Flora said she worshipped her children.  And she actually sometimes still coquetted heavily with her husband.  At twenty she had been addicted to baby talk when endeavouring 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 baking soda 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-centred 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 a lavender 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 very ladylike or daughterly speech, but shockingly 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 colour!”

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.”

Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary for success in that direction.

“I love my family,” she would say.  “They fill my life.  After all, that’s a profession in itself—­being a wife and mother.”

She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband’s land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of beauty.

“I don’t understand it,” she used to say in the child’s very presence.  “Her father’s handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn’t such a fright when I was a girl.  And look at her!  Little, dark, skinny thing.”