She stumbled back across the platform, avoiding other groups who had cheered the passing train, and found sanctuary by a baggage truck loaded with crates of live chickens.  Here she wept unnoticed, and wondered why she was weeping.  Later, in her own train, she looked down and observed the white-ribboned badge which she had valiantly pinned above her heart that very morning.  She had forgotten the badge—­and those boys must have seen it.  Savagely she tore it from its mooring, to the detriment of a new georgette waist, and dropped it from the open window.

That night she turned back in her journal to an early entry:  “If only someone would reason calmly with them.  Resist not evil!” She stared at this a long time, then she dipped a new pen in red ink and full across it she wrote “What rotten piffle!” That is, she nearly wrote those words.  What she actually put down was “What r-tt-n piffle!”

To Wilbur Cowan, in recounting her fall from the serene heights of pacifism, she brazenly said:  “Do you know—­when that poor boy reached down to shake hands with me, if I could have got at him I just know I should have kissed him.”

“Gee whiz!” said Wilbur in amazed tribute.

“I don’t care!” persisted Winona.  “That’s the way I felt—­he was such a nice boy.  He looked like you, as if he’d come from a good home and had good habits, and I did want to kiss him, and I would have if I could have reached him—­and I’m not going to tell a falsehood about it for any one, and I’m—­I’m hostile.”

“Well, I guess pretty soon I’ll be going,” said Wilbur.

Winona gazed at him with strangely shining eyes.

“You wouldn’t be any good if you didn’t!” she said, suddenly.

It was perhaps the least ornate sentence she had ever spoken.

“Gee whiz!” said Wilbur again.  “You’ve changed!”

“Something came over me,” said Winona.

CHAPTER XV

Wilbur Cowen had hesitated in the matter of war.  He wanted to be in a battle—­had glowed at the thought of fighting—­but if the war was going to be stopped in its beginning, what would be the use of starting?  And he was assured and more than half believed that it would be stopped.  Merle Whipple was his informant—­Merle had found himself.  The war was to be stopped by the New Dawn, a magazine of which Merle had been associate editor since shortly after his release from college.

Merle, on that afternoon of golf with Wilbur, had accurately forecast his own future.  Confessing then that he meant to become a great writer, he was now not only a great writer but a thinker, in the true sense of the word.  He had taken up literature—­“not muck like poetry, but serious literature”—­and Whipple money had lavishly provided a smart little craft in which to embark.  The money had not come without some bewildered questioning on the part of those supplying it.  As old Sharon said, the Whipple