A Night Out

ittle eighty-thousand-dollar cottage on the outskirts of vulgarity--which is to say, the villa was situated near enough to town to admit of marketing, but far enough removed therefrom to escape the clatter of plebeian toil and the noxious contact with the unhealthy, unwealthy herd. Here the humans entertained selected friends who came at the ends of weeks to admire the splendor of Omar Ben's tail, to bow down to the humans' money, and to hate them fiercely because they had it. The master did not toil. He lived, for certain hours of the day, in Wall Street, where he sank his patrician fingers into the throats of lesser men, squeezed them dry, then washed his hands in violet water, and built a church. True, he did not attend this church himself, but he built it; otherwise his neighbors might have been deprived of the opportunity of praising God. Omar Ben had a French maid all to himself--a perky little human with a quasi-kinship to the feline race--who combed him and brushed him and slicked him down and gave him endless, mortifying baths. Also, she tied lavender bows about his neck, and fed him from Dresden china on minute particles of flaked fish and raw sirloin, with a dessert of pasteurized cream. In the rear of the eighty-thousand-dollar cottage there was a thirty-thousand-dollar flower-garden--an oppressively clean garden, where the big Jack-roses were as immaculate as a "mama's Lizzie-boy," and the well-bred, timid little violets seemed to long to play in the dirt, yet dared not because of the master-rule of "form." And here the clean cat used to sun himself in the clean garden, thinking his clean thoughts and perishing of ennui clean through. Then, one day, from the vulgar outer world came an unclean incident. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.