It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating little friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.

Repplier’s sentence captures a paradox familiar to cat owners: cats are affectionate, but never wholly compliant. Their “alert, gentle, and discriminating” nature suggests a creature that chooses its attachments rather than submitting to them, and that selective regard becomes precisely the source of its charm. The cat offers companionship in measured doses—enough to reassure us of its presence, not enough to satisfy our desire for reciprocity—so the human is left “hungering for more.” The line also implies a critique of possessive love: the cat cannot be “banished” because it resists being treated as an object to manage, and its partial independence deepens attachment rather than diminishing it.