wing among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as
well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these
opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said,
frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart
trade.

"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say.
They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to
sell them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't
understand 'em or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think
I was trying to cheat them. They want a hat with something good and
solid on it. Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would
they? It's the same idea."

Her shopwindows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely,
severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick.

In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and
plumes.

At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques
completely covered with violets. That violet-covered toque was a
symbol.

"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody
feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a
fruit centerpiece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it, but it has
to be there."

The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a
treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of
satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace and ribbon and jet as to make
her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor
of the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little
scavenger.

"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt
Sophy. "You must have barrels of it."

Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore.

"I keep it," she said.

When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say
'Poor Sophy'?"

"Because--Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married,
and has always worked."

Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're
poor?"

"Well--yes----"

"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child,
skinny and rather foreign-looking. The boy, Eugene, had the beauty
which should have been the girl's. Very tall, very blond, with the
straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora of twenty years ago. "If
only Adele could have had his lo