“Very well, then, it’s impossible to employ you.  My men wouldn’t stay with me if I should employ a ‘scab,’ or ‘rat,’” or whatever the phrase was.

Finally, Tracy had a happy thought.  He said, “Why the thing for me to do, of course, is to join a trade-union.”

“Yes,” Barrow said, “that is the thing for you to do—­if you can.”

“If I can?  Is it difficult?”

“Well, Yes,” Barrow said, “it’s sometimes difficult—­in fact, very difficult.  But you can try, and of course it will be best to try.”

Therefore Tracy tried; but he did not succeed.  He was refused admission with a good deal of promptness, and was advised to go back home, where he belonged, not come here taking honest men’s bread out of their mouths.  Tracy began to realize that the situation was desperate, and the thought made him cold to the marrow.  He said to himself, “So there is an aristocracy of position here, and an aristocracy of prosperity, and apparently there is also an aristocracy of the ins as opposed to the outs, and I am with the outs.  So the ranks grow daily, here.  Plainly there are all kinds of castes here and only one that I belong to, the outcasts.”  But he couldn’t even smile at his small joke, although he was obliged to confess that he had a rather good opinion of it.  He was feeling so defeated and miserable by this time that he could no longer look with philosophical complacency on the horseplay of the young fellows in the upper rooms at night.  At first it had been pleasant to see them unbend and have a good time after having so well earned it by the labors of the day, but now it all rasped upon his feelings and his dignity.  He lost patience with the spectacle.  When they were feeling good, they shouted, they scuffled, they sang songs, they romped about the place like cattle, and they generally wound up with a pillow fight, in which they banged each other over the head, and threw the pillows in all directions, and every now and then he got a buffet himself; and they were always inviting him to join in.  They called him “Johnny Bull,” and invited him with excessive familiarity to take a hand.  At first he had endured all this with good nature, but latterly he had shown by his manner that it was distinctly distasteful to him, and very soon he saw a change in the manner of these young people toward him.  They were souring on him as they would have expressed it in their language.  He had never been what might be called popular.  That was hardly the phrase for it; he had merely been liked, but now dislike for him was growing.  His case was not helped by the fact that he was out of luck, couldn’t get work, didn’t belong to a union, and couldn’t gain admission to one.  He got a good many slights of that small ill-defined sort that you can’t quite put your finger on, and it was manifest that there was only one thing which protected him from open insult, and that was his muscle.  These young people had seen him exercising, mornings,