stirred with pride in him.  His masculinity, the masculinity of the fighting male, made its inevitable appeal to her, a female, moulded by all her heredity to seek out the strong man for mate, and to lean against the wall of his strength.  She did not understand this force of his being that rose mightier than her love and laid its compulsion upon him; and yet, in her woman’s heart she was aware of the sweet pang which told her that for her sake, for Love’s own sake, he had surrendered to her, abandoned all that portion of his life, and with this one last fight would never fight again.

“Mrs. Silverstein doesn’t like prize-fighting,” she said.  “She’s down on it, and she knows something, too.”

He smiled indulgently, concealing a hurt, not altogether new, at her persistent inappreciation of this side of his nature and life in which he took the greatest pride.  It was to him power and achievement, earned by his own effort and hard work; and in the moment when he had offered himself and all that he was to Genevieve, it was this, and this alone, that he was proudly conscious of laying at her feet.  It was the merit of work performed, a guerdon of manhood finer and greater than any other man could offer, and it had been to him his justification and right to possess her.  And she had not understood it then, as she did not understand it now, and he might well have wondered what else she found in him to make him worthy.

“Mrs. Silverstein is a dub, and a softy, and a knocker,” he said good-humoredly.  “What’s she know about such things, anyway?  I tell you it is good, and healthy, too,”—this last as an afterthought.  “Look at me.  I tell you I have to live clean to be in condition like this.  I live cleaner than she does, or her old man, or anybody you know—baths, rub-downs, exercise, regular hours, good food and no makin’ a pig of myself, no drinking, no smoking, nothing that’ll hurt me.  Why, I live cleaner than you, Genevieve—”