step.

Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of
affairs, tried to stop it.

"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day,
bluntly, to her sister.

"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing.
"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the
world. That's the trouble. I love them too much."

"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's
nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance.
You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's
ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom
she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban
that Angie Hatton--"

"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your
shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to
your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the
minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it.
That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her
come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little,
cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't
know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have
suffered. If you had brought two children into the world--"

So 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 workr