'As long as I nurse you children, I shall be devoted to you. I shall cosset you and shield you and watch over you, and get miserable if you are in a draught or let people handle you or tease you, and so on; but once you can look after yourselves, it will be a very different pair of paws, I warn you! That is cat rule all the world over. I shall not, I hope, be actually unkind, but I shall take the very slightest notice of you. Out of the nursery, out of mind. Lost to sight, to memory you will not be dear, for if I allowed myself to become unduly fond of any one of my children, how could I bear to have that child taken from me? One has to steel oneself. They under whom we live are responsible, though, perhaps, in a state of nature, in that jungle of which I have visions and of which I dream at night as if it were my kingdom, it would be the same--I cannot tell.' We all said politely, 'Oh, mother, I am sure you would never be unkind,' but indeed afterwards we found she spoke quite truly. She could not help it; it was the way she was made. Cats have the softest outsides, but the hardest hearts of all animals. Later on, nobody would have known that she was my mother from the way she bullied me, and let out with her paws when I passed her sometimes, without the slightest warning, and didn't seem to care when I hurt myself at all. There was the time when I was ill and fed out of that very forget-me-not spoon that ought to have stirred up tender recollections. I bit a piece out of that spoon in a fit of temper one day when I felt particularly bad, and was in a blue rage in consequence. I damaged the spoon, of course, as mother pointed out, but I hurt myself far more. I bled, and the spoon did not. It had a rivet put in it and was as well as ever again.