rriage?"

Winona had not been thinking of marriage. But now she did.

"Well"--she began--"of course, I----"

"Mercy! Not really! Why, Winona Penniman, would you barter your
independence for a union that must be demeaning, at least politically,
until our cause is won?"

"Well, of course----" Winona again faltered, tapping one minute toe of a
dancing slipper on the floor.

"Do you actually wish," continued Henrietta Plunkett, rising to the
foothills of her platform manner, "to become a parasite, a man's bond
slave, his creature? Do you wish to be his toy, his plaything?"

"I do!" said Winona low and fervently, as if she had spoken the words
under far more solemn auspices.

"Mercy me! Winona Penniman!"

And Wilbur Cowan had then come to bear her off to her room, that echoed
with strange broken music and light voices and the rhythmic scuffing of
feet on a floor--and to the privacy of her journal.

"I seem," she wrote, "to have flung wisdom and prudence to the winds.
Though well I know the fading nature of all sublunary enjoyments, yet
when I retire shortly it will be but to protract the fierce pleasure of
this night by recollection. Full well I know that Morpheus will wave his
ebon wand in vain."

Morpheus did just that. Long after Winona had protracted the fierce
enjoyment of the night to a vanishing point she lay wakeful, revolving
her now fixed determination to take the nursing course that Patricia
Whipple would take, and go far overseas, where she could do a woman's
work; or, as she phrased it again and again, be a girl of some use in a
vexed world.

In the morning she learned for the first time that Wilbur was to go to
war in company with a common prize fighter. It chilled her for the
moment, but she sought to make the best of it.

"I hope," she told Wilbur, "that war will make a better man of your
friend."

"What do you mean--a better man?" he quickly wanted to know. "Let me
tell you, Spike's a pretty good man right now for his weight. You ought
to see him in action once! Don't let any one fool you about that boy!
What do you expect at a hundred and thirty-three--a heavyweight?"

After he had gone, late that afternoon, after she had said a solemn
farewell to him in the little room of the little house in the side yard,
Winona became reckless. She picked up and scanned with shrewd eyes the
photograph of Spike that had been left: "To my friend Kid Cowan from his
friend Eddie--Spike--Brennon, 133 lbs. ri