rrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of
what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how
she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business.

You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from
one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago
wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First
National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and
trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own
family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own
people. 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 ingle-nooks.

"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 parlour
car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured 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 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
milliner