It was even warmer in Mrs. Fryt’s parlor than it had been the week before; the smell of the ladies’ powder hung heavy in the air. Dolly imagined that the only thing saving them from suffocation was the hot whisper of breeze that occasionally rustled the spider plants. She wished that Mrs. Fryt would turn on a fan, but Corinne had already said that Mrs. Fryt, believing that fans circulated germs, didn’t even own one. As a nod to the heat, though, she had provided the ladies with glasses of ice water—anything else might have been the purveyor of disaster if spilled on the quilt. With much grumbling about the humidity, the ladies settled into their stitching, and soon the only sound was an occasional clinking of ice cubes when someone took a drink.

Right away, Dolly noticed that someone—Mrs. Fryt, she assumed—had removed Dolly’s stitches from last time and re-quilted all three of the triangles Dolly had spent the previous meeting working on—the blue and white plaid, the green and white polka dot, the brown and red floral. Of course, no one said anything, but it was obvious the ladies felt her work substandard. Touching the tiny replacement stitches, and looking at the many-colored landscape of the quilt, at the places the ladies had completed to create perfectly mounded little triangles within each separate triangle of fabric, Dolly could see their point. She was determined to get better, though, and she got to work on a red and white gingham piece.

Despite the heat and her frustrating lack of quilting talent, Dolly wasn’t about to get discouraged. She felt as puffed up as someone newly, secretly in love. She had sneaked into the Mickelson house again on Friday—she hadn’t had anything too pressing at the bungalow; Friday was her day to finish anything she hadn’t managed to get to during the week, plus bake cookies and a cake, and do general shopping, and she didn’t need to do any of that. She had spent the afternoon dusting and oiling the woodwork in the Mickelson dining room, cleaning the glass of the buffet and china cabinet, polishing the marble fireplace, knocking down cobwebs from the chandelier, and daydreaming about what living in the house would be like. When she was done cleaning, she thought the room nearly fit for a dinner party, except for the upholstery and dusty rug. Well, she wasn’t about to start reupholstering things just now, and she couldn’t find a vacuum in the house. She didn’t know how she would possibly sneak even her Bissell sweeper, much less her vacuum, across town, so she was resigned to leaving things as they were for now. Tomorrow, she planned to tackle the parlor.