"But if your guess is right about Mr. Brimstine offering $10,000 for a green cat, and Jack stole the cat, then why hasn't he taken it to him?" Juno rolled her head like an angry bull. "Oh, it'd be something those Akeleys put him up to; something they flattered him into. Maybe they even got him to give them the cat. They can really twist him." Phil felt all at sea again. "But what would the Akeleys want with the cat?" "What do screwballs like that want with anything?" Juno countered. "What do they want with Jack?" She snuffed and looked at Phil. "Get one thing straight," she said gruffly, "I love Jack, the little rat. I've taken a lot from him, but I haven't minded too much. Oh, it hurt when I found out he thought more of Cookie and those other punks than he did for me, but I didn't let it show through my skin. After all, if a man knows you can lick him, I suppose it's bound to affect him. But when those Akeleys discovered him and began to play up to him and change him, that was too much for me. They're intelleckchuls, you see, and they flattered Jack and filled him up with a lot of guff about how he had a hidden artistic talent and how he was Zeus or some name like that battling the female principle and so on. Well, he falls for it, see?--goes into a complete free-fall. Starts to buy reading tapes, printed books even! Next thing he's insulting me--using a lot of words I never hardly heard of. Keeps talking about how great Mary is, with her art and her magic figures or whatever they are, and how wonderful Sashy is, with his great ideas about understanding and love and a lot of other junk. Tells me to my face that I'm a dumb bell, a stupe semantically!" And having done well with that last word, Juno slugged down the rest of her drink. "Look, Phil," she went on, "I could fight Cookie and the others, because they're on my level, but I can't fight intelleckchuls. They're lifting Jack away from me and I can't do nothing about it. And now they've gone and got him into some real trouble, I bet, with this green cat business. Because Moe Brimstine isn't impressed with intelleckchuls or anything." She carefully took the glass out of her hand and made claws. "If I had the little rat here," she said, "I'd strangle some sense into him. But until Moe Brimstine talked to me, I didn't really suspicion anything was wrong, and now I can't do nothing." Phil's blurred memory suddenly came clear. He told Juno about how, racing to Dr. Romadka's, he had seen Jack, Cookie, Sacheverell, and Mary driving somewhere in the ancient electric.