“Well, you know they do, Jack, and you know all the mean things they’ve been saying about Glenn. And you remember Charlie Davis’ mother told mama that Charlie ran across him in the street: in Chicago and that—”
“Oh, Charlie Davis!” said Lawrence, as impatiently as he could say anything. “What’s he? Anyway, you didn’t have to tell Lavinia.”
“Well, I’m glad we got the truth anyway.”
“Yes, so am I.”
“We must tell everybody.”
“Sure,” acquiesced Lawrence, “if we can get the gossips started the other way they’ll have him president of the road in a few days.”
CHAPTER XXIX
A MAN OF LETTERS
The Macochee gossips, after they were assured he was engaged in clerical, and not manual work, might have promoted Marley much more rapidly than his railroad would have done, had it not been for the news that he had changed his employment. They had gone far enough to noise it about that Marley was chief clerk in the office, where he was only a bill clerk, when the Republican, with the impartial good nature with which it treated all of Macochee’s folk, so long as they kept out of politics, mentioned him for the first time since his departure, and then, to tell of the advancement he was rapidly making in the metropolis that loomed so large and important in their provincial eyes. Lavinia had the facts in a letter from Marley a day or so before the Republican had them, though she never could imagine, as she told everybody, where the Republican got its information.
“I have a big piece of news to tell you,” he wrote. “Last night I dined with Weston. It was the first really enjoyable evening I have had since I struck the town. Luckily, the strikers had everything tied up so tight that we could do little work, and I had no trouble in getting off in time. I met him about six o’clock, and we went to the swellest restaurant in town. Weston is the finest fellow you ever saw; as it was pay night, he said he would blow me off to a good dinner. And he did, the best dinner I have ever eaten; there were half a dozen courses, and as we ate we talked, talked about everything, college days, the hard days that come after college, and you, and everything. Weston’s experience has been about the same as mine—one long, hopeless search for a job. He, however, did not wait so long as I did; he said that he realized there was no place for him in a small town, and so he set out for the city almost at once. His father wanted him to study medicine, but he said he hadn’t the money or the patience to wait, and he hated medicine anyway, and, as newspaper work offered the quickest channel to making a living he chose that. His secret ambition, he confessed, is literature, and I believe he is writing a book, but he would not, or did not, tell me as much. He says he thinks newspaper work a bad business for any one to get into, but then I have discovered that that is the way every man talks about his own calling.
“After we had finished our dinner, we sat there for a long, long time over our coffee and cigarettes, and we finally got to talking about the strike. Weston, you know, has been working on it, and I was glad to be able to tell him a good many things he said he could use. Finally, I don’t know just how it came about, but I told him how the strike started with us, about the man appearing in the street alongside the freight house, whistling, and then holding up two fingers—I think I described it to you in a letter the other night. Weston was greatly interested; I can see him still, sitting across the table from me, knocking the ashes from his cigarette into his empty coffee-cup and looking so intently at me out of his brown eyes that he almost embarrassed me. And what was my surprise when I finished to have him say: