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.