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