On the steps in front we stopped and Nora stood for a time looking at me. It was a look I did not much fancy, but what was I to do? Two or three times during our walk I had tried to begin talking a little and had attempted to patch up the structure of my yarn so that it would not be quite so full of holes and leaky but could think of no way to explain the unbruised surface and uninjured knuckles of my left, so I had taken refuge in a kind of sullen silence. I had even begun to feel a little injured and angry and was asking myself what right Nora had to question my story--was feeling, to tell the truth, much as I was later to feel when some editor or critic rejected, as not sound, one of my written tales--that is to say, resentful and intolerant of the editor or critic and inclined to call him a fool and to attribute to him all kinds of secret and degrading motives. I was feeling much in this mood, I say, when we had got back to the steps and were standing in the darkness in front. And then Nora suddenly put her strong arm about my neck and pulled my head down upon her shoulder and I began to cry like a child. That in an odd way made me more resentful than ever. It faced me with a problem I have all my life been trying to face and have never quite succeeded. One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man. It is a fact perhaps but a fact that I have always thought we men should deny with all the strength of our more powerful wills. We men should conquer women. We should not stand in the darkness with our heads on their shoulders, blubbering as I was doing at that moment. However, I continued crying and being ashamed of myself and Nora did not press her advantage. When, now and then, I lifted my face from her shoulder and looked at her face, dimly seen in the darkness, it seemed to me just kindly and filled with sympathy for my position. I felt, I presume, most of all the story-teller’s shame at the failure of his yarn and there was something else too. There was a suspicion that Nora, the woman who had been for weeks listening to my talk and whom I had somewhat looked down upon as not being my equal, had suddenly become my superior. I had prided myself on my mind and on the superiority of my imaginative flights. Could it be that this woman, this maker of beds in a cheap laborers’ rooming house, had a better mind than my own? The thought was unbearable and so, as soon as I could conveniently manage it, I got my head off Nora’s shoulder and made my escape.