Half Portions | Page 5

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."
The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow.
The girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and
more immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods;
irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited
following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and
unpaid bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive
luxury. Any one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as
Flora would have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a
taker, not a giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved
affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she
insisted on having her children with her, under her thumb, marking
their devotion as a prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly,
shufflingly, advancing not a step.
Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of
affairs, tried to stop it.
"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day,
bluntly, to her sister.
"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing.
"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the
world. That's the trouble. I love them too much."
"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's
nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance.
You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's
ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom
she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban that

Angie Hatton--"
"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in
your shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's
to your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in
the minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it.
That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her
come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little,
cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't
know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have
suffered. If you had brought two children into the world--"
So