y house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First National Bank of
Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and trimmer; from almost
anyone, in fact, except a member of her own family. They knew her
least of all. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in
Chicago, and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate
disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal inglenooks.

"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora
confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent, and Sophy, seeking hats,
had made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She
talks to everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our
train. Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social
occasion. You know how packed the seven-fifty-two is. Every seat in
the parlor car taken. And Sophy asking the colored porter about how
his wife was getting along--she called him William--and if they were
going to send her West, and all about her. I wish she wouldn't."

Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings.
You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator
starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof,
unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they
bloomed and spread and took on color as do those tight little paper
water flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity
in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your
innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement
of her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that
Sister Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the millinery salesmen
at Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph,
as, with one arm flung about her plump shoulder, they revealed to her
the picture of their girl in the back flap of their billfold.

Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the East
End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the
millinery business in Elm Street.

"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and
all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now
that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats
of her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is."

H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew.

When the Decker girls were young, the Deckers had lived i