oks," 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 worshiped her children. And she actually sometimes
still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been
addicted to baby talk when endeavoring 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 soda bicarbonate 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-centered 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
an orchid bed jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele, or Eugene,
or her husband. They all hated it.

"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had
stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as
an excuse for everything and has, ever since Gene and I were children.
She's as strong as an ox." Not a daughterly speech, but true.

Years before, a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call,
had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of
pillows.

"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way
you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with
all that lovely color!"

Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me
credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my
blood is in my cheeks."

Flor