Wilbur Cowan was appreciative.
"Some kid!" he cried; "an eyeful!"
Winona pouted for the second time that day, instead of rebuking him for these low phrases of the street. Only Judge Penniman caviled.
"Well, I'd like to know what we're coming to," he grumbled. "The idee of a mere chit like her goin' out to a place that's no better than a saloon, even if you do guzzle your drinks at a table—and in a dug-out dress!"
Winona, instead of feeling rebuked, was gratified to be called a mere chit. She pouted at the invalid.
"Poor father!" she loftily murmured, and stood while her mother threw the evening cloak about her acceptable shoulders.
It was true that at the La Bohême alcoholic stimulant would be served to those who desired it, but this was not compulsory, and the place was in no sense a common saloon. Her father was old-fashioned, as he had shown himself to be about 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 Bohême" 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 hidden orchestra blared and the oblong polished space of which their own table formed part of the border was thronged with dancing couples. Winona glowingly surrendered to the evil spell. Wilbur merely looked an invitation and she was dancing as one who had always danced. She tapped him with her fan as he led her back to the table where their first course had arrived. She trifled daintily with strange food, composing a sentence for her journal: "The whole scene was of a gayety hitherto unparalleled in the annals of our little town."