To Winona athletics and organized games came as a revelation.  She had a slim wiry little figure and was a good runner, with a capacity for keeping her breath, and had also a considerable power of spring, all of which stood her in good stead both in the hockey field and in the gymnasium.  Though Kirsty said little, she could feel her efforts were being watched and approved, and the knowledge gave her a tingling sense of satisfaction.  It was delightful to feel that she was a factor in this big school, and that she was doing her bit—­however insignificant—­to help up the athletic standard.  In physical agility Winona was superior to Garnet.  She could beat her easily at tennis, and there was already a wide gap between their gymnastic achievements.  It was a fortunate circumstance, for it just balanced their friendship, and put them on a footing of equality which would have been otherwise absent.  Garnet, so manifestly first in Form work, possessed of greater confidence and savoir faire in school life and older in experience for her years than Winona, might have monopolized the lead too entirely, had she not been obliged to yield the palm of outdoor sports to her friend.

Garnet was, in truth, just a trifle inclined to “boss.”  She liked Winona, and wanted her for a chum, but she loved to lay down the law and to constitute herself an authority upon every possible subject.  There was no doubt it was owing to her initiative that the two scholarship-holders were gaining a position for themselves in the school.  As Garnet had foreseen, the part they had taken in the Symposium won them favorable recognition.  To be singled out as soloists and to have the honor of playing an accompaniment for the prefects had raised them above the common herd, and though a few were jealous, more were ready to extend the hand of good fellowship.  In their own Form they were living down the prejudice which had at first existed against them.  Hilda Langley and Estelle Harrison were not very friendly and influenced Olave Parry and Mollie Hill against them, but these formed a minority, and the bulk of the girls seemed to have decided in their favor.

With the enormous demands made on her time by her home preparation, Winona did not venture to join many of the school guilds.  She would have liked immensely to put her name down for election to the Dramatic Society, the Debating Club and the Literary Association, but these all required rather strenuous brain work from their members, and in the circumstances she knew it would be folly to take them up.  At some future date, when her ordinary subjects proved less of a burden, she promised herself the pleasure of being numbered among that select clique known as “The Intellectuals,” but for the present her motto must be “grim grind.”  The Patriotic Knitting Guild seemed more feasible.  She paid her subscription, received her skeins of khaki wool, and started mittens to fill up odd moments.  She found the knitting a soothing