Half Portions | Page 6

then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood
and their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their
confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to
understand in some miraculous way, and to make the burden a
welcome one.
"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How
can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then."
This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and
became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old
frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was
something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the
rear, that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big
Baldwin house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick
mansion, in the Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in
the best residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and
correctly furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a
preliminary chill to your heart.
The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and
snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not
unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam,
and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head trimmer,
always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray patch on
his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him for style

and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have around.
Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls would not
go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and cook
coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drank
quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago. She had
been with her for five years. She said Julia was the best trimmer she
had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or Chicago on
her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original design, or she
would never have been content to be head milliner in a small-town
shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory down to
the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her invaluable.
The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very
black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick,
dark line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding,
but when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were
startled by a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was
deep and low. She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed
always to be asking something. Around the work table, mornings she
used to relate the dream she had had the night before. In these dreams
she was always being pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up,
screaming." Neither she nor the sewing girls knew what she was
revealing in these confidences of hers. But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd,
somehow sensed it.
"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a
boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do
you good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me
company."
Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the house
after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big flowers
embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her skin
whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in
and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny
game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand,
always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a

partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.
It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly
into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were
foraging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene,
arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she
came in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia
Gold was thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite
twenty-one.
"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon
and a leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look
comic.
"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other.
We're going to be married."
Aunt Sophy