It was very pleasant in some ways, the life Melanctha Herbert now led with Rose and all the others.  It was not always that Rose had to scold her.

There was not anybody of all these colored people, excepting only Rose, who ever meant much to Melanctha Herbert.  But they all liked Melanctha, and the men all liked to see her do things, she was so game always to do anything anybody ever could do, and then she was good and sweet to do anything anybody ever wanted from her.

These were pleasant days then, in the hot southern negro sunshine, with many simple jokes and always wide abandonment of laughter.  “Just look at that Melanctha there a running.  Don’t she just go like a bird when she is flying.  Hey Melanctha there, I come and catch you, hey Melanctha, I put salt on your tail to catch you,” and then the man would try to catch her, and he would fall full on the earth and roll in an agony of wide-mouthed shouting laughter.  And this was the kind of way Rose always liked to have Melanctha do it, to be engaged to him, and to have a good warm nigger time with colored men, not to go about with that kind of white man, never could know how to act right, to any decent kind of girl they could ever get to be with them.

Rose, always more and more, liked Melanctha Herbert better.  Rose often had to scold Melanctha Herbert, but that only made her like Melanctha better.  And then Melanctha always listened to her, and always acted every way she could to please her.  And then Rose was so sorry for Melanctha, when she was so blue sometimes, and wanted somebody should come and kill her.

And Melanctha Herbert clung to Rose in the hope that Rose could save her.  Melanctha felt the power of Rose’s selfish, decent kind of nature.  It was so solid, simple, certain to her.  Melanctha clung to Rose, she loved to have her scold her, she always wanted to be with her.  She always felt a solid safety in her; Rose always was, in her way, very good to let Melanctha be loving to her.  Melanctha never had any way she could really be a trouble to her.  Melanctha never had any way that she could ever get real power, to come close inside to her.  Melanctha was always very humble to her.  Melanctha was always ready to do anything Rose wanted from her.  Melanctha needed badly to have Rose always willing to let Melanctha cling to her.  Rose was a simple, sullen, selfish, black girl, but she had a solid power in her.  Rose had strong the sense of decent conduct, she had strong the sense of decent comfort.  Rose always knew very well what it was she wanted, and she knew very well what was the right way to do to get everything she wanted, and she never had any kind of trouble to perplex her.  And so the subtle intelligent attractive half white girl Melanctha Herbert loved and did for, and demeaned herself in service to this coarse, decent, sullen, ordinary, black, childish Rose and now this unmoral promiscuous shiftless Rose was to be married to a good man of the negroes, while