“Education?” demanded Winona, incredulous.  “But he’s left school!”

“He’ll get it out of school.  Only kind ever I got.  He’s educating himself every day.  Never mind his clothes.  Right clothes are only right when they fit your job.  Give the boy a chance to find himself.  He’s still young, Buck is—­still in the gristle.”

Winona winced at “gristle.”  It seemed so physiological—­almost coarse.

* * * * *

A year went by in which Wilbur was perforce left to his self-education, working for Porter Howgill or at the garage or for Sam Pickering as he listed.  “I’m making good money,” was his steady rejoinder to Winona’s hectoring.

“As if money were everything,” wrote Winona in her journal, where she put the case against him.

Then when she had ceased to hope better things for him Wilbur Cowan seemed to waken.  There were signs and symptoms Winona thus construed.  He became careful in his attire, bought splendid new garments.  His lean, bold jaw was almost daily smoothed by the razor of Don Paley, and Winona discovered a flask of perfume on his bureau in the little house.  The label was Heart of Flowers.  It was perhaps a more florid essence than Winona would have chosen, having a downright vigour of assertion that left one in no doubt of its presence; but it was infinitely superior to the scent of machine oil or printer’s ink which had far too often betrayed the boy’s vicinity.

Now, too, he wore his young years with a new seriousness; was more restrained of speech, with intervals of apparently lofty meditation.  Winona rejoiced at these evidences of an awakening soul.  The boy might after all some day become one of the better sort.  She felt sure of this when he sought her of his own free will and awkwardly invited her to beautify his nails.  He who had aforetime submitted to the ordeal under protest; who had sworn she should never again so torture him!  Surely he was striving at last to be someone people would care to meet.

Poor Winona did not dream that a great love had come into Wilbur Cowan’s life; a deep and abiding love that bathed all his world in colourful radiance and moved him to those surface elegances for which all her own pleading had been in vain.  Not even when he asked her one night—­while she worked with buffer and orange-wood stick—­if she believed in love at first sight did she suspect the underlying dynamics, the true inebriating factor of this reform.  He put the query with elaborate and deceiving casualness, having cleared a road to it with remarks upon a circumspect historical romance that Winona had read to him; and she had merely said that she supposed it often did happen that way, though it were far better that true love come gently into one’s life, based upon a profound mutual respect and esteem which would endure through long years of wedded life.

Wilbur had questioned this, but so cautiously and quite impersonally that Winona could not suspect his interest in the theme to be more than academic.  She believed she had convinced him that love at first sight, so-called, is not the love one reads about in the better sort of literature.  She was not alarmed—­not even curious.  In her very presence the boy had trifled with his great secret and she had not known!