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leave him,” said Fanwell.
    “It is always sad to say goodbye,” said Mma Ramotswe.
    She waited for Fanwell, who gave the dog another pat on the head before turning round to get back into the van. The dog followed him, and as he opened the door of the van it tried to leap up onto the seat inside.
    “You must stay,” said Fanwell. “You cannot come with me.”
    The dog looked up at him, its eyes wide, its mouth open to allow its large pink tongue to extrude.
    Mma Ramotswe slammed the door behind her. Pushing the dog away with his foot, Fanwell closed the passenger door behind him. “We can go now, Mma,” he muttered.
    Mma Ramotswe drove the van slowly back onto the road. As she did so, she heard barking. Glancing in her rear-view mirror she saw the dog beginning to chase after her.
    “He doesn’t want to leave us,” said Fanwell. “He’s not going to go to his place, Mma.”
    Mma Ramotswe pressed down on the accelerator. “He’ll give up, Fanwell. Once we get onto the main road, he’ll be unable to keep up with us.”
    Fanwell turned in his seat. “He is just behind us, Mma. He is running very fast.”
    Mma Ramotswe sighed. “We can’t stop, Fanwell. We can’t let him catch up.”
    Fanwell’s voice became strained. “He is very sad, that dog,” he said. “He has nobody to love him. You can tell when somebody has nobody to love him.”
    “They’ll love him in his own place,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He will have people there.”
    She looked again in her mirror. The dog was still to be seen, although he was a good distance behind them now, his ears flapping in the breeze created by his headlong lurch in their direction. She lowered her head, looking again at the road ahead. The dog had entered her life little more than an hour ago, but this seemed to her to be a real abandonment, a cutting loose of a creature who had nobody else to turn to. The world was like that, of course, and sometimes it seemed particularly so in Africa, where there were so many who needed the support of others and had no others to give it. She sighed. They could not take on every ownerless dog—that was obviously impossible; Fanwell was a kind young man, and it was much to his credit that he had bothered to do something about the dog, but he was in no position to see that gesture through and had to be protected from the unsustainable consequences of kindness, as did others who allowed their hearts to prompt them. She thought it strange, though, that she, a woman, should be the one to tell a young man that he could not do what his heart wanted him to; were women not the ones who listened to their hearts, while young men thought only of…of the things that young men thought of? Or was that part of the unfair prejudice that men had to struggle against? Was it not the case that men could weep as readily as women? Was it not the case that men could be as gentle and as caring as any woman, if only they were given the chance to show these qualities? She thought of Fanwell, and she thought of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. Both of these were kind, sensitive men who were as understanding of the feelings of others as any woman she knew; and who were every bit as gentle.
    But then Charlie came to mind, and that made her think again. Charlie was not aware of the feelings of others, or very rarely showed such awareness. It was possible, of course, that he felt more than he let on, but even if that were true, he could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as a new man. She had seen that term used in a magazine article she had read recently, and she had been intrigued. There were certainly new men around, but there were plenty of men who were not new men. You only had to go into any bar in town to see these men by the score, by the hundred, whereas if you went out in search of new men, it was difficult to know where to look. Were they the ones who were doing the shopping for their wives? Were they the ones who were collecting the children