Rond ... she was, in her
way, herself a character ... the poverty of her family was extreme. She
had a numerous menage of daughters; and a horde of cats as pets.
Whenever she walked away from her house the cats followed her in a long
line, their tails gaily in the air, like little ships sailing.
Mrs. Rond smoked incessantly, rolling her own cigarettes, from packages
of Plowboy tobacco....
Her conversation was crisp, nervous, keen. An intellectual woman of the
highest type; with all her poverty, she preserved around her an
atmosphere of aristocratic fineness (even if she did smoke Plowboy)
which bespoke happier days, in an economic and social sense.
She was thoroughly radical, but quiet and unostentatious about it. She
looked on me and Hildreth as play-children of the feminist movement.
I think it was the exaggerated maternal instinct in her that moved her
to foster and champion Hildreth and me ... an instinct that made her
gather in every stray cat she found on the road ... she is the only
person I have ever known who could break through the reserve of the
cat's nature, and make it as fond and sentimental as a dog is toward its
master.
Mrs. Rond knew all the classics, and, in her library, which she never
let go, when their economic crash came, were most of the English poets
and essayists and novelists from Malory and Chaucer down to William
Watson and W.
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