g love that bathed all his world in colourful
radiance and moved him to those surface elegances for which all her own
pleading had been in vain. Not even when he asked her one night--while
she worked with buffer and orange-wood stick--if she believed in love at
first sight did she suspect the underlying dynamics, the true
inebriating factor of this reform. He put the query with elaborate and
deceiving casualness, having cleared a road to it with remarks upon a
circumspect historical romance that Winona had read to him; and she had
merely said that she supposed it often did happen that way, though it
were far better that true love come gently into one's life, based upon a
profound mutual respect and esteem which would endure through long years
of wedded life.

Wilbur had questioned this, but so cautiously and quite impersonally
that Winona could not suspect his interest in the theme to be more than
academic. She believed she had convinced him that love at first sight,
so-called, is not the love one reads about in the better sort of
literature. She was not alarmed--not even curious. In her very presence
the boy had trifled with his great secret and she had not known!

So continuously had Winona dwelt in the loftier realms of social and
spiritual endeavour, it is doubtful if she knew that an organization
known as the Friday Night Social Club was doing a lot to make life
brighter for those of Newbern's citizens who were young and sportive and
yet not precisely people of the better sort. In the older days of the
town, when Winona was twenty, there was but one social set. Now she was
thirty, and there were two sets. She knew the town had grown; one
nowadays saw strange people that one did not know, even many one would
not care to know. If she had been told that the Friday Night Social Club
met weekly in Knights of Pythias Hall to dance those sinister new dances
that the city papers were so outspoken about she would have considered
it an affair of the underworld, about which the less said the letter.
Had it been disclosed to her that Wilbur Cowan, under the chaperonage of
Edward--Spike--Brennon, 133 lbs., ringside, had become an addict of
these affairs, a determined and efficient exponent of the weird new
steps--"a good thing for y'r footwork," Spike had said--she would have
considered he had plumbed the profoundest depths of social ignominy. Yet
so it was. Each Friday night he danced. He liked it, and while he
disported hims