curious effect of reluctance over the telephone, and there was one
phrase that she repeated several times.

"I do not want to influence you. I want you to do just what you
think best."

The fear was entirely gone by the time she rang off. I felt,
instead, a sort of relaxation that was most comforting. The rear
hall, a cul-de-sac of nervousness in the daytime and of horror at
night, was suddenly transformed by the light of my lamp into a warm
and cheerful refuge from the darkness of the lower floor. The
purring of the cat, comfortably settled on the telephone-stand, was
as cheering as the singing of a kettle on a stove. On the rack
near me my garden hat and an old Paisley shawl made a grotesque
human effigy.

I sat back in the low wicker chair and surveyed the hallway. Why
not, I considered, do away now with the fear of it? If I could
conquer it like this at midnight, I need never succumb again to it
in the light.

The cat leaped to the stand beside me and stood there, waiting. He
was an intelligent animal, and I am like a good many spinsters. I
am not more fond of cats than other people, but I understand them
better. And it seemed to me that he and I were going through some
familiar program, of which a part had been neglected. The cat
neither sat nor lay, but stood there, waiting.

So at last I fetched the shawl from the rack and made him a bed on
the stand. It was what he had been waiting for. I saw that at