The routine through which he went each day had begun to weary Marley, and it might have begun to weary his readers in Macochee, had they not all felt their own fortunes somehow bound up with his. He apologized in his nightly letters for the monotony of their recitals, but he hoped it might be condoned as the most realistic portrayal of his life that he could give. He tried at times to give his letters a lighter tone by describing, with a facility that grew with practice, the many incidents that attracted him in a city whose life was all so new and strange to him; he could not help a growing interest in it all, and while Lavinia was probably unconscious of the change, his letters were now less concerned with the things of the life he had left in Macochee, and more and more with the things of the life he had entered upon in Chicago; as on a palimpsest, the old impressions were erased to make way for new ones. But try as he would to give to his letters a cheer that was far from expressing his own spirit, he could not save them from the despair that was laying hold of him, a despair which finally communicated itself in the declaration that it was now no longer with him a question of selecting employment. "I must take," he wrote, "whatever I can get, and that will probably be some kind of manual, if not menial, work. Sometimes," so he let himself go on, "I feel as if I would give up and go back to Macochee, defeated and done for. But I can not come to that yet, though I would like to; oh, how I would like to! But I don't dare, my pride won't let me act the part of a coward, though I know I am one at heart. One thing keeps me up and that is the thought of you; I see your face ever before me, and your sweet eyes ever smiling at me--" Lavinia's eyes were not smiling as she read this; and she poured out her own grief and sympathy in a long letter that she promptly tore up, to pen in its stead a calmer, braver one, that should hearten him in the struggle which, as she proudly assured him, he was making for her. Marley's description of his straits partly prepared Lavinia for the shock of the letter in which he said he had found a job at last, but she was hardly prepared to learn that it was anything so far from her conception of what was due him as a job trucking freight for a railroad. The mockery he put into the picture of himself in a blue jumper and overalls could not console her, and she kept the truth from every one, except her mother; she preferred rather that they number Marley still with the army of the unemployed than to count him among those who toiled so desperately with the muscles of their arms and backs. She tried to conceal in encouraging congratulations the chagrin of which she felt she should be ashamed, and she tried to show her appreciation of his droll sarcasms about the preparation his four years of college had given him for the task of trundling barrels of sugar and heaving pianos down from box-cars.