"Now, Lottie," she had said, over the telephone, "you've just got to come. Every one of the girls will be here. It's my first party in my new home. Oh, I notice you find time for your new highbrow friends. It won't hurt you to come slumming this once. Well, but your mother can do without you for one afternoon can't she! Good heavens, you've some right to your——"
Lottie came. She came and brought her knitting as did every other member of the Reading Club. Satin camisoles, lingerie, hemstitching, and bead bags had been abandoned for hanks of wool. The Reading Club, together with the rest of North America, was swaddling all Belgium in a million pounds of gray and olive-drab sweaters, mufflers, socks, caps, mittens, helmets, stomach bands. Purl and knit, purl and knit, the Reading Club scarcely dropped a stitch as it exclaimed, and cooed and ah'd and oh'd over Celia Sprague Horner's ("Oh now, that's all right! Just call me Celia Sprague. Everybody does. I can't get used to it myself, after all the years I've been—Why just last week at Shield's, when I was giving my charge, I told the clerk—") new four-room apartment on Fifty-first Street—now more elegantly known as Hyde Park Boulevard. Curiously enough Celia, who had been rather a haggard and faded fiancée of thirty-six, was now, by some magic process, a well-preserved and attractive young matron of thirty-six. A certain new assurance in her bearing; a blithe self-confidence in her conversation; a look in her eyes. The beloved woman.
"This is the bedroom. Weren't we lucky to get two windows! The sun just pours in all day—in fact, every room is sunny, even the kitchen." The Reading Club regarded the bedroom rather nervously. Celia Sprague had been one of them, so long. And now.... Two small French beds of dark mahogany, with a silken counterpane on each. "No, just you put your things right down on the beds, girls. It won't hurt the spreads a bit. Everything in this house is going to be used. That's what it's for." On the bed nearest the wall a little rosy mound of lingerie pillows, all afroth with filet, and Irish, and eyelet embroidery and cut work. Celia had spent countless Reading Club afternoons on this handiwork. The rosy mound served no more practical purpose than the velvet and embroidered slippers that used to hang on the wall in her grandmother's day. Two silver-backed military brushes on the dull mahogany chest of drawers—"chiffo-robe," Celia would tell you. The Reading Club eyed them, smiling a little. Celia opened a closet door to dilate upon its roominess. A whole battalion of carefully-hung trousers leaped out at them from the door-rack. The Reading Club actually stepped back a little, startled. "Orville's clothes take up more room than mine, I always tell him. And everything just so. I never saw such a man!" She talked as one to whom men and their ways were an old, though amusing, story. "He's the neatest thing."
Out to the living room. "Oh, Celia this is sweet! I love your desk. It's so different." The room was the conventional bridal living room; a plum-coloured velvet davenport, its back against a long, very retiring table whose silk-shaded lamp showed above the davenport's broad back like someone playing hide-and-seek behind a hedge. There were lamps, and lamps, and lamps—a forest of them. The book-shelves on either side of the gas-log grate held a rather wistful library, the wedding gift "sets" of red and gold eked out with such school-girl fillers as the Pepper Books, Hans Brinker, and Louisa Alcott.
"A woman twice a week—one day to clean and one to wash and iron. Orville wants me to have a maid but I say what for? She'd have to sleep out and you never can depend—besides, it's just play. We have dinner out two or three nights——"
They were seated now, twittering, each with her knitting. A well-dressed, alert group of women, their figures trim in careful corsets, their hair, teeth, complexions showing daily care and attention. The long slim needles—ebony, amber, white—flew and flashed in the sunlight.
"... This is my sixth sweater. I do 'em in my sleep."
"... It's the heel that's the trick. Once I've passed that——"
"... My brother says we'll never go in. We're a peace-loving nation, he says. We simply don't believe in war. Barbaric."
The handiwork of each was a complete character index. The bride was painstaking and bungling. Her knitting showed frequent bunches and lumps. Beck Schaefer's needles were swift, brilliant, and slovenly. Effie Case's sallow sensual face, her fragile waxen fingers, showed her distaste for the coarse fabric with which she was expertly occupied. Amy Stattler, the Social Service worker, knitted as though she found knitting restful. A plume of white showed startlingly in the soft black of her hair. Prim sheer white cuffs and collar finished her black gown at wrists and throat. Beck Schaefer, lolling on the other side of the room, her legs crossed to show plump gray silk calves, her feet in gray suede slippers ornamented with huge cut-steel buckles, seemed suddenly showy and even vulgar in comparison. She was, paradoxically, good-hearted and unpopular. This last because she was given to indulging in that dangerous pastime known as "being perfectly frank." Instinctively you shrank when Beck Schaefer began a sentence with, "Now, I'm going to be perfectly frank with you." She was rarely perfectly frank with the men, however. She had a way of shaking a coquettish forefinger at the more elderly of these and saying, "Will you never grow up!" People said of Beck that she lighted up well in the evening.