“You seem a lot older than I do now,” he said, and Merle, brushing back the errant lock, had replied:  “Poor chap, you’re a victim of the mob reaction.  Of course I’m older now.  I’m face to face with age-long problems that you’ve never divined the existence of.  It does age one.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Wilbur.

He felt shamed, apologetic for his course.  Still he would have some plain fighting, Wall Street or no Wall Street.

He wrested a chattering Winona from Mrs. Henrietta Plunkett at the door of the ladies’ cloakroom.  Mrs. Plunkett was Newbern’s ablest exponent of the cause of woman, and she had been disquieted this night at observing signs of an unaccustomed frivolity in one of her hitherto stanchest disciples.

“I can’t think what has come over you!” she had complained to Winona.  “You seem like a different girl!”

“I am a different girl!” boasted Winona.

“You do look different—­your gown is wonderfully becoming, and what lovely slippers!” Mrs. Plunkett inspected the aged debutante with kindly eyes.  “But remember, my dear, we mustn’t let frivolities like this divert our attention from the cause.  A bit more of the good fight and we shall have come into our own.”

“All this wonderful mad evening I have forgotten the cause,” confessed Winona.

“Mercy!” said Mrs. Plunkett.  “Forgotten the cause?  One hardly does that, does one, without a reason?”

“I have reasons enough,” said Winona, thinking of the new dancing slippers and the frock.

“Surely, my dear, you who are so free and independent are not thinking of marriage?”

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.