Poor thing

It was fairly quiet on the children's desk this evening so I kept a five-year-old girl company. It was the usual--parent in the library but completely ignoring her. She couldn't read yet so I found her some wordless picture books to look at. She looked very carefully through one called Chicken and Cat Clean Up. Two-sentence summary: The title characters have a cleaning company which is hired by an elephant to clean his house, but Cat is an earnest but incompetent cleaner so the elephant kicks her out of the house when he sees the results. Outside the house she redeems herself by aprehending a mugger.

We had just gotten to the popint where the elephant has kicked Cat out, and the little girl was confused. "What happened?" she asked.

"The elephant was mad because she messed up his house, so he made her leave."

The girl looked pensive for a moment and then said, "Poor thing. She was trying her best, but she doesn't get any respect."