An absorbent sheet of cellulosic fibers includes a mixture of hardwood fibers and softwood fibers arranged in a reticulum having: (i) a plurality of pileated fiber enriched regions of relatively high local basis weight interconnected by way of (ii) a plurality of lower local basis weight linking regions whose fiber orientation is biased along the machine direction between pileated regions interconnected thereby, wherein the sheet exhibits a % CD stretch which is at least about 2.75 times the dry tensile ratio of the sheet. Tensile ratios of from about 0.4 to about 4 are readily achieved.