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From her clients she gleaned the freshest chronicles of Newbern's social life, many being such as one might safely repeat; many more, Winona uncomfortably recalled, the sort no good woman would let go any further. She hoped the imminent disclosure would not be of the latter class, yet suddenly she wished to hear it even if it were.
Lyman Teaford, who for a dozen years had gone with Winona Penniman faithfully if not spectacularly; Lyman Teaford, dignified and genteel, who belonged to Newbern's better set, had one night appeared at an affair of the Friday Night Social Club. Perhaps because he had reached the perilous forties he had suddenly determined to abandon the safe highway and seek adventure in miry bypaths.
Had she raised the boy for this? The deplored intimacy had begun on a morning when Wilbur was early abroad salvaging golf balls from certain obscure nooks of the course where Newbern's minor players were too likely to abandon the search for them on account of tall grass, snakes, poison ivy, and other deterrents.
Plunkett was Newbern's ablest exponent of the cause of woman, and she had been disquieted this night at observing signs of an unaccustomed frivolity in one of her hitherto stanchest disciples. "I can't think what has come over you!" she had complained to Winona. "You seem like a different girl!" "I am a different girl!" boasted Winona.
She preceded Wilbur to a table for two, impressive with crystal and damask, and was seated by an obsequious foreigner who brought to the act a manner that had never before in Newbern distinguished this service when it had been performed at all. Other tables about them were already filled with Newbern's elect, thrilled as was Winona, concealing it as ably as she, with the town's new distinction.
"I do wish some of the folks could have been there," she added, listlessly. "Is that so?" he demanded, remembering then that this girl was never to be trusted, even in moods seemingly honeyed. He spurted the new roadster in rank defiance of Newbern's lately enacted ordinance regulating the speed of motor vehicles.
Nor was there anything the least clandestine in this backdoor trade of Herman's on the Sabbath. One had but to know the path to his door, and at this moment Newbern's mayor, old Doctor Purdy, sat at one of Herman's tables and sipped from a stone mug of beer and played a game of pinochle with stout, red-bearded Herman himself, overlooked by Minna, who had brought them their drink.
He kept down, followed through and forebore, against all human instinct, to press the ball. By the end of Newbern's golfing season he was able to do almost unerringly what so many of Newbern's better sort did erratically and at intervals. And the talk of John Knox McTavish about the wealth accruing to alert caddies had proved to be not all fanciful.
That afternoon as Sharon made an absorbed progress along River Street he jostled Winona Penniman, who with even a surpassing absorption had been staring into the window of one of those smart shops marking Newbern's later growth.
"Dear me!" said Harvey D. He straightened an etched cathedral, and then with a brush from the hearth swept cigar ashes deeper into the rug about the chair of Sharon. "Dear me!" he sighed again. Early the following morning Merle Whipple halted before the show window of Newbern's chief establishment purveying ready-made clothing for men.
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