“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.
“Lavinia showed it to me.”
“Has she been over there?”
“Yes. Why?”
The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless, indeed.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED
“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.