The Maternal Feminine

The Maternal Feminine

Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy, you would have to coin a term
or fall back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An
unmarried woman," states that worthy work, baldly, "especially
when no longer young." That, to the world, was Sophy Decker.
Unmarried, certainly. And most certainly no longer young. In
figure, she was, at fifty, what is known in the corset ads as a
"stylish stout." Well dressed in dark suits, with broad-toed
health shoes and a small, astute hat. The suit was practical
common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was
strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute
and ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin.
Chippewa's East End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the
mill hands and hired girls bought the naive ones. But whether
lumpy or possessed of that thing known as line, Sophy Decker's
hats were honest hats.

The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable
women of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a
family of married sisters and tolerant, good-humored
brothers-in-law, and careless nieces and nephews.

"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such
a good old thing. And she's had so little in life, really."

She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever
sending a model hat to this pert little niece in Seattle; or
taking Adele, Sister Flora's daughter, to Chicago or New York as
a treat on one of her buying trips.

Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a
dozen foolish shopping commissions for the idle womenfolk of her
family. Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints
about their husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about
their wives. It was always the same.

"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another
living soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't
for the children----"

There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy
instead of to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps
they held for each other an unuttered distrust or jealousy.
Perhaps, in making a confidante of Sophy, there was something of
the satisfaction that comes of dropping a surreptitious stone
down a deep well and hearing it plunk, safe in the knowledge that
it has struck no one and that it cannot rebound, lying there in
the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by saying, "But you
don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I don't know
why I'm telling you all this."

But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know," they paid
little heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part
of it is that she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must
know who, all her life, has given and given and in return has
received nothing. Sophy Decker had never used the word
inhibition in her life. She may not have known what it meant.
She only knew (without in the least knowing she knew) that in
giving of her goods, of her affections, of her time, of her
energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would have
been shocked if you had told them that there was about this
old-maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without
being what is known as a masculine woman, she had, somehow,
acquired the man's viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a
good deal, and enjoyed her food. She did not care for those
queer little stories that married women sometimes tell, with
narrowed 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 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 anyone, in fact, except a
member of her own family. They knew her least of all. 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 inglenooks.

"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 parlor car taken. And
Sophy asking the colored 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 color as do those
tight little 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 millinery salesmen at Danowitz &
Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as,
with one arm flung about her plump shoulder, they revealed to her
the picture of their girl in the back flap of their billfold.

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 millinery business in Elm Street.

"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and
successful and all," she told her husband. "But it's not so
pleasant for Adele, now that she's growing up, having all the
girls she knows buying their hats of her aunt. Not that I--but
you know how it is."

H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew.

When the Decker girls were young, the Deckers had lived in a
sagging old frame house (from which the original paint had long
ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street
in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten, russet-apple tree in the
yard, an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front
porch, and an uncut brush of sunburned grass and weeds all about.

From May until September you never passed the Decker place
without hearing the plunkety-plink of a mandolin from somewhere
behind the vines, laughter, and the creak-creak of the hard-
worked and protesting hammock hooks.

Flora, Ella, and Grace Decker had had more beaux and fewer
clothes than any other girls in Chippewa. In a town full of
pretty young things, they were, undoubtedly, the prettiest; and
in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) Flora was
the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose
never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite
nose, purest example of the degree of perfection which may be
attained by that vulgarest of features. Under her great gray
eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost
poignant wistfulness. Her slow, sweet smile give 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 color and texture of a
rose, with none of its fragile reticence and grace.

It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous,
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 hatmaking, 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 center 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; 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 clubhouse 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

Sophy's hatmaking, in the beginning, had been done at home. She
had always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an
occasional hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married,
Sophy found herself in possession of a rather bewildering amount
of spare time. The hat trade grew so that sometimes there were
six rather botchy little bonnets all done up in yellow paper
pyramids with a pin at the top, awaiting their future wearers.
After her mother's death Sophy still stayed on in the old house.
She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, came home, stuck up
a homemade sign in the parlor window (the untidy cucumber vines
came down), and began her hatmaking in earnest. In five years
she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm, had painted the
old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch,
and transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly
stretch of green lawn and bright flower beds. In ten years she
was in Elm Street, and the Chippewa Eagle ran a half column twice
a year describing her spring and fall openings. On these
occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin and marcel wave and her most
relentless corsets, was, in all the superficial things, not a
pleat or fold or line or wave behind her city colleagues. She
had all the catch phrases:

"This is awfully good this year."

"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model."

". . . Well, but, my dear, it's the style--the line--you're
paying for, not the material."

"No, that hat doesn't do a thing for you."

"I've got it. I had you in mind when I bought it. Now don't
say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on."

When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant
before the mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your
head, holding it in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile
thing. Your fascinated eyes were held by it, and your breath as
well. Then down it descended, slowly, slowly. A quick pressure.

Her fingers firm against your temples. A little sigh of relieved
suspense.

"That's wonderful on you! . . . You don't! Oh, my dear! But
that's because you're not used to it. You know how you said, for
years, you had to have a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a
turban, with your nose, until I proved to you that if the head
size was only big . . . Well, perhaps this needs just a lit-tle
lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it."

And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a
hat against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a
psychologist and too shrewd a businesswoman for that. She
preferred that you go out of her shop hatless rather than with an
unbecoming hat. But whether you bought or not you took with you
out of Sophy Decker's shop something more precious than any
hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her admonishing a customer,
her good-natured face all aglow:

"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress.

I do. You can get your arms above your head, and set it right.
I put on my hat and veil as soon's I get my hair combed."

In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in
tight brassiere and scant slip, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in
smart hat and veil, attired as though for the street from the
neck up and for the bedroom from the shoulders down.

The East End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were
modish and expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to
gain a large and lucrative following 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 looks,"
his mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't
need them, but a girl does. Adele will have to be well dressed
and interesting. And that's such hard work."

Flora said she worshiped her children. And she actually
sometimes still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty
she had been addicted to baby talk when endeavoring 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 soda bicarbonate 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-centered 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 an orchid 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
daughterly speech, but 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 color!"

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
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. Anyone 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, 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 hand 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, then, it had come about during the years between their
childhood and their youth that Aunt Sophy received the burden of
their confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed,
somehow, to understand in some miraculous way, and to make the
burden a welcome one.

"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying,
Della. How can I hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now,
then."

This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung
and became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's
house--the old frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that
matter, there was something about the very shop downtown, with
its workroom in the rear, that had a cozy, homelike quality never
possessed by the big Baldwin house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had
built a large brick mansion, in the Tudor style, on a bluff
overlooking the Fox River, in the best residential section of
Chippewa. It was expensively furnished. The hall console alone
was enough to strike a preliminary chill to your heart.

The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm
and snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but
with a not unpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and
glue and steam and flatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia
Gold, the head trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat,
white with a dark-gray patch on his throat and a swipe of it
across one flank that spoiled him for style and beauty but made
him a comfortable-looking cat to have around. Sometimes, on very
cold days, or in the rush season, the girls would not go home to
dinner, but would bring their lunches and cook coffee over a
little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drank
quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago.
She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the
best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New
York or Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius
for original design, or she never would have been content to be
head milliner in a small-town shop. But she could copy a
fifty-dollar model from memory down to the last detail of crown
and brim. It was a gift that made her invaluable.

The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair
was very black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met
in a thick dark line. Her face as she bent over her work was
sullen and brooding, but when she lifted her head suddenly, in
conversation, you were startled by a vivid flash of teeth and
eyes and smile. Her voice was deep and low. She made you a
little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking
something. Around the worktable, mornings, she used to relate
the dream she had had the night before. In these dreams she was
always being pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up,
screaming." Neither she nor the sewing girls knew what she was
revealing in these confidences of hers. But Aunt Sophy, the
shrewd, somehow sensed it.

"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living
in a boardinghouse. You come over to me for a week. The change
will do you good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody
to keep me company."

Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about
the house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy
negligees with big flower patterns strewn over them. They made
her hair look blacker and her skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes
Eugene or Adele or both would drop in and the four would play
bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny game, Adele a
rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, always,
and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a
partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.

It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming
unexpectedly into the living room from the kitchen, where she and
Adele were foraging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia
Gold and Eugene, arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek.
They started up as she came in and faced her, the woman
defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was thirty (with
reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite twenty-one.

"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise
spoon and a leaf of lettuce in her hand then, and still she did
not look comic.

"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each
other. We're going to be married."

Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons
and plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now,
listen----" she began.

"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"

Except that it was very white and, somehow, old-looking, Aunt
Sophy's face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia,
my girl. That isn't love, and you know it. I'm an old maid, but
I know what love is when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia.
Sensible woman like you, hugging and kissing a boy like that, and
old enough to be his mother."

"Now, look here, Aunt Sophy! If you're going to talk that
way---- Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to
really----"

"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking suddenly very ill.

And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh!
What's the idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's
everybody?"

Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a
hand-- a capable, firm, steadying hand--on the arm of each. The
woman drew back, but the boy did not.

"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a
week! Will you promise me? Will you?"

"Are you going to tell Father?"

"Not for a week, if you'll promise not to see each other in that
week. No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to.
. . . You're not a bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home
they never gave him a chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week,
Eugene. We can talk things over then."

Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen.

"Quick!"

"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing.

"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy
lot, sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. Gene, see if
you can open the olives with this fool can opener. I tried."

There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt
Sophy; what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her
mind. Just hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old,
suddenly. But when, three days later, the news came that America
was to go into the war she had her answer.

Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't
old enough, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over.
Surely." She was almost hysterical.

Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked
at Aunt Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the
answer. They said nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In
three days he was gone. Flora took to her bed. Next day Adele, a
faint, unwonted color marking her cheeks, walked into her
mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the recumbent figure.
Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing up and down,
now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the floor. He
was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted curiously
over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and
crafty look.

"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like
that! My nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has
done something or other to your business. I'm sure no wife could
have been more economical than I have. Nothing matters but
Eugene, anyway. How could he do such a thing! I've given my
whole life to my children----"

H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the
wall at the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in
between her teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.

Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother.
Her hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she
stood there, she resembled her mother and her father so
startlingly and simultaneously that the two, had they been less
absorbed in their own affairs, must have marked it.

The girl's head came up stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry
Daniel Oakley."

Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years
he had been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed
him. She and Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was
always talking about his strength and endurance, his walks, his
rugged health; pounding his chest meanwhile and planting his feet
far apart. He and Baldwin had had business relations as well as
friendly ones.

At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H.
Charnsworth stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter
with a queer look; a concentrated look, as though what she had
said had set in motion a whole mass of mental machinery within
his brain.

"When did he ask you?"

"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the
men will be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at
England and France. I'm not going to be left." She turned
squarely toward her father, her young face set and hard. "You
know what I mean. You know what I mean."

Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have
told your mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand
there and say, `I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I am so
faint . . . all of a sudden . . . Get the spirits of ammonia."

Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six
weeks later. They had a regular prewar wedding--veil, flowers,
dinner, and all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and
draped her veil. The girl stood looking at herself in the
mirror, a curious half smile twisting her lips. She seemed
slighter and darker than ever.

"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a
quart of milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she
turned to her aunt, who stood behind her, and clung to her,
holding her tight, tight. "I can't!" she gasped. "I can't!
I can't!"

Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the
girl.

"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean
you don't want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are
you marrying for? Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy."

But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed
folds of her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead,
of course. Just like the girl in the play." She laughed a
little. But Aunt Sophy did not.

"Now look here, Della. If you're----"

But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers.
"It's all right," she said. Aunt Sophy stood with her back
against the door. "If it's money," she said. "It is! It is,
isn't it! I've got money saved. It was for you children. I've
always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty close, with his
speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all. It
isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby."

"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has
been wonderful, really. Dad's been stealing money for years.
Dan's. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor, anyway.

Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't
it? Like something in the movies. I don't mind. I'm lucky,
really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing
like me."

"But your mother----"

"Mother doesn't know a thing."

Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony, but Adele was
composed enough for two.

When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his
face drawn and queer, Sophy knew.

"How much?" she said.

"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than
that----"

"I thought Oakley----Adele said----"

"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met.
It's this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right.
People got scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in
cash."

"Speculating with it, were you?"

"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals."

"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me."

"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will
cover it, and everything will be all right. If I had anybody
else to go to for the money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get
it back. You know that."

Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was
for the children, anyway. They won't need it now."

He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why
won't they?"

"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream."

"Eugene?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and
presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy.
About this money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora
doesn't understand these things, but I can talk to you. It's
like this----"

"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm
doing it, not for you, but for Flora, and Della--and Eugene.
Flora has lived such a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she
ever really knew any of you. Her husband, or her children. I
sometimes have the feeling that Della and Eugene are my
children--were my children."

When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph
was getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers,"
he said.

"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And
she's lived her little, narrow life, with nothing to bother her
but her hats and her house. She doesn't know what it means to
suffer as a mother suffers --poor Sophy."

"Um," Baldwin grunted.

When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the
War Department, Aunt Sophy was so calm it might have appeared
that Flora had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest,
did Flora. Sophy neglected everything to give comfort to the
stricken two.

"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How
can you sit there like that! Even if you weren't his mother,
surely you must feel something."

"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.

"What difference does that make!"

AMERICAN RED CROSS
(Croix Rouge Americaine)

MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN:
I am sure you must have been officially notified by the U.S.
War Dept. of the death of your son, Lieut. Eugene H. Baldwin.
But I want to write you what I can of his last hours. I was with
him much of that time as his nurse. I'm sure it must mean much
to a mother to hear from a woman who was privileged to be with
her boy at the last.
Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly gassed
from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not
receive gassed patients, as they are sent to a special hospital
near here. But two nights before, the Germans wrecked that
hospital, so many gassed patients have come to us.
Your son was put in the officers' ward, where the doctors who
examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as he
had inhaled so much gas that it was only a matter of a few hours.

I could scarcely believe that a man so big and strong as he was
could not pull through.
The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly
choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were
both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not to
leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good to have
a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his head on my
shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more easily. I
stayed with him all that night, though I was not on duty. You
see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he died he was
able to see very well. I stayed with him every minute of that
night and have never seen a finer character than he showed during
all that fight for life.
He had several bad attacks that night and came through each one
simply because of his great will power and fighting spirit.
After each attack he would grip my hand and say, "Well, we made
it that time, didn't we, nurse?" Toward morning he asked me if
he was going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed
all his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand.
He seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in
bed, he said: "Then I'll fight for it!" We kept him alive for
three days, and actually thought we had won when on the third day
. . .
But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been the
mother of such a son. . . .
I am a Wisconsin girl--Madison. When this is over and I come
home, will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than I
can possibly write?
MARIAN KING

It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They
had hoped for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four
people were waiting in the living room of the big Baldwin house
overlooking the river. Flora and her husband, Adele and Aunt
Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then Adele would rise,
nervously, and go to the window that faced the street. Flora was
weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair, frowning
a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt
Sophy sat quietly, waiting.

There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes.
Flora broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her
handkerchief as she spoke.

"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy
you. I do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to
say `Poor Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after
all. It's the married woman who drinks the cup to the last,
bitter drop. There you sit, Sophy, fifty years old, and life
hasn't even touched you. You don't know how cruel life can be to
a mother."

Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room
stood up and faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping
outside. Daniel Oakley's hearty voice: "Well, it only took us
five minutes from the station. Pretty good."

Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They
faced her, the four--Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy.
Marian King stood a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She
looked at the two older women with swift, appraising glances.
Then she came into the room, quickly, and put her two hands on
Aunt Soph's shoulders and looked into her eyes straight and sure.

"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be
a very proud woman."

-THE END-
Edna Ferber's short story: The Maternal Feminine

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