Quotation from: The Valley of the Moon

Written by: Jack London


And he was a prizefighter. The thought of it almost made her
gasp. Yet he answered not at all to her conception of a
prizefighter. But, then, he wasn't a prizefighter. He had said he
was not. She resolved to ask him about it some time if . . . if
he took her out again. Yet there was little doubt of that, for
when a man danced with one girl a whole day he did not drop her
immediately. Almost she hoped that he was a prizefighter. There
was a delicious tickle of wickedness about it. Prizefighters were
such terrible and mysterious men. In so far as they were out of
the ordinary and were not mere common workingmen such as
carpenters and laundrymen, they represented romance. Power also
they represented. They did not work for bosses, but spectacularly
and magnificently, with their own might, grappled with the great
world and wrung splendid living from its reluctant hands. Some of
them even owned automobiles and traveled with a retinue of
trainers and servants. Perhaps it had been only Billy's modesty
that made him say he had quit fighting. And yet, there were the
callouses on his hands. That showed he had quit.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.