with the whole evil conspiracy—­how they’d got her prize-winning beagles licked by a common cat that wouldn’t be let into any bench show on earth!  Her spirit was broke.

“‘My poor son,’ she says, ’I shall allow to go his silly way after this outrageous bit of double-dealing.  I think it useless to strive further with him.  He has not only confessed all the foul details, but he came brazenly out with the assertion that a man has a right to lead his own life—­and he barely thirty!’

“She goes on to say that it’s this terrible twentieth-century modernism that has infected him.  She says that, first woman sets up a claim to live her own life, and now men are claiming the same right, even one as carefully raised and guarded as her boy has been; and what are we coming to?  But, anyway, she did her best for him.