By fourteen, I could see my life laid out before me. While Mumma ran the business, I would keep house for her and Ernest and Lillie. Later, I would become the sort of maiden aunt who lived in a spare bedroom and helped in the raising of nieces and nephews.

Marriage seemed out of the question—even then, when I was so young. You see, Ernest and Lillie were handsome persons with Mumma’s red-gold hair and Papa’s bright blue eyes. I shared their coloring and—in favorable light, from certain angles—a similar cast of feature, but for me, you must imagine a young Eleanor Roosevelt: bucktoothed, weak-chinned, strong-minded, with a father’s bony angularity in place of a mother’s delicate prettiness.

But Eleanor married, you might protest. Why, her husband became president!

Add, then, my freckles, considered a dreadful defect in those days. Next, be discreetly disconcerted by my crossed eyes blinking behind round spectacles.

Ah, you think now. Ah, I have the picture. Poor Agnes …

In 1899, our little household changed forever. Ernest shocked us all by running away to join the army, taking with him Papa’s mechanical talent and a firm desire for the male companionship our high-pitched feminine household did not afford him. I knew Ernest was unhappy at the factory, but he was barely seventeen and I’d never imagined he would simply up and leave home. Poor Mumma was beside herself when she discovered his note.

A few weeks later, she summoned me to her office to make her own announcement. After careful consultation with her brother, she told me, she had sold our Papa’s patents and the factory itself to White Sewing Machines, a Cleveland concern with a reputation for plain dealing and decent labor policies. This decision realized sufficient profit to provide an income. There would be enough, Mumma informed me, to send both of her daughters to Oberlin College, one of the first coeducational academic institutions in America. Lillian’s fine mind had already taken in all that our small school had to offer; she would be a good deal younger than most of our classmates, but we would matriculate at Oberlin together so that I could look after her. At Oberlin, Mumma expected, Lillian would find an educated young man worthy of her.