Half Portions | Page 2

narrowed eyes,
but she was strangely tolerant of what is known as sin. So simple and
direct she was that you wondered how she prospered in a line so subtle
as the millinery business.
You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from
one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago
wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First
National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and
trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own
family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own people.
Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago, and Flora
in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate disapproval from
the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks.
"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora
confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had
made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks
to everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train.
Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social
occasion. You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in
the parlour car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how
his wife was getting along--she called him William--and if they were
going to send her west, and all about her. I wish she wouldn't."
Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human
beings. You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and
elevator starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof,
unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they
bloomed and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese
paper water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle
curiosity in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to

her your innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the
encouragement of her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as
well that sister Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery
salesmen at Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss
Decker Aunt Soph, as, with one arm flung about her plump blue serge
shoulder, they revealed to her the picture of their girl in the back flap of
their bill-folder.
Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the
East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the
millinery business in Elm Street.
"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and
all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now that
she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats of her
aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is."
H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you
are made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with
the Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H.
Charnsworth Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may
feel a little natural bewilderment.
The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the
original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an
unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple
tree in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front
porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From
May until September you never passed the Decker place without
hearing the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the
vines, accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the
creak-creak of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora,
Ella, and Grace Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any
other girls in Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were,
undoubtedly, the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy
always excepted) Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind
of girl whose nose never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white,
exquisite nose, purest example of the degree of perfection which may

be attained by that vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were
faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant
wistfulness. If there is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its
slender throat than to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are
free to use it. Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual
physical pang. Only her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth,
untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungry shark. The
strange and cruel part of it was that, in some grotesque, exaggerated
way, as a cartoon may be like a photograph, Sophy resembled