Her Idea of Justice: Absolutely Not Alito

And there's the bust.

The woman's sculpted face is turned outward onto Dupont Circle.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Some other feminist? Aron, who loves telling a good story, yelps in amusement.

It's actually her great-grandmother, Bessie Pearlstein, carved by her grandmother.

Her kids were freaked out by it, she says. "They found her face very scary. . . . So I gave her to my brother and he put it in his trunk."

It stayed there for months until Aron saved the bust and brought it to the office, much to the consternation of some of the young people who were embarrassed to admit they couldn't identify the famous feminist in the window.

"Finally a student confessed she had no idea who it was, and I asked, 'Who do you think it is?' . . . I told her it was my great-grandmother, and ever since then people have taken to dressing her up" on the holidays.

Aron grew up in New York in a family of social activists.

"My whole family was grounded in activism. My grandmother went around the country raising money and lecturing about Israel, and many of my aunts went down and were part of the civil rights movement. . . . There was a lot of discussion around the family table about social causes."

She met her husband, Bernard Arons, a psychiatrist, when they were classmates (seating was alphabetical) at Oberlin College. They've been married for nearly 37 years, and have three adult children.

She and her husband have a commuter marriage. He works in New York and is home on weekends. "Most people probably don't even know I'm married," Aron says.

Close allies such as Neas do, of course. They have been in the trenches together a long time, share the same opponents and the same goals.