In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I was subject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throw it open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy a world in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved women and with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty and seeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped the talk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my work or, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies they had bought at the drug store or had carried to me from their homes. I had worked the sick headache racket to the limit and then, feeling it had become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where I worked with the young athlete I now wanted to beat with my fists. And on a certain day I tried. I had now convinced myself that the feint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good working condition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could not stand up to his drink, could stand up against me. For weeks I had been as nasty as I could be to my fellow-workman. There was a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling down the incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struck him on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him on the shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regret and then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I did it again. We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-witted teamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, making my lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at night in my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had come into a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What in Heaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her but talked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking with lovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a world of my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the facts of my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was always making with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious and once I remember, when we had been sitting on a bench in a little park, I left her and went behind a bush. She thought I had gone there out of a natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how Harry Walters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, did a good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponent before oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to come back at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attack has exhausted itself.