The narrator tells us that he's not afraid of the monster. He's just a little scared of his last cat, who just left. The narrator explains that the cat is her last living thing, and that she's so stingy with it that she doesn't even want to give it back. The cat, she says, is like a family pet, but never really a family. She's a little too dumb to understand why the cat would leave her, but she does know that she was very nice to the cat, and she thinks that's why he left her.