Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth
Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little
natural bewilderment.

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 sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From
May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing
the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines,
accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak
of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace
Decker 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. If there
is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than
to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it.
Her slow, sweet smile gave 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 colour and texture of a rose, with none of
its fragile reticence and grace.