She was a nice woman and I adored her, although she played a funny little trick on me. She used to take me up when she came in, and I used to mew. 'It is an odd thing,' Auntie May said to her, after Mrs. Jay had been to see her two or three times and they were great friends, 'that you love cats so much and yet they mew when you hold them!' 'Isn't it odd?' said Mrs. Jay, smiling. She had a very pretty voice. 'I cannot suggest any explanation.' _I_ could have explained it. Mrs. Jay bit my neck every time, not hard or cruelly, but just so that I could not help crying out. She was not a naturally unkind woman, but she had a mania for experimenting on people by teasing them as well as being good to them. She saved Auntie May's life, I think. She came one day and said very decidedly: 'Now, Miss May Graham, I am going to take you away from here, bag and baggage, cat and cattage. That dreadful Pettigrew--' 'Poor Pettigrew!' said Auntie May in a thin little voice. 'Poor Pettigrew indeed! She is simply starving you, that is what she is doing, and taking ten francs a day for it! I am not going to leave you here a day longer, if I take you away in an ambulance!' There was no need for Auntie May to go in an ambulance. She paid Manxie, who was in a towering rage, a month's pay in lieu of notice, Mrs. Jay packed up her belongings, my old basket was brought out again, and we were settled in the Rue de L'Echelle by the evening. I never saw Mistigris again. CHAPTER XIV 'POOSH!' They had the slipperiest floors in the Rue de L'Echelle, made of pieces of wood joined together and then polished till the nap was like silk. Léocadie, the _bonne_, did it with cloths wrapped about her feet, and she looked too funny and chaseable skating up and down the floors. Sometimes Philippe, Mr. Jay's servant, did it, and he plodged, that was the difference. Léocadie ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed her, but he chaffed her. She was rather a little slop in her morning blouse and her checked apron and her black frizzly hair, and when she gave him an order he would answer gravely, '_Bien, Princesse!_' which sent Mr. Jay into fits of laughter. Léocadie was very kind to me. She was always holding out some little odd-and-end for me to eat, saying, '_Tiens, Minet?_' while I liked lying on Philippe's coat, that he took off when he worked, better than anything. Then in the warm May days that were coming on, I used to lie in the balcony and look through the iron lace-work and put my paw out, and shake it about in the air. I could look down, too, and see the wheelbarrows with bright flowers on them, and the bare-headed women with lovely hair, and the tinkling cabs, and the drivers with their grey beaver hats.