So continuously had Winona dwelt in the loftier realms of social and spiritual endeavour, it is doubtful if she knew that an organization known as the Friday Night Social Club was doing a lot to make life brighter for those of Newbern’s citizens who were young and sportive and yet not precisely people of the better sort.  In the older days of the town, when Winona was twenty, there was but one social set.  Now she was thirty, and there were two sets.  She knew the town had grown; one nowadays saw strange people that one did not know, even many one would not care to know.  If she had been told that the Friday Night Social Club met weekly in Knights of Pythias Hall to dance those sinister new dances that the city papers were so outspoken about she would have considered it an affair of the underworld, about which the less said the letter.  Had it been disclosed to her that Wilbur Cowan, under the chaperonage of Edward—­Spike—­Brennon, 133 lbs., ringside, had become an addict of these affairs, a determined and efficient exponent of the weird new steps—­“a good thing for y’r footwork,” Spike had said—­she would have considered he had plumbed the profoundest depths of social ignominy.  Yet so it was.  Each Friday night he danced.  He liked it, and while he disported himself from the lightest of social motives love came to him; the world was suddenly a place of fixed rainbows, and dancing—­with her—­no longer a gladsome capering, but a holy rite.

On a certain Friday evening unstarred by any portent she had burst upon his yielding eyes.  Instantly he could have told Winona more than she would ever know about love at first sight.  A creature of rounded beauty, peerlessly blonde, her mass of hair elaborately coifed and bound about her pale brow with a fillet of sable velvet.  He saw her first in the dance, sumptuously gowned, regal, yet blithe, yielding as might a goddess to the mortal embrace of Bill Bardin as they fox-trotted to the viol’s surge.  He was stricken dumb until the dance ended.  Then he gripped an arm of Spike Brennon, who had stood by him against the wall, “looking ’em over,” as Spike had put it.

“Look!” he urged in tones hushed to the wonder of her.  Spike had looked.

“Gee!” breathed the stricken one mechanically.  He would not have chosen the word, but it formed a vent for his emotion.

“Bleached blonde,” said Spike after a sharper scrutiny of the fair one, who now coquetted with a circle of gallants.

“Isn’t she?” exclaimed the new lover, admiringly.

With so golden a result to dazzle him, was he to quarrel pettishly with the way it had been wrought?

“Do you suppose I could be introduced to her?” demanded Wilbur, timidly.

This marked the depth of his passion.  He was too good a dancer to talk such nonsense ordinarily.

“Surest thing you know,” said Spike.  “Could you be introduced to her?  In a split second!  Come on!”

“But you don’t know her yourself?” Wilbur hung back.