Half Portions | Page 3

Flora. It
was as though Nature, in prankish mood, had given a cabbage the
colour and texture of a rose, with none of its fragile reticence and grace.
It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given
to ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent
reminiscence, as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she
walked--rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that
Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless
cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style
met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in the
centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch.
That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as
inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not
manage badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness
and the twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty,
captured H. Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth
Baldwin drove a skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this
was twenty years ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in
Milwaukee, and talked about a game called golf. It was he who
advocated laying out a section of land for what he called links, and
erecting a club house thereon.
"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full of
natural hazards, besides having a really fine view."
Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its
exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the
grass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the

Chippewa Eagle.
"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow
pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what was?--oh,
yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, couldn't you die!"
For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he
went East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers
and gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's
tournament played on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the
river. And his name, in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the
plate-glass windows of the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:
NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY. H.
CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES.
Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering,
which read:
MISS SOPHY DECKER Millinery
Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had
always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional
hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself
in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat
trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little bonnets
all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top, awaiting
their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still stayed on in
the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, came home,
stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy
cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In
five years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted
the old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and
transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of
green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street,
and the Chippewa Eagle ran a half column twice a year describing her
spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin,
and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the

superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her city
colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:
"This is awfully good this year."
"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the
style--the line--you're paying for, not the material."
"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it.
Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on."
When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant
before the mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head,
holding it in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your
fascinated eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it
descended, slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against
your temples. A little sigh of relieved suspense.
"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because
you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to
have a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban,