Part 21 (1/2)

Her shopwindows reflected her business ac.u.men. One was chastely, severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick.

In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.

At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques completely covered with violets. That violet-covered toque was a symbol.

”I don't expect 'em to buy it,” Sophy Decker explained. ”But everybody feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a fruit centerpiece at a family dinner. n.o.body ever eats it, but it has to be there.”

The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of satin and velvet sc.r.a.ps, and bits of lace and ribbon and jet as to make her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little scavenger.

”What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?” asked Aunt Sophy. ”You must have barrels of it.”

Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore.

”I keep it,” she said.

When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, ”Why do you always say 'Poor Sophy'?”

”Because--Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and has always worked.”

Adele considered that. ”If you don't get married do they say you're poor?”

”Well--yes----”

”Then I'll get married,” announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, skinny and rather foreign-looking. The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora of twenty years ago. ”If only Adele could have had his looks,” his mother used to say. ”They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them, but a girl does. Adele will have to be well dressed and interesting. And that's such hard work.”

Flora said she wors.h.i.+ped her children. And she actually sometimes still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to baby talk when endeavoring to coax something out of someone. Her admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great deal of soda bicarbonate and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the beautiful and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, unhealthily. With the encroaching fat, Flora's small, delicate features seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a telescope. A self-centered face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating strength, courage, and a great human understanding.

From her husband and her children, Flora exacted service that would have chafed a galley slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in an orchid bed jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele, or Eugene, or her husband. They all hated it.

”She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired,” Adele had stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. ”She uses it as an excuse for everything and has, ever since Gene and I were children.

She's as strong as an ox.” Not a daughterly speech, but true.

Years before, a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of pillows.

”Well, I don't blame you,” the caller had gushed. ”If I looked the way you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with all that lovely color!”

Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. ”n.o.body ever gives me credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my blood is in my cheeks.”

Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary for success in that direction.

”I love my family,” she would say. ”They fill my life. After all, that's a profession in itself--being a wife and mother.”

She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of beauty.

”I don't understand it,” she used to say in the child's presence. ”Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little dark skinny thing.”

The boy, Eugene, grew up a very silent, handsome, shy young fellow.

The girl, dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Anyone but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not a step.

Sometimes Sophy, the clear-eyed, seeing this state of affairs, tried to stop it.

”You expect too much of your husband and children,” she said one day, bluntly, to her sister.