Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room every night long after the house was dark and still.
The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to him.
"She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy," said Mrs. Blair. "She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn't here to share it. I believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is almost fanatical about it."
"Oh dear!" said the judge. "I thought the nightly calls were a severe strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters."
"He writes excellent letters, however," Mrs. Blair said. "I wish you could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to his mother--"
"How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?" interrupted the judge.
The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless, indeed.
"I am very tired to-night," Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later. "I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all the leading firms, but--here I am, still without a place. I thought I might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies, and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.
"I did not get to see many of the firm members themselves; their offices are formidable places. There is no office in Macochee like them; they have big outer rooms, full of stenographers and clerks and there is a boy at a desk who makes you tell your business before you can get in to see any of the lawyers themselves. They seem to be mighty big, important fellows. Most of them would not see me at all; several said they had no place for me and dismissed me with a kind of pitying smile; one man, when I asked him if he thought there was an opening, said he supposed there ought to be, as one lawyer in Chicago had died of starvation only the day before. But some were kinder; one, whom I shall never forget, took pains to sit down and talk with me a long time, but he was no more encouraging than the others. He said the profession was terribly overcrowded, 'that is,' he corrected himself with a tired smile, 'if you can call it a profession any longer. It is more of a business nowadays and the only ones who get ahead are those who have big corporations for clients. How they all live is a mystery to me!' He thought I had better not undertake it and advised me to go into some business. But then most of them did that.