ut the lawless new dance steps that Wilbur had been
teaching her. He had declared that if people performed such antics in
public without music they'd mighty soon find themselves in the lockup,
and Winona had not even shuddered. Now, as he continued to grumble at
this degeneracy, she gracefully tapped his arm with her fan. She had
read of this device being effectively employed by certain conquerors of
men, and coolly she tried it upon her father. She performed the trifle
gracefully, and it seemed of value audacious and yet nothing to be
misunderstood by a really clean-minded man. She tapped the judge again
as they left, with a minor variation of the technic. The judge little
knew that he but served as a dummy at target practice.

The car in which Wilbur conveyed his guest to the scene of revelry was
not of an elegance commensurate with Winona's. It was a mongrel of many
makes, small, battered, and of a complaining habit. He had acquired it
as a gift from one who considered that he bestowed trash, and had
transformed it into a thing of noisy life, knowing, as a mother knows of
her infant, what each of its squeaks and rattles implied. It was
distressing, in truth, to look upon, but it went. Indeed, the proud
owner had won a race with it from a too-outspoken critic who drove a
much superior car. It was Wilbur Cowan who first in Newbern discovered
that you could speed up a car by dropping a few moth balls into the
gasoline tank. He called his car the Can, but, unreasonably, was not too
cordial to others using the name.

The Can bore the pair to a fretful halt under the newest electric
lights on River Street. "The La Boheme" read the dazzling sign. And
Winona passed into her new life. She was feeling strangely young as she
relinquished her cloak to a uniformed maid. She stood amid exotic
splendour, and was no longer herself but some regal creature in the
Sunday supplement of a great city paper. She had always wanted to be a
girl, but had not known how--and now at thirty-five how easy it seemed!
She preceded Wilbur to a table for two, impressive with crystal and
damask, and was seated by an obsequious foreigner who brought to the act
a manner that had never before in Newbern distinguished this
service--when it had been performed at all.

Other tables about them were already filled with Newbern's elect,
thrilled as was Winona, concealing it as ably as she, with the town's
new distinction. Hardly had food been ordered when a h