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 images of the past were confused.  Yet it was difficult to tell why it was so, for after the first the child could, it seemed, have realized no difference in her life.  Now and then she heard some of that conversation characterized at once by the confidence of wrong and injustice, and the logical doubt of it, by solid reasoning which, if followed far enough, refuted itself, by keen and unanswerable argument, and the wildest and most futile enthusiasm.  But she had gained nothing except the conviction of the great wrongs of the poor of this earth and the awful tyranny of the rich, of the everlasting moaning of Lazarus at the gates and the cry for water later on from the depths of the rich man’s hell.  Somehow that last never comforted Ellen; she had no conception of the joy of the injured party over righteous retribution.  She pitied the rich man and Lazarus impartially, yet all the time a spirit of fierce partisanship with these poor men was strengthening with her growth, their eloquence over their wrongs stirred her soul, and set her feet outside her childhood.  Still, as before said, there was no tangible difference in her daily life.  The little petted treasure of the Brewsters had all her small luxuries, sweets, and cushions of life, as well after as before the closing of Lloyd’s.  And the preparations for her aunt’s wedding went on also.  The sight of her lover sleigh-riding with her rival that afternoon had been too much for the resolution of Eva Loud’s undisciplined nature.  She had herself gone to Jim Tenny’s house that evening, and called him to account, to learn that he had seriously taken her resolution not to marry at present to proceed from a fear that he would not provide properly for her, and that he had in this state of indignation been easily led by the sight of Aggie Bemis’s pretty face in her front door, as he drove by, to stop.  She had told Jim that she would marry him as she had agreed if he looked at matters in that way, and had passed Aggie Bemis’s window leaning on Jim’s arm with a side stare of triumph.