An informal club of stitchers, its members gathered early Monday afternoons in Crewel World to stitch and gossip. Present at this session were serene Patricia, earthy Bershada, naive Emily, stalwart Jill, bluff Alice, friendly Doris—and rakish Phil, the lone male member. Phil wasn’t a hanger-on, he was a committed counted cross-stitcher. Normally, he worked on train-themed pieces, but he’d been taken by Winter Retreat, a twelve-by-sixteen-inch Gold Collection outdoors pattern, and was working hard on it. It featured four boldly marked Canada geese standing in a field of tall tan grass beside a body of dark water. There were glints of gold in the grass and a gray, overcast sky into which more geese were vanishing. It was a finicky piece, he was finding, with lots of changes of subtle colors in the grass, sky, and water. Working on the piece was stretching his talent and his patience to their limits. Which, after all, was not a bad thing. Betsy had an errand to run and so she wasn’t there when the meeting convened.
