Half Portions | Page 4

with your nose, until I
proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this
needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it."
And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat
against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist
and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go
out of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But
whether you bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's
shop something more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to
hear her admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:
"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do.
You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my
hat and veil as soon's I get my hair combed."
In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight
brassière and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart

hat and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the
bedroom from the shoulders down.
The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were
modish and expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a
large and lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory
hands as well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both
these opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy
said, frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her
smart trade.
"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say.
They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to
sell them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand
'em, or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying
to cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid
on it. Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's
the same idea."
Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. 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. No one ever bought a hat like that. No
one ever will. That violet-covered toque is 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
centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody 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 scraps, 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 worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes
still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been
addicted to baby talk when endeavouring 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 baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen
or twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora