“Well,” I said, “I think you’ve been pretty fair with that company. 
    You’ve waited on it for three months now.  If I had the offer of
    another job I’d feel perfectly free to take it, if I were you.”

    “Yes,” he said, “I think I should.”

    “All right, I have a job for you,” said I.  “My husband wants a man
    now at his garage, to clean automobiles.  The hours are from 6 p.m.
    to 6 a.m., and you’ll earn $15 a week.”

    His paper fell from his hands to the floor; his jaw dropped, and he
    just looked at me.  Then he tried to crawl out of it and began to
    make excuses.

    “I haven’t time to argue with you, Mr. Gage,” I said.  “I’ll keep the
    job open till seven o’clock tonight and you can let me know then
    whether you’ll take it or not.”

    At seven he came to say he’d take the job.[45]

If in desertion cases the interest centers very vividly about the absent man, in non-support cases the reverse is likely to be true, because he is often not very interesting per se, and because, moreover, he is always on the spot and does not have to be searched for.  Familiarity certainly breeds contempt for the non-supporter.  Consequently the social worker may easily fall into the danger of disregarding the human factors he presents, and either treating the family as if he did not exist or expending no further effort on him than to see that he “puts in” six months of every year in jail if possible (since the law usually secures to him the privilege of loafing the other six).  It is not safe, however, to regard even the most leisurely of non-supporters as beyond the possibility of awakening.  One district secretary who had thus given a man up had the experience of seeing him transformed into a steady worker after a few months of intensive effort by a first-year student in a school of social science, whose only equipment for the job was personality and enthusiasm.  So remarkable are some of the reclamations that have been brought about with seemingly hopeless non-supporters that all possible measures should be tried before giving one of them up.

His Scotch ancestry, a good wife, luck, and a friend with insight and skill, pulled Aleck Gray out of that bottomless pit, the gutter.  Aleck had been a bookkeeper; but he didn’t get on well with his employers, lost his job, got to drinking, and went so far downhill that his wife had to take their two children and go home to her people several hundred miles away.  Aleck finally drifted into a bureau for homeless men, where the agent became interested in him and worked with him for six months, getting him job after job, which he always lost through drink or temper.  He seemed incapable of taking directions or working with other people.  In all that time the agent felt that he was getting no nearer the root of Aleck’s trouble, though he came back after each dismissal and doggedly took whatever was offered.  Finally,