At that, she decided in favor of nothing terrifying.

She drank tea between three and six each afternoon; she kept a cat named Ajax; and she resolved to marry Mr.Fopling.
The latter young gentleman Bess called to her side when she pleased, dismissed when he wearied her, and in all respects controlled his conclusions, his conversations, and his whereabouts, as Heaven meant she should.

Bess preferred that Mr.Fopling call during the afternoon; she required the morning for her household duties, and, when not screening Dorothy from Storri, saved the evening for her books.
Ajax was a grave and formal cat, and, in his way, a personage.

He was decorous to a degree, unbended in no confidences with strangers, and hated Mr.Fopling, whom he regarded as either a graceless profligate or a domestic animal of unsettled species who, through no merit and by rank favoritism, had been granted a place in the household superior to his own.

At sight of Mr.Fopling, Ajax would bottle-brush his tail, arch his back, and explode into that ejaculation peculiar to cats.