with her she had a painful sense of a grating adjustment as of
points of meeting which did not dovetail as they should. Norman
Lloyd represented one of the old families of the city, distinguished
by large possessions and college training, and he was the first of
his race to engage in trade. His wife came from a vastly different
stock, being the daughter of a shoe-manufacturer herself, and the
granddaughter of a cobbler who had tapped his neighbor's shoes in
his little shop in the L of his humble cottage house. Mrs. Norman
Lloyd was innocently unconscious of any reason for concealing the
fact, and was fond, when driving out to take the air in her fine
carriage, of pointing out to any stranger who happened to be with
her the house where her grandfather cobbled shoes and laid the
foundation of the family fortune. "That all came from that little
shop of my grandfather," she would say, pointing proudly at Lloyd's
great factory, which was not far from the old cottage. "Mr. Lloyd
didn't have much of anything when I married him, but I had
considerable, and Mr. Lloyd went into the factory, and he has been
blessed, and the property has increased until it has come to this."
Mrs. Lloyd's chief pride was in the very facts which others
deprecated. When she considered the many-windowed pile of Lloyd's,
and that her husband was the recognized head and authority over all
those throngs of grimy men, walking with the stoop of daily labor,
carrying their little dinner-boxes with mechanical clutches of
leather-tanned fingers, she used to send up a prayer for humility,
lest evil and downfall of pride come to her. She was a pious woman,
a member of the First Baptist Church, and active in charitable work.
Mrs. Norman Lloyd adored her husband, and her estimate of him was
almost ludicrously different from that of the grimy men who flocked
to his factory, she seeing a most kindly spirited and amiable man,
devoting himself to the best interests of his employés, and striving