“I suppose the poor men feel pretty badly at being thrown out of work,” Mrs. Lloyd said, looking up at the windows as she slipped past in her nest of furs.

“They feel so badly that I have seen a round dozen since we started out taking advantage of their liberty to have a sleigh-ride with livery teams at a good round price,” Lloyd replied, with languid emphasis.  He never spoke with any force of argument to his wife, nor indeed to any one else, in justification of his actions.  His reasons for action were in most cases self-evolved and entirely self-regulated.  He had said not a word to any one, not even to his foreman, of his purpose to close the factory until it was quite fixed; he had asked no advice, explained to no one the course of reasoning which led to his doing so.  Rowe was a city of strikes, but there had never been a strike at Lloyd’s because he had abandoned the situation in every case before the clouds of rebellion were near enough for the storm to break.  When Briggs and McGuire, the rival manufacturers at his right and left, had resorted to cut prices when business was dull, as a refuge from closing up, Lloyd closed with no attempt at compromise.

“I suppose they need a little recreation,” Mrs. Lloyd observed, thinking of the little girl’s face peeping out between her mother and grandmother in the sleigh they had just passed.

“Their little recreation is on about the same scale for them as my hiring a special railroad train every day in the week to go to Boston would be for me,” returned Lloyd, setting his handsome face ahead at the track.

“It does seem dreadful foolish,” said his wife, “when they are out of work, and maybe won’t earn any more money to support their families all winter—­” Mrs. Lloyd hesitated a minute.  “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.