Alerted once again to the sheer volume of inconsequence, she determined to hear the signal through the noise...

From the very first she had espied where the problem lay in Spinoza’s posthumous Ethics...

‘But what of canon 218?’ she snapped. ‘Only a fool could overlook its place within the hierarchy of truths consolidated in the 1917 Codex Juris Canonici.’

Unsure of the true nature of events, the cat calmly considered her options . . .

‘This hour is not our hour,’ she murmured Sphinx-like: ‘We have no time now. We stand between the times’.

She turned away from his library of trivialities, firmly yet joyfully resolved to seek the truth in life, and life alone.

Unable — no unwilling — to sleep that evening, she clung to what had been revealed by Chopin’s austere ornamentation in that third and final movement....