Raggety’s Love Affairs
Raggety’s bachelorhood has always been an anxiety to me. Limited environment and force of circumstance have prevented my suing for the paw of some gentle little terrier Miss, and setting Raggety and his mate up in domesticity. Many times through the years simple and frank women have said to me, “How adorable Raggety’s puppies would be!”
Yes, indeed, if they could all be Raggeties. But genius does not always reproduce itself, and I’ve been fearful that the puppies might have two stupid prick-ears, or worse still, two dull lop-ears. But the hearts of dogs and men are not bound exclusively to domestic felicity. Therefore Raggety has had his loves, and, like the Greatest of Frenchmen, his love affairs show catholicity and wide range of imagination.
When this imagination is upon him he is ardent and progressive, fights with lordly rivals, and returns bloody but triumphant. Once he eluded a whole band of rivals, crept through a broken pane of glass far too small for the rest, and dropped eight feet below to the floor of the cellar where the adorable Belle had been secreted by cruel guardians. You may imagine the guardians’ surprise on the following morning when they came to feed the imprisoned Belle! Raggety greeted them with a cordiality and friendliness which exhibited his new and intimate relation to the family and—Belle.
Jeems, on the other hand, leads a guarded life and knows that virtue also has its rewards. I can only hope that Raggety has never communicated to Jeems’s innocent mind the joys of nature and the love of the sex. True follower of nature’s supreme law, how Raggety’s independence and disregard of conventionalities would have delighted the liberty-loving heart of the ardent Jean-Jacques!