In "The Horse Dealer's Daughter", Dr. Jack Fergusson risks his life to save a drowning girl named Mabel. He foolishly wades into the deep murky water knowing that logically (head), he cannot swim. Yet out of instinct (heart), Jack cannot let this girl drown. In saving her, she was ironically convinced that he was in love with her. "You love me," she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. "You love me. I know you love me, I know" (Roberts, 401). Ironically, Dr Fergusson had no idea that something like this would happen. "He was amazed, bewildered, and afraid, He had never thought of loving her. He had never wanted to love her. When he rescued her and restored her. He was a doctor and she was a patient. He had had no single personal thought of her (Roberts, 401). Although this idea has never occurred to him, he eventually comes around and begins to say that he indeed loves her. Can a simple gaze into a lost and suppress human being change the feeling for one that had no intentions in the first place? Dr. Fergusson says he loves her because logically (head) he didn't want Mabel to lose her sanity once again, this is not real love. "You love me?" she said, rather faltering. "Yes." The word cost him a painful effort. Not because it wasn't true. But because it was too newly true, the saying seemed to tear open again his newly-torn heart. And he hardly wanted it to be true, even now. (Roberts, 402).
Mabel, growing up independent, motherless, and ridiculed by her brothers has now lost her father. Financially she is in trouble. Mabel thinks of herself as "too awful" to be loved and finds that when Dr. Fergusson declares over and over that he wants her and that he loves her, she is more scared about that than of him not wanting her. "After the kiss, her eyes again slowly filed with tears. She sat still, away from, him with her face drooped aside, and her hands folded in her lap.