career—but remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you—then some one else.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t like that.”
“Then be content with fewer thrills. What about your tumble over the bank down there? That came near being a tragedy. What if I hadn’t found you?”
“But you did find me,” cried Emily. “I like near escapes—after they’re over,” she added. “If everybody had always been happy there’d be nothing to read about.”
Tweed made a third in their rambles and Emily grew very fond of him, without losing any of her loyalty to the pussy folk.
“I like cats with one part of my mind and dogs with another part,” she said.
“I like cats but I never keep one,” Dean said. “They’re too exacting—they ask too much. Dogs want only love but cats demand worship. They have never got over the Bubastis habit of godship.”
Emily understood this—he had told her all about old Egypt and the goddess Pasht—but she did not quite agree with him.
“Kittens don’t want to be worshipped,” she said. “They just want to be cuddled.”
“By their priestesses—yes. If you had been born on the banks of the Nile five thousand years ago, Emily, you would have been a priestess of Pasht—an adorable, slim, brown creature with a fillet of gold around your black hair and bands of silver on those ankles Aunt Nancy admires, with dozens of sacred little godlings frisking around you under the palms of the temple courts.”
“Oh,” gasped Emily rapturously, “that gave me the flash. And,” she added wonderingly, “just for a moment it made me homesick, too. Why?”
“Why? Because I haven’t a doubt you were just such a priestess in a former incarnation and my words reminded your soul of it. Do you believe in the doc-
