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.