Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/123

 animals; I love those cubs, of course—and the foxes too, poor dears. But it is all so different. How can I explain it to you? There's nothing I've ever cared about as much as hunting. It's quite true. We all love it. We're born with the love of it in our blood.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac continued to gaze at her. She had faintly flushed; but she said nothing.

Poor Jill stumbled on. 'I suppose it's just a remnant of barbarism; but isn't that perhaps the excuse for it? Everything is so shut down and boxed in and built up nowadays and the old instincts in us need to be stretched out sometimes or they'll do us a mischief. Isn't it partly that? It isn't, I'm sure, the love of cruelty, or anything horrible; it's the love of the chase, and the risk and the excitement, and the darling hounds and horses, and being in the country all together;—sharing something splendid, all together.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac, gently, if automatically, stroking her cat, continued to give her, Jill felt, the benefit of complete attention. 'But is it not, in the end, the same as with the boys?' she said, after a silence had followed and grown long.

'The boys?'

'The boys who chase the cat.'

Jill stared. Then, under her sunburn, her colour mounted. 'Those hateful little brutes! Tying a saucepan to a poor cat's tail! Hunting it for the fun of seeing it run! That's not sport!'

'They hunt cats without the saucepan,' said Mademoiselle Ludesac, 'and is it not for love of the chase,