"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.