Mrs. Lloyd’s death had made a certain hush in the ferment of revolt at Lloyd’s, but now it was again on the move.  There was a strong feeling of dislike to young Lloyd among the workmen.  His uncle had heaped up ill-feeling as well as wealth as a heritage for him.  The older Lloyd had never been popular, and Robert had succeeded to all his unpopularity, and was fast gathering his own.  He was undoubtedly disposed to follow largely his uncle’s business methods.  He had admired them, they had proved successful, and he had honestly seen nothing culpable in them as business methods go; so it was not strange that he tried to copy them when he came into charge of Lloyd’s.  He was inclined to meet opposition with the same cool inflexibility of persistency in his own views, and was disposed to consult his own interests and carry out his own plans with no more brooking of interference than the skipper of a man-o’-war.  Therefore, when it happened, shortly after his aunt’s death, that he conceived a dissatisfaction with some prominent spirits among union men, he discharged them without the slightest reference to the fact that they were old and skilful workmen, and employed non-union men from another town in their places.  He had, indeed, the object of making in time his factory entirely non-union.  He said to himself that he would be dictated to by no labor organization under the sun, and that went a step beyond his uncle, inasmuch as the elder Lloyd had always made his own opinion subservient to good business policy; but Robert was younger and his blood hotter.  It happened, also, a month later, when he began to see that business had fallen off considerably (indeed, it was the beginning of a period of extreme business depression), and that he could no longer continue on the same scale with the same profits, that instead of assembling the men in different departments, communicating the situation to them, and submitting them a reduced price-list for consideration, as was the custom with the more pacific of the manufacturers in the vicinity, he posted it up in the different rooms with no ado whatever.  That had been his uncle’s method, but never in the face of such brewing discontent as was prevalent in Lloyd’s at that time.  It was an occasion when the older man would have shut down, but Robert had, along with his arbitrary impetuosity, a real dislike to shut down on account of the men, for which they would have been the last to give him credit.  “Poor devils,” he told himself, standing in the office window one night, and seeing them pour out and disappear into the early darkness beyond the radius of the electric-lights, “I can’t turn them adrift without a dollar in midwinter.  I’ll try to run the factory a while longer on a reduced scale, if I only meet expenses.”