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 colour as do those tight little Japanese 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 men millinery salesmen at Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as, with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder.

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.  But perhaps you, until you are made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora’s husband, H. Charnsworth Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little natural bewilderment.

The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa.  There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about.  From May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines, accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks.  Flora, Ella, and Grace Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in Chippewa.  In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly, the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) Flora was the acknowledged beauty.  She was the kind of girl whose nose never turns red on a frosty morning.  A little, white, exquisite nose, purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that vulgarest of features.  Under her great gray eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness.  If there is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than to say it was like a lovely flower