For Ruth was in love, tenderly and beautifully in love; but she did not know how to express it beyond the fetch and carry phase.  Her heart ached; and that puzzled her.  Love was joy, and joyous she was when alone.  But in his presence a wall of diffidence and timidity encompassed her.

The call of youth to youth, and we name it love for want of something better:  a glamorous, evanescent thing “like snow upon the desert’s dusty face, lighting a little hour or two, was gone.”  Man is a peculiar animal.  No matter what the fire and force of his passion, it falters eventually, and forever after smoulders or goes out.  He has nothing to fall back upon, no substitute; but a woman always has the mother love.  When the disillusion comes, when the fairy story ends, if she is blessed with children, she doesn’t mind.  If she has no children, she goes on loving her husband; but he is no longer a man but a child.

A dog appeared unexpectedly upon the threshold.  He was yellow and coarse of hair; flea-bitten, too; and even as he smiled at Ruth and wagged his stumpy tail, he was forced to turn savagely upon one of these disturbers who had no sense of the fitness of things.

“Well, well; look who’s here!” cried Spurlock.

He started toward the dog with the idea of ejecting him, but Ruth intervened.

“No, please!  It is good luck for a dog to enter your house.  Let me keep him.”

“What?  Good Lord, he’s alive with fleas!  They’ll be all over the place.”

“Please!”

She dropped the curtains and the manuscripts, knelt and held out her arms.  The dog approached timidly, his tail going furiously.  He suspected a trap.  The few whites he had ever known generally offered to pet him when they really wanted to kick him.  But when Ruth’s hand fell gently upon his bony head, he knew that no one in this house would ever offer him a kick.  So he decided to stay.

“You want him?”

“Please!” said Ruth.

“All right.  What’ll we call him—­Rollo?”—­ironically.

“I never had a pet.  I never had even a real doll,” she added, as she snuggled the flea-bitten head to her heart.  “See how glad he is!”

His irony and displeasure subsided.  She had never had a pet, never had a real doll.  Here was a little corner of the past—­a tragic corner.  He knew that tragedy was as blind as justice, that it struck the child and the grown-up impartially.  He must never refuse her anything which was within his power to grant—­anything (he modified) which did not lead to his motives.

“You poor child!—­you can have all the dogs on the island, if you want them!  Come along to the kitchen, and we’ll give Rollo a tubbing.”

And thus their domesticity at McClintock’s began—­with the tubbing of a stray yellow dog.  It was an uproarious affair, for Rollo now knew that he had been grieviously betrayed:  they were trying to kill him in a new way.  Nobody will ever know what the fleas thought.