"I'm sure it's honest work," she wrote, "but do be careful, dear, not to hurt yourself in lifting such heavy loads." It was a comfort to remind him that he was not intended to do such work. There was a relief, however, that she did not dare admit, when he told her three days later that he had lost his job. "I realize for the first time my importance in the great scheme of things," he wrote. "I was fired because I do not belong to the freight handlers' union. It took them three days to find this out, and then they threatened to strike if the railroad company did not immediately discharge me. The railroad company, after due consideration, decided to let me out, and--I'm out. It makes me tremble to think of the consequences that would have followed had they decided otherwise. Think of it! The railroad tied up, business at a standstill and the commerce of the nation paralyzed, and all because of Glenn Marley, A. B. It is really encouraging to know that my presence on the earth is actually known to my fellow-mortals; it has at least been discovered that I am alive and in Chicago, even if my diploma is not recognized by Freight Handlers' Union No. 63. And now," he concluded, "as Kipling says, it's 'back to the army again, Sergeant, back to the army again'--the army of the unemployed." Lavinia was shocked again a day or so later when on opening her letter she met the announcement that he had been offered a job with another railroad as a freight handler. "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."