And now I was dressed and had tiptoed out of the house, tapped on Nora’s door and was waiting for her outside. I had decided that when she came out I would not make an appeal for her woman’s sympathy by telling of what had actually happened to me. “I do not want woman’s sympathy,” I thought proudly. What I wanted was woman’s respect. I wanted to conquer them, to have them at my feet, to stand before them the conquering male. When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street light and she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and to reconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not one but four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. An inspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of a woman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed the platform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarks that were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could never stand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who had to work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand up for her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at once pitched into the four men and there had been a terrible fight. As I described the fancied affair to Nora the feint and the cross on which I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received many hard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face how I had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like a tornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feints with my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponents until at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And then I had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or two of the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If my opponents have suffered a terrible beating at my hands and if one or two of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They should have known better than to have insulted a woman in my presence.” I had told Nora my story and we had walked in silence until we had come to a street lamp when she suddenly stopped and, taking my left hand, turned it up to the light. As I had not succeeded in the actual fight in striking a blow with it, the hand was unmarked by a bruise. “Huh!” said Nora and we went on in silence. The silence, which was one of the hardest I have ever had to bear, continued until we had finished our walk--which on that evening did not last very long,--and had got back to the house.