No; Gipsy was not the pet for a little girl. The rosy hearthstone
and sheltered rug were too circumspect for him. Surrounded by the
comforts of middle-class respectability, and profoundly
oppressed, even in his youth, by the Puritan ideals of the
household, he sometimes experienced a sense of suffocation. He
wanted free air and he wanted free life; he wanted the lights,
the lights and the music. He abandoned the bourgeoise
irrevocably. He went forth in a May twilight, carrying the
evening beefsteak with him, and joined the underworld.
His extraordinary size, his daring and his utter lack of sympathy
soon made him the leader--and, at the same time, the terror--of
all the loose-lived cats in a wide neighbourhood. He contracted
no friendships and had no confidants. He seldom slept in the same
place twice in succession, and though he was wanted by the
police, he was not found. In appearance he did not lack
distinction of an ominous sort; the slow, rhythmic, perfectly
controlled mechanism of his tail, as he impressively walked
abroad, was incomparably sinister. This stately and dangerous
walk of his, his long, vibrant whiskers, his scars, his yellow
eye, so ice-cold, so fire-hot, haughty as the eye of Satan, gave
him the deadly air of a mousquetaire duellist.
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