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 "It will ruin your career if the fact becomes known that your husband is proceeding about the business of earning his living?" he asks her, with a grim smile.

Dolores grabs him, layin' her pretty head against his arm. "Oh, Kane, do give up this absurd idea!" she coaxes, and, believe me, she'd give a stone statue a kick! "Things are not nearly as bad as they seem to you. Why can't we—why can't we live on my money until something better presents itself!"

"A moment ago you expressed your contempt of parasites; now you would have me be one, eh?" says the Kid, pattin' her head. "No, Dolores, as Joe would say: 'That's out!' I have seen too many good men—that is originally they had character and ambition—ruined by that same arrangement; living on their wife's money. Surely it is more honorable for me to earn my living boxing than to exist on your bounty, isn't it?"

"There is nothing honorable about prize fighting!" snaps Dolores, lettin' go his arm. "I despise the whole low, sordid atmosphere that surrounds it. How can you even think of entering that beastly profession again?"

Kid Roberts looks like he had a hot comeback on the tip of his tongue, but at that critical minute Dolores's father, Senator Brewster, enters the room, and she greets him with a sigh of relief. Re-enforcements is comin' up, so to speak.

"Father!" says Dolores excitedly, "Kane wants to become a prize fighter again: what do you think of that?"