He even rebelled at fabrications, highly extolled in the gospel of clean eating, which were meant to placate the baser minded by their resemblances to meat—­things like nut turkey and mock veal loaf and leguminous chicken and synthetic beefsteak cooked in pure vegetable oils.  These he scorned the more bitterly for their false pretense, demanding plain meat and a lot of it.  The nations cited by Winona that had thrived and grown strong on the produce of the fields left him unimpressed.  He merely said, goaded to harshness, that he was not going to be a Chinese laundryman for any one.

Of what avail to read the lyrics of a great Hindu vegetarian poet to this undeveloped being?  Still Winona laboured unceasingly to bring light to the dark place.  Teaching a public school for eight years had developed a substratum of granite determination in her character.  She would never quit.  She was still to the outer eye the slight, brown Winona of twenty—­perky, birdlike, with the quick trimness of a winging swallow, a little sharper featured perhaps, but superior in acuteness of desire and persistence, and with some furtive, irresponsible girlishness lurking timorously back in her bright glance.

She still secretly relished the jesting address of Dave Cowan, when at long intervals he lingered in Newbern from cross-country flights.  It thrilled her naughtily to be addressed as La Marquise, to be accused of goings-on at the court of Louis XVIII, about which the less said the better.  She had never brought herself to wear the tan silk stockings of invidious allure, and she still confined herself to her mother’s plainest dressmaking, yearning secretly for the fancy kind, but never with enough daring.  Lyman Teaford still came of an evening to play his flute acceptably, while Winona accompanied him in many an amorous morceau.  Lyman, in the speech of Newbern, had for eight years been going with Winona.  But as the romantically impatient and sometimes a bit snappish Mrs. Penniman would say, he had never gone far.

* * * * *

Winona rejoiced a year later when golf promised, at least for a summer, to snatch Wilbur Cowan from the grimy indistinction of a mechanic’s career.  For thriving and aspiring Newbern had eased one of its growing pains with a veritable golf course, and the whilom machinery enthusiast became smitten with this strange new sport.  Winona rejoiced, because it would bring him into contact with people of the better sort, for of course only these played the game.  Her charge, it is true, engaged in the sport as a business, and not as one seeking recreation, but the desired social contact was indubitable.  To carry over the course a bag or two of clubs for the elect of Newbern was bound to be improving.