"I can't stand more than six months of the East, and I've been here a year now, off and on.

After a time I begin to want air.

I want to breathe." "Yet you lived here once." "A sort of life, yes, but that don't count." "What does count with you, I wonder ?" She was smiling up at him, and as they passed under a street light her eyes shone with a misty brightness through her veil of dotted net.
For a minute he thought over her question.

"I guess fighting does," he answered at last.

"Getting on in spite of hard knocks, and smashing things that stand in your way.