text: "Tarcuna, what are the manners that go with a party at someone's apartment?"
  
  "The ordinary sort of party, or the sort I might have gotten hired for?"
  
  It is hard to glare at someone over The Horizonal Quill. "Tarcuna, be helpful. This is a small social party for RARU recruiting. Do you really think there will be whores there? Much less that I'd be treated as one?"
  
  "I hope you're not treated as one, you'd be utterly incompetent at it and you wouldn't get paid. As for the other guests, I don't know. You introduced yourself as a jobless and not very rich young woman without obvious family or other means of support. You could be looking for a position, as far as they know."
  
  "Do you think that's what they're after?"
  
  "No. But if you were one of my college friends going into that sort of situation, I'd definitely have you think about it. I got wormed doing something not too much different."
  
  "Tarcuna, you are my most annoying minion. Are there any particular manners that I should pay attention to?"
  
  "I'm also your least annoying minion. Bring some cookies or something like that, but not the best cookies because it's not polite to bring better than the hostess. Start off by admiring the apartment and its furnishings. I've never actually been to a seditious chocolaterie, but I suspect you should let the hostess bring up treasonous matters first."
  
  So I took my exceedingly dangerous cat to the convenience store across the street. It's a quarter of the ground floor of 1778 Morganthaler Street West. It is also a dense little maze of packages of foodstuffs, housewares, tools, magazines, beers, contraceptives, spare clothing, and all the sorts of things that sophisticated yet disorganized and poor hovens might want to buy at any hour of the night. I bought a box of Sendile's Pentagonal Biscuits, chocolate flavor, which Tarcuna said wouldn't be any sort of a culinary challenge, but at least would be edible. Nrararn persuaded me that he would not wear a leash in any case.