She fancies the notion of having someone to care for, to do things for, and so do I. It is a literary triumph for me and I instinctively like literary triumphs. We are much together and as the time is a black one for me she makes life livable. Nora is a true modern, not fussy, not making a great brag and bluster about it as did so many of the “moderns” in the arts I was to see later in New York. In my day I was to see a time when if a man wrote ten honest paragraphs or painted three honest paintings he immediately set himself up as a persecuted saint and wept if Mr. Sumner of New York or the Watch and Ward Club of Boston did not descend upon him. Most “moderns” of the arts I was later to see regretted the day of the passing of the Inquisition. They did not hanker to be burned at the stake but would have loved having it done to them, as in the moving picture, with some sort of mechanical cold flame. As for Nora she wanted to know all I thought, all I felt. She was not afraid I would “ruin” her. She knew how to look out for herself. In the evenings we went out to walk together, sometimes going to the docks and sitting together while the moon came up over the waters of the lake and sometimes going to what was called the better part of town to walk under trees in a park or along a residence street. There was no love-making for Nora’s mind was turned toward her sailorman and I was ill. My body was well and strong most of the time, but there was an illness within. My mind dwelt too much of the time in darkness. I had already worked in a dozen factories and much of the time it had been with me as it was with Judge Turner when he was a boy in an Ohio town. Nature had compelled him to go into a vile shed on the walls of which were scrawled sentences that revolted his soul and the necessity of keeping my body going--a necessity I myself did not understand but that was there, in me--had compelled me, time and again, to go into the door of a factory as an employee. I talked constantly to Nora of the thoughts in my mind. There was a kind of understanding between us. I did not try to come between her and her sailorman and I had the privilege of saying to her what I pleased. What a mixed-up affair! I was always pretending to Nora that I loved men and was a great mixer with men while at the same time I was dreaming of having a fight with my fists with the athlete at the warehouse. In the late afternoon I went along a street homeward bound, filled with beer and imagining a scene. In my wanderings I had known personally two fighters, Bill McCarthy, a lightweight, and Harry Walters, a heavy. Once I was second for Harry Walters in a fight with a Negro in a barn near Toledo, Ohio. Sports came out from the city to the barn near a river and when Harry began to lose I was shrewd enough to spread the alarm that the police were coming so that everyone fled and Harry was saved a beating at the hands of the black.