nute. "I wonder,"
said she, "if they feel sort of desperate, and think they won't have
enough for their families, anyway--that is, enough to feed them, and
they might as well get a little good time out of it to remember
by-and-by when there ain't enough bread-and-butter. I dunno but we
might do something like that, if we were in their places--don't you,
Norman?"

"No, I do not," replied Lloyd; "and that is the reason why you and I
are not in their places."

Mrs. Lloyd put her sealskin muff before her face as they turned a
windy corner, and reflected that her husband was much wiser than
she, and that the world couldn't be regulated by women's hearts,
pleasant as it would be for the world and the women, since the final
outcome would doubtless be destruction.

Mrs. Norman Lloyd was an eminent survival of the purest and
oldest-fashioned femininity, a very woman of St. Paul, except that
she did not keep silence in the sanctuary.

Just after they had turned the corner they passed an outlying
grocery store much frequented as a lounging-place by idle men. There
was a row of them on the wooden platform (backed against the wall),
cold as it was, watching the sleighs pass, and two or three knots
gathered together for the purposes of confabulation. Nearly all of
them were employes of Lloyd's, and they had met at that unseasonable
hour on that bitter day, drifting together unconsciously as towards
a common nucleus of trouble, to talk over the situation.

When these men, huddled up in their shabby great-coats, with caps
pulled over shaggy brows and sullenly flashing eyes, saw the Lloyds
approaching, the rumble of conversation suddenly ceased. They all
stood staring when their employer passed. Only one man, Nahum Beals,
looked fairly at Lloyd's face with a denouncing flash of eyes.

To this man Lloyd, recognizing him and some of the others as his
employes, bowed. Nahum Beals stood glaring at him in accusing
silence, and his head was as immovable as if carved in stone. The
other men, with their averted eyes, made a curious, motionless
tableau of futile and dumb resistance to power which might have been
carved with truth on the face of the rock from the beginning of the
earth.

Chapter XI

The closing of Lloyd's marked, in some inscrutable way, the close of
the first period of Ellen Brewster's childhood. Looking back in
later years, she always felt her retrospective thought strike a
barrier there, beyond which her im