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 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-centred 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 a
lavend