“Wasn’t it?” said Winona, bravely.

“We need this kind in war, and we’ll need it even more when the war is over—­when he comes back.”

“When he comes back,” echoed Winona.  And then with an irrelevance she could not control:  “I’m going to a dance with him to-night.”  Her own eyes were dancing strangely as she declared it.

“Good thing!” said Sharon.  He looked her over shrewdly.  “Seems to me you’re looking younger than you ought to,” he said.

Winona pouted consciously for the first time in her hitherto honest life.

“You’re looking almighty girlish,” added Sharon with almost a leer, and Winona suffered a fearful apprehension that her ribs were menaced by his alert thumb.  She positively could not be nudged in public.  She must draw the line somewhere, even if she had led him on by pouting.  She stepped quickly to the door of the Elite Bootery.

“He’ll come back all right,” said Sharon.  “Say, did I ever tell you how he got me to shootin’ a good round of golf?  I tried it first with the wooden bludgeons, and couldn’t ever make the little round lawns under seven or eight—­parties snickering their fool heads off at me.  So I says I can never make the bludgeons hit right.  I don’t seem to do more’n harass the ball into ’em, so he says try an iron all the way.  So I tried the iron utensils, and now I get on the lawn every time in good shape, I can tell you.  Parties soon begun to snicker sour all at once, I want you to know.  It ain’t anything for me to make that course in ninety-eight or”—­Sharon’s conscience called aloud—­“or a hundred and ten or fifteen or thereabouts, in round numbers.”

“I’m so glad,” said Winona.

“I give him all the credit.  And”—­he turned after starting on—­“he’ll come back—­he’ll come back to us!”

Winona drew a fortifying breath and plunged into the Elite Bootery.  She was perhaps more tight-lipped than usual, but to the not-too-acute observer this would have betokened mere businesslike determination instead of the panic it was.  She walked grimly to a long bench, seated herself, and placed her right foot firmly upon a pedestal, full in the gaze of a clerk who was far too young, she instantly perceived, for negotiations of this delicacy.

“I wish to purchase,” she began through slightly relaxed lips, “a pair of satin dancing slippers like those in your window—­high-heeled, one strap, and possibly with those jewelled buckles.”  She here paused for another breath, then continued tremendously:  “Something in a shade to go with—­with these!”

With dainty brazenness the small hand at her knee obeyed an amazing command from her disordered brain and raised the neat brown skirt of Winona a full two inches, to reveal a slim ankle between which and an ogling world there gleamed but the thinnest veneer of tan silk.