on its stalk, you are free to use it.  Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang.  Only her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungry shark.  The strange and cruel part of it was that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a photograph, Sophy resembled Flora.  It was as though Nature, in prankish mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of its fragile reticence and grace.

It was a manless household.  Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, as poor Mr. Decker.  Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she walked—­rheumatism, or a spinal affection.  Small wonder, then, that Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year’s style met this year’s without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch.

That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as inevitable as the sequence of the seasons.  Ella and Grace did not manage badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the twine hammock to work with.  But Flora, with her beauty, captured H. Charnsworth Baldwin.  Chippewa gasped.  H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked about a game called golf.  It was he who advocated laying out a section of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon.

“The section of the bluff overlooking the river,” he explained, “is full of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view.”

Chippewa—­or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the grass evenings after supper—­laughed as it read this interview in the Chippewa Eagle.

“A golf course,” they repeated to one another, grinning.  “Conklin’s cow pasture, up the river.  It’s full of natural—­wait a minute—­what was?—­oh, yeh, here it is—­hazards.  Full of natural hazards.  Say, couldn’t you die!”

For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went East to college.  Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men’s tournament played on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river.  And his name, in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago: 

Northern Lumber and land company. 
H. Charnsworth Baldwin, PRES.

Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, which read: 

Miss Sophy Decker
Millinery