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. Lottie Payson was knitting a sleeveless, olive-drab sweater. Row after row, inch after inch, it grew and lengthened, a flawless thing. Lottie hated knitting. As she bent over the work her face wore a look for definition of which you were baffled. Not a sullen look nor brooding, but bound. That was it! Not free. The talk at first was casual, uninteresting. "Lot, is that the skirt to the suit Heller made you last winter?... His things are as good the second season as they are the first. Keep their shape. And he certainly does know how to get a sleeve in. His shoulder line...." "... the minute I begin to gain I can tell by my waistbands----" "... if you purl three knit two----" Beck Schaefer had ceased to knit. She was looking at the intent little group. She represented a certain thwarted type of unwed woman in whom the sensual is expressed, pitifully enough, in terms of silk and lacy lingerie; in innuendo; in a hungry roving eye; in a little droop at the corners of the mouth; in an over-generous display of plump arms, or bosom, or even knees. Beck's married friends often took her with them in the evenings as a welcome third to relieve the tedium of a wedded tête-à-tête. They found a vicarious pleasure in giving Beck a good time. Suddenly, in the midst of the brittle chatter and laughter, was thrust the steel edge of Beck Schaefer's insolent voice, high, shrill. "Well, Cele, tell us the truth: are you happy?" The bride, startled, dropped a stitch, looked up, looked down, flushed. "Why yes, of course, you bad thing!"