his 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 womenfolk 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. She may not
have known what it meant. 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 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 narrowed eyes, but she was strangely
tolerant of what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that
you wondered how she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery
business.

You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from
one of fifty people: from a salesman in a New York or Chicago wholesale
milliner