“But you need not be alarmed,” she was reassured to read—though it was not until she thought it all over afterward that she began to wonder how he had divined her dislike of his being in such work—“I haughtily declined, and turned them down. You see this road is just now in the throes of a strike, and all their freight handlers are out. Consequently, they have had to employ scabs to do the work of the strikers. They take anybody—that’s why they were ready to take me. But as I said, I declined. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to take a place away from a union man.”
Lavinia mistook her satisfaction in Marley’s declination of the position for a satisfaction in the nobility of his sacrifice, and in her elation she related the circumstance at dinner. Now that Marley had declined such an employment she felt safe in doing this. But her father did not see it in her light, or at least in Marley’s light.
“Humph!” he sneered; “so he sympathizes with unionism, does he? Well, those unions will own the whole earth if they keep on.”
“But he says he thought of the wives and children of the union men—”
“Well, but why doesn’t he think of the wives and children of the scabs, as he calls them? They have as much right to live and work as the union men.”
Lavinia, as an opponent of union labor herself, could not answer this argument, though she felt it her duty to defend Marley. But before she could proceed in his defense, her father, strangely enraged at the mere mention of the policies of the unions, hurried on:
“The union didn’t show any consideration for him when it took his other job away from him.”
Lavinia shot a reproachful glance at her mother, who did not see it because she was shooting a glance more than reproachful at her husband, and it had the effect of silencing and humbling the judge, as all of Lavinia’s arguments, or all of the arguments known to the propaganda of union labor, could not have done.
CHAPTER XXVII
A FOOTHOLD
The next letter the postman gave Lavinia began ecstatically: