t Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old
thing. And she's had so little in life, really."

She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending a
spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this
pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter,
to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips.
Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen
foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family.
Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their
husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It
was always the same.

"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living
soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the
children--"

There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of
to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each
other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a
confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes
of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk,
safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot
rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by
saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I
don't know why I'm telling you all this."

But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"--they paid little
heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that
she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life,
has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had
never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it
meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you
have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least
knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her
time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would
have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old
maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all
what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's
viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her
food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women
sometimes tell, with na