That salaried place which he was always seeking on the staff of some newspaper, proved not so easy to get as he had imagined in the flush of his first successes. Ricker willingly included him among the Chronicle-Abstract's own correspondents and special reporters; and he held the same off-and-on relation to several other papers; but he remained without a more definite position. He earned perhaps more money than a salary would have given him, and in their way of living he and Marcia laid up something out of what he earned. But it did not seem to her that he exerted himself to get a salaried place; she was sure that, if so many others who could not write half so well had places, he might get one if he only kept trying. Bartley laughed at these business-turns of Marcia's as he called them; but sometimes they enraged him, and he had days of sullen resentment when he resisted all her advances towards reconciliation. But he kept hard at work, and he always owned at last how disinterested her most ridiculous alarm had been.
Once, when they had been talking as usual about that permanent place on some newspaper, she said, “But I should only want that to be temporary, if you got it. I want you should go on with the law, Bartley. I've been thinking about that. I don't want you should always be a journalist.”
Bartley smiled. “What could I do for a living, I should like to know, while I was studying law?”
“You could do some newspaper work,—enough to support us,—while you were studying. You said when we first came to Boston that you should settle down to the law.”
“I hadn't got my eyes open, then. I've got a good deal longer row to hoe than I supposed, before I can settle down to the law.”
“Father said you didn't need to study but a little more.”
“Not if I were going into the practice at Equity. But it's a very different thing, I can tell you, in Boston: I should have to go in for a course in the Harvard Law School, just for a little start-off.”
Marcia was silenced, but she asked, after a moment, “Then you're going to give up the law, altogether?”
“I don't know what I'm going to do; I'm going to do the best I can for the present, and trust to luck. I don't like special reporting, for a finality; but I shouldn't like shystering, either.”
“What's shystering?” asked Marcia.