One night when Clangingharp sat writing, an episode occurred. Clangingharp couldn’t write on an empty stomach, and the verses he made when he was sober were so drab and elegiac that in spite of his remark to Frostembight he threw them away and went out after cocktails. He could write shriller and hotter stuff when he had had cocktails. Well, one night he sat thinking of what an empty thing a cocktail is. He had been writing verses, and he knew they were regrettable. But he did not go out and have cocktails. It might be told why he didn’t, but what’s the use? You go to a comedy to get away from your business troubles, and the chief clown constantly thrusts under your nose a big wad of stage money. It would simply be dragging in sordid matter that should have no place in a psychological study. It is enough to say he didn’t go out. He sat and plunked drops of purple ink from his pen into a blotter with an insurance advertisement on it that lay submissively on the desk. Then Marcus Aurelius leaped onto the blotter, and a fiendish shine glittered dryly in the epicist’s eye. He noticed the cat was white. Rainy afternoons on the fire-escape had made the beast very white. Clangingharp plunked a drop of royal purple on the tip of Marcus Aurelius’s tail. The next instant Clangingharp had written: “And gave him hemorrhage of the soul.” “Great!” he screeched in a seething cauldron of joy. “Powerful!” He began to wonder whether or not cattails were as effective as cocktails. He plunked another royal purple drop onto the cat’s tail, and wrote another line. It was not so good as hemorrhage of the soul, but it was pretty fair: “And freshet-flushed his hydrant eye.” For two weeks Clangingharp’s days and nights were dry. He did not go out after cocktails, and as there was a drought on the fire-escape the cat was becoming splendidly regal. The window was kept open, for the weather was hot; but Marcus Aurelius got no nourishment excepting an occasional mouse and what he absorbed from the ink, so he staid in. Clangingharp would sit there for hours and deliberately sling ink at him. Not a growl from Marcus. At last he would take down the folding-bed, and before getting in would remember the pen and wipe it along Marcus’s spine. Not a plaint from the cat: always patient and forgiving.