He felt ashamed of himself at first for caring so much about the loss of a thing like that, but as he pondered the question further, he saw deeper. It was not just conceit and vanity that made people want recognition when they were old. What they were looking for when they asked for it was a definite confirmation of their personality,--a vital necessity, without which they were apt to wither away. They were like cut flowers, he thought, once they had lost their special identity. That was why so many lingered on in the place where they had lived and worked, feeling that they would die if they were taken away from it. Even those who had been neither pleasant nor useful in their lives received some sort of recognition in the place where they had lived. The new folks whom you met when you were old often seemed tacitly to deny that you had ever lived at all. You fought against it, at first, but you could do nothing about it. Presently, perhaps, you even came to see yourself through their eyes as a sort of ghost,--a ghost who would never have any future, and who had never had any past.... And along with your life, of course, they denied your work,--that work which was part of you and yet was so much bigger than you, and which you had fondly imagined would still live on in people’s minds, even after you, who mattered so much less than the work, were dead and crumbled away.... One of the several garden-cats appeared at that moment around a corner of the greenhouse, and twined itself lovingly about his legs. He could see another inside the greenhouse, sitting on one of the stages, and still another sunning itself happily inside one of the frames. They were an old breed now, which had been in the gardens for years--so old, indeed, that he had ceased to distinguish between the generations. For the same reason, and because of their puzzling likeness to one another, they had no individual names, but were known collectively as The Cat. They were an ugly breed, he supposed, although he admitted it grudgingly,--brindled, with the darker spots of the brindling appearing invariably in the wrong places,--but he liked to see them about. It gave him a sense of pleasure to watch the sun bringing out on their glossy sides the tawny hues which went so well with wood and soil. He had grown so accustomed to them, indeed, that a cat of any other description about the place would have offended his artistic eye. The Cat was another of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada,--the things which already he was beginning to count over and to weigh before the time came to let them go. He wondered for a moment or two whether it would be possible to take one of the breed with him, but came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t do. Mattie might not like it; the people at the other end might not like it; and most certainly the cat wouldn’t like it. No, it would never do.