They fastened the wardrobe door very tight and strictly forbade Mary to touch us, and for many days after this we just lay still and ate--ate--ate! Mother, however greedy we were, never pushed us away. She was like a soft hill of wool that we had leave to lie up against and browse upon. Every now and then she spread out her paws, which were like silver streaks, wide and square, all over us, not heavily, so as to weigh us down, but lightly, like a sort of lattice that kept the cold draughts off us, and that we might fancy to be a wall or a hedge between us and the world if we liked. It was the great advantage of mother's being a pet cat that she and her family lived in the house, not in a cattery, as they are called. Mother knew very well what a cattery was like--she had been in one before a man bought her and gave her to Auntie May as a present. She cost three guineas, she said. It was a very nice cattery, as catteries go--she admits that--and she will always look upon it with affection as being her first home, but still there was a lot of difference between it and Auntie May's house. A cattery has generally hard trodden-in earth for a floor, without a carpet, except for a few unhemmed bits spread here and there. There's generally an old chair--wooden--to scrape your claws on: now velvet, such as is kept here, mother says, is much more interesting and efficacious. The bed is inside, under cover--I grant you that--but only made out of a few old packing cases, and there is generally a horrid smelly oil-lamp to warm the whole place. Now Auntie May had us in her own bedroom for the first week of our lives, and when she did move us, it was only into her study. She was an authoress and had to have a study; at least her father, who was a distinguished painter and R.A., and adores his daughter, thought she had as much right as he to have a studio--same word as study. 'She sells her books, and I don't sell my pictures!' he said. (I call her Auntie May because Rosamond does, and because it sounds more respectful, and mother said I ought.) Her study was quite nicely furnished and full of bureaus and manuscript cupboards and high things to perch on. Mother says it is advisable when choosing a perch to get as high as possible, because of the draughts that run along the floors of even the best rooms.