They're nothing but Two-Paws, both of them. You, poor thing, belittle yourself by seeking to imitate them. You stand on your hind legs, wear a coat when it rains, eat plums--for shame!--and those big green balls, the malicious trees let fall sometimes, when I'm passing underneath. TOBY-DOG Apples? KIKI-THE-DEMURE Very likely. She picks one up and throws it down the path, crying: "Apple, Toby, apple," and you rush after, in unseemly fashion, gasping for breath, looking like a fool, your tongue and your eyes sticking out.... TOBY-DOG, (_scowling, head resting on his paws_) One takes one's pleasures where one finds them. KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (_yawning, shows his pointed teeth and his palate of pink velvet_) I'm hungry. Dinner is surely late tonight. Suppose you look for Her? TOBY-DOG I daren't. She forbade it. She is down there in the hollow, with a big basket. The dew is falling and wetting her feet and the sun's going away. But you know how She is. She sits on the damp ground, looking ahead of her, as if She were asleep--or lies flat on her stomach, whistling and watching an ant in the grass ... She tears up a handful of wild thyme and smells it, or calls the tomtits and the jays--who never come to her by any chance. She takes a heavy watering pot and--ugh! it gives me the shivers--pours thousands of icy, silvery threads over the roses or into the hollows of those little stone troughs, 'way back in the woods. I always look in to see the head of a brindle-bull who comes to meet me and to drink up the pictures of the leaves, but She pulls me back by the collar with: "Toby, Toby, _that_ water is for the birds." ... Then She takes out her knife and opens nuts, fifty, a _hundred_ nuts, and forgets the time ... There's no end to the things She does. KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (_slyly_) And what do you do all that time? TOBY-DOG I--well--I just wait for her. KIKI-THE-DEMURE I admire you! TOBY-DOG Once in a while, squatting down, She eagerly scratches the earth, toils and sweats over it; then I jump 'round her, delighted to see her at something so useful and so familiar. But her feeble scent deceives her. _I_ never smell mole, or shrew-mouse-of-the-rosy-paws, in the holes _She_ digs. And how explain her utter lack of purpose? Presently, falling back on her haunches, She brandishes a hairy-rooted herb and cries: "I have it, the jade!" I lie in the damp grass and tremble, or dig my nose (She calls it my snout) into the earth to get the complicated odors of it. ... When there are three or four scents all blended, all mixed together, can you distinguish that of the mole from that of the hare which passed quickly, or the bird which rested there? KIKI-THE-DEMURE