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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Titan
+
+Author: Theodore Dreiser
+
+Posting Date: April 23, 2009 [EBook #3629]
+Release Date: January, 2003
+First Posted: June 15, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TITAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Kirk Pearson <kpearson@nyx.net> and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Titan
+
+
+by
+
+Theodore Dreiser
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+       I  The New City
+      II  A Reconnoiter
+     III  A Chicago Evening
+      IV  Peter Laughlin & Co.
+       V  Concerning A Wife And Family
+      VI  The New Queen of the Home
+     VII  Chicago Gas
+    VIII  Now This is Fighting
+      IX  In Search of Victory
+       X  A Test
+      XI  The Fruits of Daring
+     XII  A New Retainer
+    XIII  The Die is Cast
+     XIV  Undercurrents
+      XV  A New Affection
+     XVI  A Fateful Interlude
+    XVII  An Overture to Conflict
+   XVIII  The Clash
+     XIX  "Hell Hath No Fury--"
+      XX  "Man and Superman"
+     XXI  A Matter of Tunnels
+    XXII  Street-railways at Last
+   XXIII  The Power of the Press
+    XXIV  The Coming of Stephanie Platow
+     XXV  Airs from the Orient
+    XXVI  Love and War
+   XXVII  A Financier Bewitched
+  XXVIII  The Exposure of Stephanie
+    XXIX  A Family Quarrel
+     XXX  Obstacles
+    XXXI  Untoward Disclosures
+   XXXII  A Supper Party
+  XXXIII  Mr. Lynde to the Rescue
+   XXXIV  Enter Hosmer Hand
+    XXXV  A Political Agreement
+   XXXVI  An Election Draws Near
+  XXXVII  Aileen's Revenge
+ XXXVIII  An Hour of Defeat
+   XXXIX  The New Administration
+      XL  A Trip to Louisville
+     XLI  The Daughter of Mrs. Fleming
+    XLII  F. A. Cowperwood, Guardian
+   XLIII  The Planet Mars
+    XLIV  A Franchise Obtained
+     XLV  Changing Horizons
+    XLVI  Depths and Heights
+   XLVII  American Match
+  XLVIII  Panic
+    XLIX  Mount Olympus
+       L  A New York Mansion
+      LI  The Revival of Hattie Starr
+     LII  Behind the Arras
+    LIII  A Declaration of Love
+     LIV  Wanted--Fifty-year Franchises
+      LV  Cowperwood and the Governor
+     LVI  The Ordeal of Berenice
+    LVII  Aileen's Last Card
+   LVIII  A Marauder Upon the Commonwealth
+     LIX  Capital and Public Rights
+      LX  The Net
+     LXI  The Cataclysm
+    LXII  The Recompense
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+The New City
+
+
+When Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from the Eastern District
+Penitentiary in Philadelphia he realized that the old life he had lived
+in that city since boyhood was ended.  His youth was gone, and with it
+had been lost the great business prospects of his earlier manhood.  He
+must begin again.
+
+It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a
+tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second
+fortune in his hands.  This restored wealth softened him in some
+degree.  Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge.  He was
+sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now
+decided that he would leave it once and for all.  He would get in
+something else--street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless
+opportunities of the far West.  Philadelphia was no longer pleasing to
+him.  Though now free and rich, he was still a scandal to the
+pretenders, and the financial and social world was not prepared to
+accept him.  He must go his way alone, unaided, or only secretly so,
+while his quondam friends watched his career from afar.  So, thinking
+of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, now only
+twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off.  He looked at her
+quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain type of
+feminine beauty.
+
+"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching
+departure.  "You and I will get out of this shortly.  Don't grieve.
+I'll be back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you.  I'd take you
+now, only I don't know how that country is out there. We'll fix on some
+place, and then you watch me settle this fortune question.  We'll not
+live under a cloud always.  I'll get a divorce, and we'll marry, and
+things will come right with a bang.  Money will do that."
+
+He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, and she
+clasped his cheeks between her hands.
+
+"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, "I'll miss you so! You're all I have."
+
+"In two weeks," he smiled, as the train began to move, "I'll wire or be
+back.  Be good, sweet."
+
+She followed him with adoring eyes--a fool of love, a spoiled child, a
+family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, the type so strong a man
+would naturally like--she tossed her pretty red gold head and waved him
+a kiss.  Then she walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy strides--the
+type that men turn to look after.
+
+"That's her--that's that Butler girl," observed one railroad clerk to
+another.  "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that, would
+he?"
+
+It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably pay to
+health and beauty.  On that pivot swings the world.
+
+Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther west
+than Pittsburg.  His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant as they
+were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of
+Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to
+American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional
+leadership in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth,
+unctuous respectability, and all the tastes and avocations which these
+imply.  He had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and
+made its sacred precincts his own when the crash came.  Practically he
+had been admitted.  Now he was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a
+millionaire.  But wait! The race is to the swift, he said to himself
+over and over.  Yes, and the battle is to the strong.  He would test
+whether the world would trample him under foot or no.
+
+Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the second
+morning.  He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then provided--a
+car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences of its
+arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured glass--when
+the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began to appear.  The
+side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was speeding became more
+and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more and more hung with arms and
+strung smoky-thick with wires.  In the far distance, cityward, was,
+here and there, a lone working-man's cottage, the home of some
+adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in order to
+reap the small but certain advantage which the growth of the city would
+bring.
+
+The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of brown
+grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly in the
+morning breeze.  Underneath were signs of the new green--the New Year's
+flag of its disposition.  For some reason a crystalline atmosphere
+enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the latter like
+a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety which touched him.
+Already a devotee of art, ambitious for connoisseurship, who had had
+his joy, training, and sorrow out of the collection he had made and
+lost in Philadelphia, he appreciated almost every suggestion of a
+delightful picture in nature.
+
+The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more numerous.
+Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of the
+country--yellow, red, blue, green, white.  (Chicago, he recalled,
+already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were the
+end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite new
+as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky--in places
+grimy.  At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and
+muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were, how
+unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down rhythmically--here a flight of
+steps, a veritable platform before a house, there a long stretch of
+boards laid flat on the mud of the prairie itself.  What a city!
+Presently a branch of the filthy, arrogant, self-sufficient little
+Chicago River came into view, with its mass of sputtering tugs, its
+black, oily water, its tall, red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its
+immense black coal-pockets and yellowish-brown lumber-yards.
+
+Here was life; he saw it at a flash.  Here was a seething city in the
+making.  There was something dynamic in the very air which appealed to
+his fancy.  How different, for some reason, from Philadelphia! That was
+a stirring city, too.  He had thought it wonderful at one time, quite a
+world; but this thing, while obviously infinitely worse, was better.
+It was more youthful, more hopeful. In a flare of morning sunlight
+pouring between two coal-pockets, and because the train had stopped to
+let a bridge swing and half a dozen great grain and lumber boats go
+by--a half-dozen in either direction--he saw a group of Irish
+stevedores idling on the bank of a lumber-yard whose wall skirted the
+water.  Healthy men they were, in blue or red shirt-sleeves, stout
+straps about their waists, short pipes in their mouths, fine, hardy,
+nutty-brown specimens of humanity.  Why were they so appealing, he
+asked himself.  This raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose itself
+into stirring artistic pictures.  Why, it fairly sang! The world was
+young here. Life was doing something new.  Perhaps he had better not go
+on to the Northwest at all; he would decide that question later.
+
+In the mean time he had letters of introduction to distinguished
+Chicagoans, and these he would present.  He wanted to talk to some
+bankers and grain and commission men.  The stock-exchange of Chicago
+interested him, for the intricacies of that business he knew backward
+and forward, and some great grain transactions had been made here.
+
+The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses into a long,
+shabbily covered series of platforms--sheds having only roofs--and
+amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines belching steam,
+and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way out into Canal
+Street and hailed a waiting cab--one of a long line of vehicles that
+bespoke a metropolitan spirit.  He had fixed on the Grand Pacific as
+the most important hotel--the one with the most social
+significance--and thither he asked to be driven.  On the way he studied
+these streets as in the matter of art he would have studied a picture.
+The little yellow, blue, green, white, and brown street-cars which he
+saw trundling here and there, the tired, bony horses, jingling bells at
+their throats, touched him. They were flimsy affairs, these cars,
+merely highly varnished kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and
+glass stuck about them, but he realized what fortunes they portended if
+the city grew.  Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation.  Even
+more than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than
+stock-organization he loved the thought of street-cars and the vast
+manipulative life it suggested.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+A Reconnoiter
+
+
+The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank
+Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the
+laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall? This singing
+flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin,
+this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it
+lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in
+its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its
+mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul.  A very bard of a
+city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans
+buried deep in the mire of circumstance.  Take Athens, oh, Greece!
+Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of
+a younger day.  Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see.
+Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in
+their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.
+
+From New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange
+company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of
+refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they
+had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great,
+determined so to be without ever knowing how.  Here came the dreamy
+gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful student of
+Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the enfranchised miner of California
+and the Rockies, his bags of gold and silver in his hands.  Here was
+already the bewildered foreigner, an alien speech confounding him--the
+Hun, the Pole, the Swede, the German, the Russian--seeking his homely
+colonies, fearing his neighbor of another race.
+
+Here was the negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the gambler, the
+romantic adventurer par excellence.  A city with but a handful of the
+native-born; a city packed to the doors with all the riffraff of a
+thousand towns.  Flaring were the lights of the bagnio; tinkling the
+banjos, zithers, mandolins of the so-called gin-mill; all the dreams
+and the brutality of the day seemed gathered to rejoice (and rejoice
+they did) in this new-found wonder of a metropolitan life in the West.
+
+The first prominent Chicagoan whom Cowperwood sought out was the
+president of the Lake City National Bank, the largest financial
+organization in the city, with deposits of over fourteen million
+dollars.  It was located in Dearborn Street, at Munroe, but a block or
+two from his hotel.
+
+"Find out who that man is," ordered Mr. Judah Addison, the president of
+the bank, on seeing him enter the president's private waiting-room.
+
+Mr. Addison's office was so arranged with glass windows that he could,
+by craning his neck, see all who entered his reception-room before they
+saw him, and he had been struck by Cowperwood's face and force.  Long
+familiarity with the banking world and with great affairs generally had
+given a rich finish to the ease and force which the latter naturally
+possessed.  He looked strangely replete for a man of thirty-six--suave,
+steady, incisive, with eyes as fine as those of a Newfoundland or a
+Collie and as innocent and winsome.  They were wonderful eyes, soft and
+spring-like at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on
+the instant could harden and flash lightning.  Deceptive eyes,
+unreadable, but alluring alike to men and to women in all walks and
+conditions of life.
+
+The secretary addressed came back with Cowperwood's letter of
+introduction, and immediately Cowperwood followed.
+
+Mr. Addison instinctively arose--a thing he did not always do. "I'm
+pleased to meet you, Mr. Cowperwood," he said, politely.  "I saw you
+come in just now.  You see how I keep my windows here, so as to spy out
+the country.  Sit down.  You wouldn't like an apple, would you?" He
+opened a left-hand drawer, producing several polished red winesaps, one
+of which he held out.  "I always eat one about this time in the
+morning."
+
+"Thank you, no," replied Cowperwood, pleasantly, estimating as he did
+so his host's temperament and mental caliber.  "I never eat between
+meals, but I appreciate your kindness.  I am just passing through
+Chicago, and I thought I would present this letter now rather than
+later.  I thought you might tell me a little about the city from an
+investment point of view."
+
+As Cowperwood talked, Addison, a short, heavy, rubicund man with
+grayish-brown sideburns extending to his ear-lobes and hard, bright,
+twinkling gray eyes--a proud, happy, self-sufficient man--munched his
+apple and contemplated Cowperwood.  As is so often the case in life, he
+frequently liked or disliked people on sight, and he prided himself on
+his judgment of men.  Almost foolishly, for one so conservative, he was
+taken with Cowperwood--a man immensely his superior--not because of the
+Drexel letter, which spoke of the latter's "undoubted financial genius"
+and the advantage it would be to Chicago to have him settle there, but
+because of the swimming wonder of his eyes.  Cowperwood's personality,
+while maintaining an unbroken outward reserve, breathed a tremendous
+humanness which touched his fellow-banker.  Both men were in their way
+walking enigmas, the Philadelphian far the subtler of the two.  Addison
+was ostensibly a church-member, a model citizen; he represented a point
+of view to which Cowperwood would never have stooped.  Both men were
+ruthless after their fashion, avid of a physical life; but Addison was
+the weaker in that he was still afraid--very much afraid--of what life
+might do to him.  The man before him had no sense of fear.  Addison
+contributed judiciously to charity, subscribed outwardly to a dull
+social routine, pretended to love his wife, of whom he was weary, and
+took his human pleasure secretly. The man before him subscribed to
+nothing, refused to talk save to intimates, whom he controlled
+spiritually, and did as he pleased.
+
+"Why, I'll tell you, Mr. Cowperwood," Addison replied.  "We people out
+here in Chicago think so well of ourselves that sometimes we're afraid
+to say all we think for fear of appearing a little extravagant. We're
+like the youngest son in the family that knows he can lick all the
+others, but doesn't want to do it--not just yet.  We're not as handsome
+as we might be--did you ever see a growing boy that was?--but we're
+absolutely sure that we're going to be.  Our pants and shoes and coat
+and hat get too small for us every six months, and so we don't look
+very fashionable, but there are big, strong, hard muscles and bones
+underneath, Mr. Cowperwood, as you'll discover when you get to looking
+around.  Then you won't mind the clothes so much."
+
+Mr. Addison's round, frank eyes narrowed and hardened for a moment. A
+kind of metallic hardness came into his voice.  Cowperwood could see
+that he was honestly enamoured of his adopted city.  Chicago was his
+most beloved mistress.  A moment later the flesh about his eyes
+crinkled, his mouth softened, and he smiled.  "I'll be glad to tell you
+anything I can," he went on.  "There are a lot of interesting things to
+tell."
+
+Cowperwood beamed back on him encouragingly.  He inquired after the
+condition of one industry and another, one trade or profession and
+another.  This was somewhat different from the atmosphere which
+prevailed in Philadelphia--more breezy and generous.  The tendency to
+expatiate and make much of local advantages was Western.  He liked it,
+however, as one aspect of life, whether he chose to share in it or not.
+It was favorable to his own future.  He had a prison record to live
+down; a wife and two children to get rid of--in the legal sense, at
+least (he had no desire to rid himself of financial obligation toward
+them).  It would take some such loose, enthusiastic Western attitude to
+forgive in him the strength and freedom with which he ignored and
+refused to accept for himself current convention. "I satisfy myself"
+was his private law, but so to do he must assuage and control the
+prejudices of other men.  He felt that this banker, while not putty in
+his hands, was inclined to a strong and useful friendship.
+
+"My impressions of the city are entirely favorable, Mr. Addison," he
+said, after a time, though he inwardly admitted to himself that this
+was not entirely true; he was not sure whether he could bring himself
+ultimately to live in so excavated and scaffolded a world as this or
+not.  "I only saw a portion of it coming in on the train. I like the
+snap of things.  I believe Chicago has a future."
+
+"You came over the Fort Wayne, I presume," replied Addison, loftily.
+"You saw the worst section.  You must let me show you some of the best
+parts.  By the way, where are you staying?"
+
+"At the Grand Pacific."
+
+"How long will you be here?"
+
+"Not more than a day or two."
+
+"Let me see," and Mr. Addison drew out his watch.  "I suppose you
+wouldn't mind meeting a few of our leading men--and we have a little
+luncheon-room over at the Union League Club where we drop in now and
+then.  If you'd care to do so, I'd like to have you come along with me
+at one.  We're sure to find a few of them--some of our lawyers,
+business men, and judges."
+
+"That will be fine," said the Philadelphian, simply.  "You're more than
+generous.  There are one or two other people I want to meet in between,
+and"--he arose and looked at his own watch--"I'll find the Union Club.
+Where is the office of Arneel & Co.?"
+
+At the mention of the great beef-packer, who was one of the bank's
+heaviest depositors, Addison stirred slightly with approval.  This
+young man, at least eight years his junior, looked to him like a future
+grand seigneur of finance.
+
+At the Union Club, at this noontime luncheon, after talking with the
+portly, conservative, aggressive Arneel and the shrewd director of the
+stock-exchange, Cowperwood met a varied company of men ranging in age
+from thirty-five to sixty-five gathered about the board in a private
+dining-room of heavily carved black walnut, with pictures of elder
+citizens of Chicago on the walls and an attempt at artistry in stained
+glass in the windows.  There were short and long men, lean and stout,
+dark and blond men, with eyes and jaws which varied from those of the
+tiger, lynx, and bear to those of the fox, the tolerant mastiff, and
+the surly bulldog. There were no weaklings in this selected company.
+
+Mr. Arneel and Mr. Addison Cowperwood approved of highly as shrewd,
+concentrated men.  Another who interested him was Anson Merrill, a
+small, polite, recherche soul, suggesting mansions and footmen and
+remote luxury generally, who was pointed out by Addison as the famous
+dry-goods prince of that name, quite the leading merchant, in the
+retail and wholesale sense, in Chicago.
+
+Still another was a Mr. Rambaud, pioneer railroad man, to whom Addison,
+smiling jocosely, observed: "Mr. Cowperwood is on from Philadelphia,
+Mr. Rambaud, trying to find out whether he wants to lose any money out
+here.  Can't you sell him some of that bad land you have up in the
+Northwest?"
+
+Rambaud--a spare, pale, black-bearded man of much force and exactness,
+dressed, as Cowperwood observed, in much better taste than some of the
+others--looked at Cowperwood shrewdly but in a gentlemanly, retiring
+way, with a gracious, enigmatic smile.  He caught a glance in return
+which he could not possibly forget.  The eyes of Cowperwood said more
+than any words ever could.  Instead of jesting faintly Mr. Rambaud
+decided to explain some things about the Northwest.  Perhaps this
+Philadelphian might be interested.
+
+To a man who has gone through a great life struggle in one metropolis
+and tested all the phases of human duplicity, decency, sympathy, and
+chicanery in the controlling group of men that one invariably finds in
+every American city at least, the temperament and significance of
+another group in another city is not so much, and yet it is.  Long
+since Cowperwood had parted company with the idea that humanity at any
+angle or under any circumstances, climatic or otherwise, is in any way
+different.  To him the most noteworthy characteristic of the human race
+was that it was strangely chemic, being anything or nothing, as the
+hour and the condition afforded. In his leisure moments--those free
+from practical calculation, which were not many--he often speculated as
+to what life really was.  If he had not been a great financier and,
+above all, a marvelous organizer he might have become a highly
+individualistic philosopher--a calling which, if he had thought
+anything about it at all at this time, would have seemed rather
+trivial.  His business as he saw it was with the material facts of
+life, or, rather, with those third and fourth degree theorems and
+syllogisms which control material things and so represent wealth.  He
+was here to deal with the great general needs of the Middle West--to
+seize upon, if he might, certain well-springs of wealth and power and
+rise to recognized authority.  In his morning talks he had learned of
+the extent and character of the stock-yards' enterprises, of the great
+railroad and ship interests, of the tremendous rising importance of
+real estate, grain speculation, the hotel business, the hardware
+business.  He had learned of universal manufacturing companies--one
+that made cars, another elevators, another binders, another windmills,
+another engines.  Apparently, any new industry seemed to do well in
+Chicago.  In his talk with the one director of the Board of Trade to
+whom he had a letter he had learned that few, if any, local stocks were
+dealt in on 'change.  Wheat, corn, and grains of all kinds were
+principally speculated in.  The big stocks of the East were gambled in
+by way of leased wires on the New York Stock Exchange--not otherwise.
+
+As he looked at these men, all pleasantly civil, all general in their
+remarks, each safely keeping his vast plans under his vest, Cowperwood
+wondered how he would fare in this community.  There were such
+difficult things ahead of him to do.  No one of these men, all of whom
+were in their commercial-social way agreeable, knew that he had only
+recently been in the penitentiary.  How much difference would that make
+in their attitude? No one of them knew that, although he was married
+and had two children, he was planning to divorce his wife and marry the
+girl who had appropriated to herself the role which his wife had once
+played.
+
+"Are you seriously contemplating looking into the Northwest?" asked Mr.
+Rambaud, interestedly, toward the close of the luncheon.
+
+"That is my present plan after I finish here.  I thought I'd take a
+short run up there."
+
+"Let me put you in touch with an interesting party that is going as far
+as Fargo and Duluth.  There is a private car leaving Thursday, most of
+them citizens of Chicago, but some Easterners.  I would be glad to have
+you join us.  I am going as far as Minneapolis."
+
+Cowperwood thanked him and accepted.  A long conversation followed
+about the Northwest, its timber, wheat, land sales, cattle, and
+possible manufacturing plants.
+
+What Fargo, Minneapolis, and Duluth were to be civically and
+financially were the chief topics of conversation.  Naturally, Mr.
+Rambaud, having under his direction vast railroad lines which
+penetrated this region, was confident of the future of it. Cowperwood
+gathered it all, almost by instinct.  Gas, street-railways, land
+speculations, banks, wherever located, were his chief thoughts.
+
+Finally he left the club to keep his other appointments, but something
+of his personality remained behind him.  Mr. Addison and Mr. Rambaud,
+among others, were sincerely convinced that he was one of the most
+interesting men they had met in years.  And he scarcely had said
+anything at all--just listened.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+A Chicago Evening
+
+
+After his first visit to the bank over which Addison presided, and an
+informal dinner at the latter's home, Cowperwood had decided that he
+did not care to sail under any false colors so far as Addison was
+concerned.  He was too influential and well connected. Besides,
+Cowperwood liked him too much.  Seeing that the man's leaning toward
+him was strong, in reality a fascination, he made an early morning call
+a day or two after he had returned from Fargo, whither he had gone at
+Mr. Rambaud's suggestion, on his way back to Philadelphia, determined
+to volunteer a smooth presentation of his earlier misfortunes, and
+trust to Addison's interest to make him view the matter in a kindly
+light.  He told him the whole story of how he had been convicted of
+technical embezzlement in Philadelphia and had served out his term in
+the Eastern Penitentiary. He also mentioned his divorce and his
+intention of marrying again.
+
+Addison, who was the weaker man of the two and yet forceful in his own
+way, admired this courageous stand on Cowperwood's part.  It was a
+braver thing than he himself could or would have achieved. It appealed
+to his sense of the dramatic.  Here was a man who apparently had been
+dragged down to the very bottom of things, his face forced in the mire,
+and now he was coming up again strong, hopeful, urgent.  The banker
+knew many highly respected men in Chicago whose early careers, as he
+was well aware, would not bear too close an inspection, but nothing was
+thought of that.  Some of them were in society, some not, but all of
+them were powerful. Why should not Cowperwood be allowed to begin all
+over? He looked at him steadily, at his eyes, at his stocky body, at
+his smooth, handsome, mustached face.  Then he held out his hand.
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood," he said, finally, trying to shape his words
+appropriately, "I needn't say that I am pleased with this interesting
+confession.  It appeals to me.  I'm glad you have made it to me. You
+needn't say any more at any time.  I decided the day I saw you walking
+into that vestibule that you were an exceptional man; now I know it.
+You needn't apologize to me.  I haven't lived in this world fifty years
+and more without having my eye-teeth cut.  You're welcome to the
+courtesies of this bank and of my house as long as you care to avail
+yourself of them.  We'll cut our cloth as circumstances dictate in the
+future.  I'd like to see you come to Chicago, solely because I like you
+personally.  If you decide to settle here I'm sure I can be of service
+to you and you to me. Don't think anything more about it; I sha'n't
+ever say anything one way or another.  You have your own battle to
+fight, and I wish you luck.  You'll get all the aid from me I can
+honestly give you. Just forget that you told me, and when you get your
+matrimonial affairs straightened out bring your wife out to see us."
+
+With these things completed Cowperwood took the train back to
+Philadelphia.
+
+"Aileen," he said, when these two met again--she had come to the train
+to meet him--"I think the West is the answer for us.  I went up to
+Fargo and looked around up there, but I don't believe we want to go
+that far.  There's nothing but prairie-grass and Indians out in that
+country.  How'd you like to live in a board shanty, Aileen," he asked,
+banteringly, "with nothing but fried rattlesnakes and prairie-dogs for
+breakfast? Do you think you could stand that?"
+
+"Yes," she replied, gaily, hugging his arm, for they had entered a
+closed carriage; "I could stand it if you could.  I'd go anywhere with
+you, Frank.  I'd get me a nice Indian dress with leather and beads all
+over it and a feather hat like they wear, and--"
+
+"There you go! Certainly! Pretty clothes first of all in a miner's
+shack.  That's the way."
+
+"You wouldn't love me long if I didn't put pretty clothes first," she
+replied, spiritedly.  "Oh, I'm so glad to get you back!"
+
+"The trouble is," he went on, "that that country up there isn't as
+promising as Chicago.  I think we're destined to live in Chicago. I
+made an investment in Fargo, and we'll have to go up there from time to
+time, but we'll eventually locate in Chicago.  I don't want to go out
+there alone again.  It isn't pleasant for me." He squeezed her hand.
+"If we can't arrange this thing at once I'll just have to introduce you
+as my wife for the present."
+
+"You haven't heard anything more from Mr. Steger?" she put in. She was
+thinking of Steger's efforts to get Mrs. Cowperwood to grant him a
+divorce.
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"Isn't it too bad?" she sighed.
+
+"Well, don't grieve.  Things might be worse."
+
+He was thinking of his days in the penitentiary, and so was she. After
+commenting on the character of Chicago he decided with her that so soon
+as conditions permitted they would remove themselves to the Western
+city.
+
+It would be pointless to do more than roughly sketch the period of
+three years during which the various changes which saw the complete
+elimination of Cowperwood from Philadelphia and his introduction into
+Chicago took place.  For a time there were merely journeys to and fro,
+at first more especially to Chicago, then to Fargo, where his
+transported secretary, Walter Whelpley, was managing under his
+direction the construction of Fargo business blocks, a short street-car
+line, and a fair-ground.  This interesting venture bore the title of
+the Fargo Construction and Transportation Company, of which Frank A.
+Cowperwood was president.  His Philadelphia lawyer, Mr. Harper Steger,
+was for the time being general master of contracts.
+
+For another short period he might have been found living at the Tremont
+in Chicago, avoiding for the time being, because of Aileen's company,
+anything more than a nodding contact with the important men he had
+first met, while he looked quietly into the matter of a Chicago
+brokerage arrangement--a partnership with some established broker who,
+without too much personal ambition, would bring him a knowledge of
+Chicago Stock Exchange affairs, personages, and Chicago ventures.  On
+one occasion he took Aileen with him to Fargo, where with a haughty,
+bored insouciance she surveyed the state of the growing city.
+
+"Oh, Frank!" she exclaimed, when she saw the plain, wooden, four-story
+hotel, the long, unpleasing business street, with its motley collection
+of frame and brick stores, the gaping stretches of houses, facing in
+most directions unpaved streets.  Aileen in her tailored
+spick-and-spanness, her self-conscious vigor, vanity, and tendency to
+over-ornament, was a strange contrast to the rugged self-effacement and
+indifference to personal charm which characterized most of the men and
+women of this new metropolis.  "You didn't seriously think of coming
+out here to live, did you?"
+
+She was wondering where her chance for social exchange would come
+in--her opportunity to shine.  Suppose her Frank were to be very rich;
+suppose he did make very much money--much more than he had ever had
+even in the past--what good would it do her here? In Philadelphia,
+before his failure, before she had been suspected of the secret liaison
+with him, he had been beginning (at least) to entertain in a very
+pretentious way.  If she had been his wife then she might have stepped
+smartly into Philadelphia society. Out here, good gracious! She turned
+up her pretty nose in disgust. "What an awful place!" was her one
+comment at this most stirring of Western boom towns.
+
+When it came to Chicago, however, and its swirling, increasing life,
+Aileen was much interested.  Between attending to many financial
+matters Cowperwood saw to it that she was not left alone. He asked her
+to shop in the local stores and tell him about them; and this she did,
+driving around in an open carriage, attractively arrayed, a great brown
+hat emphasizing her pink-and-white complexion and red-gold hair.  On
+different afternoons of their stay he took her to drive over the
+principal streets.  When Aileen was permitted for the first time to see
+the spacious beauty and richness of Prairie Avenue, the North Shore
+Drive, Michigan Avenue, and the new mansions on Ashland Boulevard, set
+in their grassy spaces, the spirit, aspirations, hope, tang of the
+future Chicago began to work in her blood as it had in Cowperwood's.
+All of these rich homes were so very new.  The great people of Chicago
+were all newly rich like themselves.  She forgot that as yet she was
+not Cowperwood's wife; she felt herself truly to be so.  The streets,
+set in most instances with a pleasing creamish-brown flagging, lined
+with young, newly planted trees, the lawns sown to smooth green grass,
+the windows of the houses trimmed with bright awnings and hung with
+intricate lace, blowing in a June breeze, the roadways a gray, gritty
+macadam--all these things touched her fancy.  On one drive they skirted
+the lake on the North Shore, and Aileen, contemplating the chalky,
+bluish-green waters, the distant sails, the gulls, and then the new
+bright homes, reflected that in all certitude she would some day be the
+mistress of one of these splendid mansions. How haughtily she would
+carry herself; how she would dress! They would have a splendid house,
+much finer, no doubt, than Frank's old one in Philadelphia, with a
+great ball-room and dining-room where she could give dances and
+dinners, and where Frank and she would receive as the peers of these
+Chicago rich people.
+
+"Do you suppose we will ever have a house as fine as one of these,
+Frank?" she asked him, longingly.
+
+"I'll tell you what my plan is," he said.  "If you like this Michigan
+Avenue section we'll buy a piece of property out here now and hold it.
+Just as soon as I make the right connections here and see what I am
+going to do we'll build a house--something really nice--don't worry.  I
+want to get this divorce matter settled, and then we'll begin.
+Meanwhile, if we have to come here, we'd better live rather quietly.
+Don't you think so?"
+
+It was now between five and six, that richest portion of a summer day.
+It had been very warm, but was now cooling, the shade of the western
+building-line shadowing the roadway, a moted, wine-like air filling the
+street.  As far as the eye could see were carriages, the one great
+social diversion of Chicago, because there was otherwise so little
+opportunity for many to show that they had means.  The social forces
+were not as yet clear or harmonious. Jingling harnesses of nickel,
+silver, and even plated gold were the sign manual of social hope, if
+not of achievement.  Here sped homeward from the city--from office and
+manufactory--along this one exceptional southern highway, the Via Appia
+of the South Side, all the urgent aspirants to notable fortunes.  Men
+of wealth who had met only casually in trade here nodded to each other.
+Smart daughters, society-bred sons, handsome wives came down-town in
+traps, Victorias, carriages, and vehicles of the latest design to drive
+home their trade-weary fathers or brothers, relatives or friends.  The
+air was gay with a social hope, a promise of youth and affection, and
+that fine flush of material life that recreates itself in delight.
+Lithe, handsome, well-bred animals, singly and in jingling pairs, paced
+each other down the long, wide, grass-lined street, its fine homes
+agleam with a rich, complaisant materiality.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Aileen, all at once, seeing the vigorous, forceful men,
+the handsome matrons, and young women and boys, the nodding and the
+bowing, feeling a touch of the romance and wonder of it all.  "I should
+like to live in Chicago.  I believe it's nicer than Philadelphia."
+
+Cowperwood, who had fallen so low there, despite his immense capacity,
+set his teeth in two even rows.  His handsome mustache seemed at this
+moment to have an especially defiant curl.  The pair he was driving was
+physically perfect, lean and nervous, with spoiled, petted faces.  He
+could not endure poor horse-flesh.  He drove as only a horse-lover can,
+his body bolt upright, his own energy and temperament animating his
+animals.  Aileen sat beside him, very proud, consciously erect.
+
+"Isn't she beautiful?" some of the women observed, as they passed,
+going north.  "What a stunning young woman!" thought or said the men.
+
+"Did you see her?" asked a young brother of his sister.  "Never mind,
+Aileen," commented Cowperwood, with that iron determination that brooks
+no defeat.  "We will be a part of this.  Don't fret. You will have
+everything you want in Chicago, and more besides."
+
+There was tingling over his fingers, into the reins, into the horses, a
+mysterious vibrating current that was his chemical product, the
+off-giving of his spirit battery that made his hired horses prance like
+children.  They chafed and tossed their heads and snorted.  Aileen was
+fairly bursting with hope and vanity and longing.  Oh, to be Mrs. Frank
+Algernon Cowperwood here in Chicago, to have a splendid mansion, to
+have her cards of invitation practically commands which might not be
+ignored!
+
+"Oh, dear!" she sighed to herself, mentally.  "If only it were all
+true--now."
+
+It is thus that life at its topmost toss irks and pains.  Beyond is
+ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its infinite ache.
+
+"Oh, life! oh, youth! oh, hope! oh, years! Oh pain-winged fancy,
+beating forth with fears."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+Peter Laughlin & Co.
+
+
+The partnership which Cowperwood eventually made with an old-time Board
+of Trade operator, Peter Laughlin, was eminently to his satisfaction.
+Laughlin was a tall, gaunt speculator who had spent most of his living
+days in Chicago, having come there as a boy from western Missouri.  He
+was a typical Chicago Board of Trade operator of the old school, having
+an Andrew Jacksonish countenance, and a Henry Clay--Davy
+Crockett--"Long John" Wentworth build of body.
+
+Cowperwood from his youth up had had a curious interest in quaint
+characters, and he was interesting to them; they "took" to him. He
+could, if he chose to take the trouble, fit himself in with the odd
+psychology of almost any individual.  In his early peregrinations in La
+Salle Street he inquired after clever traders on 'change, and then gave
+them one small commission after another in order to get acquainted.
+Thus he stumbled one morning on old Peter Laughlin, wheat and corn
+trader, who had an office in La Salle Street near Madison, and who did
+a modest business gambling for himself and others in grain and Eastern
+railway shares.  Laughlin was a shrewd, canny American, originally,
+perhaps, of Scotch extraction, who had all the traditional American
+blemishes of uncouthness, tobacco-chewing, profanity, and other small
+vices.  Cowperwood could tell from looking at him that he must have a
+fund of information concerning every current Chicagoan of importance,
+and this fact alone was certain to be of value.  Then the old man was
+direct, plain-spoken, simple-appearing, and wholly
+unpretentious--qualities which Cowperwood deemed invaluable.
+
+Once or twice in the last three years Laughlin had lost heavily on
+private "corners" that he had attempted to engineer, and the general
+feeling was that he was now becoming cautious, or, in other words,
+afraid.  "Just the man," Cowperwood thought.  So one morning he called
+upon Laughlin, intending to open a small account with him.
+
+"Henry," he heard the old man say, as he entered Laughlin's fair-sized
+but rather dusty office, to a young, preternaturally solemn-looking
+clerk, a fit assistant for Peter Laughlin, "git me them there Pittsburg
+and Lake Erie sheers, will you?" Seeing Cowperwood waiting, he added,
+"What kin I do for ye?"
+
+Cowperwood smiled.  "So he calls them 'sheers,' does he?" he thought.
+"Good! I think I'll like him."
+
+He introduced himself as coming from Philadelphia, and went on to say
+that he was interested in various Chicago ventures, inclined to invest
+in any good stock which would rise, and particularly desirous to buy
+into some corporation--public utility preferred--which would be certain
+to grow with the expansion of the city.
+
+Old Laughlin, who was now all of sixty years of age, owned a seat on
+the Board, and was worth in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand
+dollars, looked at Cowperwood quizzically.
+
+"Well, now, if you'd 'a' come along here ten or fifteen years ago you
+might 'a' got in on the ground floor of a lot of things," he observed.
+"There was these here gas companies, now, that them Otway and Apperson
+boys got in on, and then all these here street-railways.  Why, I'm the
+feller that told Eddie Parkinson what a fine thing he could make out of
+it if he would go and organize that North State Street line.  He
+promised me a bunch of sheers if he ever worked it out, but he never
+give 'em to me.  I didn't expect him to, though," he added, wisely, and
+with a glint. "I'm too old a trader for that.  He's out of it now,
+anyway.  That Michaels-Kennelly crowd skinned him.  Yep, if you'd 'a'
+been here ten or fifteen years ago you might 'a' got in on that.
+'Tain't no use a-thinkin' about that, though, any more.  Them sheers is
+sellin' fer clost onto a hundred and sixty."
+
+Cowperwood smiled.  "Well, Mr. Laughlin," he observed, "you must have
+been on 'change a long time here.  You seem to know a good deal of what
+has gone on in the past."
+
+"Yep, ever since 1852," replied the old man.  He had a thick growth of
+upstanding hair looking not unlike a rooster's comb, a long and what
+threatened eventually to become a Punch-and-Judy chin, a slightly
+aquiline nose, high cheek-bones, and hollow, brown-skinned cheeks.  His
+eyes were as clear and sharp as those of a lynx.
+
+"To tell you the truth, Mr. Laughlin," went on Cowperwood, "what I'm
+really out here in Chicago for is to find a man with whom I can go into
+partnership in the brokerage business.  Now I'm in the banking and
+brokerage business myself in the East.  I have a firm in Philadelphia
+and a seat on both the New York and Philadelphia exchanges.  I have
+some affairs in Fargo also.  Any trade agency can tell you about me.
+You have a Board of Trade seat here, and no doubt you do some New York
+and Philadelphia exchange business. The new firm, if you would go in
+with me, could handle it all direct.  I'm a rather strong outside man
+myself.  I'm thinking of locating permanently in Chicago.  What would
+you say now to going into business with me? Do you think we could get
+along in the same office space?"
+
+Cowperwood had a way, when he wanted to be pleasant, of beating the
+fingers of his two hands together, finger for finger, tip for tip.  He
+also smiled at the same time--or, rather, beamed--his eyes glowing with
+a warm, magnetic, seemingly affectionate light.
+
+As it happened, old Peter Laughlin had arrived at that psychological
+moment when he was wishing that some such opportunity as this might
+appear and be available.  He was a lonely man, never having been able
+to bring himself to trust his peculiar temperament in the hands of any
+woman.  As a matter of fact, he had never understood women at all, his
+relations being confined to those sad immoralities of the cheapest
+character which only money--grudgingly given, at that--could buy.  He
+lived in three small rooms in West Harrison Street, near Throup, where
+he cooked his own meals at times.  His one companion was a small
+spaniel, simple and affectionate, a she dog, Jennie by name, with whom
+he slept.  Jennie was a docile, loving companion, waiting for him
+patiently by day in his office until he was ready to go home at night.
+He talked to this spaniel quite as he would to a human being (even more
+intimately, perhaps), taking the dog's glances, tail-waggings, and
+general movements for answer.  In the morning when he arose, which was
+often as early as half past four, or even four--he was a brief
+sleeper--he would begin by pulling on his trousers (he seldom bathed
+any more except at a down-town barber shop) and talking to Jennie.
+
+"Git up, now, Jinnie," he would say.  "It's time to git up.  We've got
+to make our coffee now and git some breakfast.  I can see yuh, lyin'
+there, pertendin' to be asleep.  Come on, now! You've had sleep enough.
+You've been sleepin' as long as I have."
+
+Jennie would be watching him out of the corner of one loving eye, her
+tail tap-tapping on the bed, her free ear going up and down.
+
+When he was fully dressed, his face and hands washed, his old string
+tie pulled around into a loose and convenient knot, his hair brushed
+upward, Jennie would get up and jump demonstratively about, as much as
+to say, "You see how prompt I am."
+
+"That's the way," old Laughlin would comment.  "Allers last.  Yuh never
+git up first, do yuh, Jinnie? Allers let yer old man do that, don't
+you?"
+
+On bitter days, when the car-wheels squeaked and one's ears and fingers
+seemed to be in danger of freezing, old Laughlin, arrayed in a heavy,
+dusty greatcoat of ancient vintage and a square hat, would carry Jennie
+down-town in a greenish-black bag along with some of his beloved
+"sheers" which he was meditating on.  Only then could he take Jennie in
+the cars.  On other days they would walk, for he liked exercise.  He
+would get to his office as early as seven-thirty or eight, though
+business did not usually begin until after nine, and remain until
+four-thirty or five, reading the papers or calculating during the hours
+when there were no customers.  Then he would take Jennie and go for a
+walk or to call on some business acquaintance.  His home room, the
+newspapers, the floor of the exchange, his offices, and the streets
+were his only resources.  He cared nothing for plays, books, pictures,
+music--and for women only in his one-angled, mentally impoverished way.
+His limitations were so marked that to a lover of character like
+Cowperwood he was fascinating--but Cowperwood only used character. He
+never idled over it long artistically.
+
+As Cowperwood suspected, what old Laughlin did not know about Chicago
+financial conditions, deals, opportunities, and individuals was
+scarcely worth knowing.  Being only a trader by instinct, neither an
+organizer nor an executive, he had never been able to make any great
+constructive use of his knowledge.  His gains and his losses he took
+with reasonable equanimity, exclaiming over and over, when he lost:
+"Shucks! I hadn't orter have done that," and snapping his fingers.
+When he won heavily or was winning he munched tobacco with a seraphic
+smile and occasionally in the midst of trading would exclaim: "You
+fellers better come in.  It's a-gonta rain some more." He was not easy
+to trap in any small gambling game, and only lost or won when there was
+a free, open struggle in the market, or when he was engineering some
+little scheme of his own.
+
+The matter of this partnership was not arranged at once, although it
+did not take long.  Old Peter Laughlin wanted to think it over,
+although he had immediately developed a personal fancy for Cowperwood.
+In a way he was the latter's victim and servant from the start. They
+met day after day to discuss various details and terms; finally, true
+to his instincts, old Peter demanded a full half interest.
+
+"Now, you don't want that much, Laughlin," Cowperwood suggested, quite
+blandly.  They were sitting in Laughlin's private office between four
+and five in the afternoon, and Laughlin was chewing tobacco with the
+sense of having a fine, interesting problem before him.  "I have a seat
+on the New York Stock Exchange," he went on, "and that's worth forty
+thousand dollars.  My seat on the Philadelphia exchange is worth more
+than yours here.  They will naturally figure as the principal assets of
+the firm.  It's to be in your name. I'll be liberal with you, though.
+Instead of a third, which would be fair, I'll make it forty-nine per
+cent., and we'll call the firm Peter Laughlin & Co.  I like you, and I
+think you can be of a lot of use to me.  I know you will make more
+money through me than you have alone.  I could go in with a lot of
+these silk-stocking fellows around here, but I don't want to.  You'd
+better decide right now, and let's get to work."
+
+Old Laughlin was pleased beyond measure that young Cowperwood should
+want to go in with him.  He had become aware of late that all of the
+young, smug newcomers on 'change considered him an old fogy.  Here was
+a strong, brave young Easterner, twenty years his junior, evidently as
+shrewd as himself--more so, he feared--who actually proposed a business
+alliance.  Besides, Cowperwood, in his young, healthy, aggressive way,
+was like a breath of spring.
+
+"I ain't keerin' so much about the name," rejoined Laughlin.  "You can
+fix it that-a-way if you want to.  Givin' you fifty-one per cent. gives
+you charge of this here shebang.  All right, though; I ain't a-kickin'.
+I guess I can manage allus to git what's a-comin' to me.
+
+"It's a bargain, then," said Cowperwood.  "We'll want new offices,
+Laughlin, don't you think? This one's a little dark."
+
+"Fix it up any way you like, Mr. Cowperwood.  It's all the same to me.
+I'll be glad to see how yer do it."
+
+In a week the details were completed, and two weeks later the sign of
+Peter Laughlin & Co., grain and commission merchants, appeared over the
+door of a handsome suite of rooms on the ground floor of a corner at La
+Salle and Madison, in the heart of the Chicago financial district.
+
+"Get onto old Laughlin, will you?" one broker observed to another, as
+they passed the new, pretentious commission-house with its splendid
+plate-glass windows, and observed the heavy, ornate bronze sign placed
+on either side of the door, which was located exactly on the corner.
+"What's struck him? I thought he was almost all through.  Who's the
+Company?"
+
+"I don't know.  Some fellow from the East, I think."
+
+"Well, he's certainly moving up.  Look at the plate glass, will you?"
+
+It was thus that Frank Algernon Cowperwood's Chicago financial career
+was definitely launched.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+Concerning A Wife And Family
+
+
+If any one fancies for a moment that this commercial move on the part
+of Cowperwood was either hasty or ill-considered they but little
+appreciate the incisive, apprehensive psychology of the man.  His
+thoughts as to life and control (tempered and hardened by thirteen
+months of reflection in the Eastern District Penitentiary) had given
+him a fixed policy.  He could, should, and would rule alone.  No man
+must ever again have the least claim on him save that of a suppliant.
+He wanted no more dangerous combinations such as he had had with
+Stener, the man through whom he had lost so much in Philadelphia, and
+others.  By right of financial intellect and courage he was first, and
+would so prove it.  Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.
+
+Moreover, since his fall from grace in Philadelphia he had come to
+think that never again, perhaps, could he hope to become socially
+acceptable in the sense in which the so-called best society of a city
+interprets the phrase; and pondering over this at odd moments, he
+realized that his future allies in all probability would not be among
+the rich and socially important--the clannish, snobbish elements of
+society--but among the beginners and financially strong men who had
+come or were coming up from the bottom, and who had no social hopes
+whatsoever.  There were many such.  If through luck and effort he
+became sufficiently powerful financially he might then hope to dictate
+to society.  Individualistic and even anarchistic in character, and
+without a shred of true democracy, yet temperamentally he was in
+sympathy with the mass more than he was with the class, and he
+understood the mass better.  Perhaps this, in a way, will explain his
+desire to connect himself with a personality so naive and strange as
+Peter Laughlin.  He had annexed him as a surgeon selects a special
+knife or instrument for an operation, and, shrewd as old Laughlin was,
+he was destined to be no more than a tool in Cowperwood's strong hands,
+a mere hustling messenger, content to take orders from this swiftest of
+moving brains.  For the present Cowperwood was satisfied to do business
+under the firm name of Peter Laughlin & Co.--as a matter of fact, he
+preferred it; for he could thus keep himself sufficiently inconspicuous
+to avoid undue attention, and gradually work out one or two coups by
+which he hoped to firmly fix himself in the financial future of Chicago.
+
+As the most essential preliminary to the social as well as the
+financial establishment of himself and Aileen in Chicago, Harper
+Steger, Cowperwood's lawyer, was doing his best all this while to
+ingratiate himself in the confidence of Mrs. Cowperwood, who had no
+faith in lawyers any more than she had in her recalcitrant husband.
+She was now a tall, severe, and rather plain woman, but still bearing
+the marks of the former passive charm that had once interested
+Cowperwood.  Notable crows'-feet had come about the corners of her
+nose, mouth, and eyes.  She had a remote, censorious, subdued,
+self-righteous, and even injured air.
+
+The cat-like Steger, who had all the graceful contemplative air of a
+prowling Tom, was just the person to deal with her.  A more suavely
+cunning and opportunistic soul never was.  His motto might well have
+been, speak softly and step lightly.
+
+"My dear Mrs. Cowperwood," he argued, seated in her modest West
+Philadelphia parlor one spring afternoon, "I need not tell you what a
+remarkable man your husband is, nor how useless it is to combat him.
+Admitting all his faults--and we can agree, if you please, that they
+are many"--Mrs. Cowperwood stirred with irritation--"still it is not
+worth while to attempt to hold him to a strict account.  You know"--and
+Mr. Steger opened his thin, artistic hands in a deprecatory way--"what
+sort of a man Mr. Cowperwood is, and whether he can be coerced or not.
+He is not an ordinary man, Mrs. Cowperwood.  No man could have gone
+through what he has and be where he is to-day, and be an average man.
+If you take my advice you will let him go his way.  Grant him a
+divorce.  He is willing, even anxious to make a definite provision for
+you and your children.  He will, I am sure, look liberally after their
+future.  But he is becoming very irritable over your unwillingness to
+give him a legal separation, and unless you do I am very much afraid
+that the whole matter will be thrown into the courts.  If, before it
+comes to that, I could effect an arrangement agreeable to you, I would
+be much pleased.   As you know, I have been greatly grieved by the
+whole course of your recent affairs.  I am intensely sorry that things
+are as they are."
+
+Mr. Steger lifted his eyes in a very pained, deprecatory way.  He
+regretted deeply the shifty currents of this troubled world.
+
+Mrs. Cowperwood for perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth time heard him
+to the end in patience.  Cowperwood would not return.  Steger was as
+much her friend as any other lawyer would be.  Besides, he was socially
+agreeable to her.  Despite his Machiavellian profession, she half
+believed him.  He went over, tactfully, a score of additional points.
+Finally, on the twenty-first visit, and with seemingly great distress,
+he told her that her husband had decided to break with her financially,
+to pay no more bills, and do nothing until his responsibility had been
+fixed by the courts, and that he, Steger, was about to retire from the
+case.  Mrs. Cowperwood felt that she must yield; she named her
+ultimatum.  If he would fix two hundred thousand dollars on her and the
+children (this was Cowperwood's own suggestion) and later on do
+something commercially for their only son, Frank, junior, she would let
+him go.  She disliked to do it.  She knew that it meant the triumph of
+Aileen Butler, such as it was.  But, after all, that wretched creature
+had been properly disgraced in Philadelphia.  It was not likely she
+could ever raise her head socially anywhere any more.  She agreed to
+file a plea which Steger would draw up for her, and by that oily
+gentleman's machinations it was finally wormed through the local court
+in the most secret manner imaginable.  The merest item in three of the
+Philadelphia papers some six weeks later reported that a divorce had
+been granted.  When Mrs. Cowperwood read it she wondered greatly that
+so little attention had been attracted by it.  She had feared a much
+more extended comment. She little knew the cat-like prowlings, legal
+and journalistic, of her husband's interesting counsel.  When
+Cowperwood read it on one of his visits to Chicago he heaved a sigh of
+relief.  At last it was really true.  Now he could make Aileen his
+wife.  He telegraphed her an enigmatic message of congratulation.  When
+Aileen read it she thrilled from head to foot.  Now, shortly, she would
+become the legal bride of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the newly
+enfranchised Chicago financier, and then--
+
+"Oh," she said, in her Philadelphia home, when she read it, "isn't that
+splendid! Now I'll be Mrs. Cowperwood.  Oh, dear!"
+
+Mrs. Frank Algernon Cowperwood number one, thinking over her husband's
+liaison, failure, imprisonment, pyrotechnic operations at the time of
+the Jay Cooke failure, and his present financial ascendancy, wondered
+at the mystery of life.  There must be a God. The Bible said so.  Her
+husband, evil though he was, could not be utterly bad, for he had made
+ample provision for her, and the children liked him.  Certainly, at the
+time of the criminal prosecution he was no worse than some others who
+had gone free. Yet he had been convicted, and she was sorry for that
+and had always been.  He was an able and ruthless man.  She hardly knew
+what to think.  The one person she really did blame was the wretched,
+vain, empty-headed, ungodly Aileen Butler, who had been his seductress
+and was probably now to be his wife.  God would punish her, no doubt.
+He must.  So she went to church on Sundays and tried to believe, come
+what might, that all was for the best.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+The New Queen of the Home
+
+
+The day Cowperwood and Aileen were married--it was in an obscure
+village called Dalston, near Pittsburg, in western Pennsylvania, where
+they had stopped off to manage this matter--he had said to her: "I want
+to tell you, dear, that you and I are really beginning life all over.
+Now it depends on how well we play this game as to how well we succeed.
+If you will listen to me we won't try to do anything much socially in
+Chicago for the present.  Of course we'll have to meet a few people.
+That can't be avoided.  Mr. and Mrs. Addison are anxious to meet you,
+and I've delayed too long in that matter as it is.  But what I mean is
+that I don't believe it's advisable to push this social exchange too
+far.  People are sure to begin to make inquiries if we do.  My plan is
+to wait a little while and then build a really fine house so that we
+won't need to rebuild.  We're going to go to Europe next spring, if
+things go right, and we may get some ideas over there.  I'm going to
+put in a good big gallery," he concluded.  "While we're traveling we
+might as well see what we can find in the way of pictures and so on."
+
+Aileen was thrilling with anticipation.  "Oh, Frank," she said to him,
+quite ecstatically, "you're so wonderful! You do everything you want,
+don't you?"
+
+"Not quite," he said, deprecatingly; "but it isn't for not wanting to.
+Chance has a little to say about some of these chings, Aileen."
+
+She stood in front of him, as she often did, her plump, ringed hands on
+his shoulders, and looked into those steady, lucid pools--his eyes.
+Another man, less leonine, and with all his shifting thoughts, might
+have had to contend with the handicap of a shifty gaze; he fronted the
+queries and suspicions of the world with a seeming candor that was as
+disarming as that of a child. The truth was he believed in himself, and
+himself only, and thence sprang his courage to think as he pleased.
+Aileen wondered, but could get no answer.
+
+"Oh, you big tiger!" she said.  "You great, big lion! Boo!"
+
+He pinched her cheek and smiled.  "Poor Aileen!" he thought.  She
+little knew the unsolvable mystery that he was even to himself--to
+himself most of all.
+
+Immediately after their marriage Cowperwood and Aileen journeyed to
+Chicago direct, and took the best rooms that the Tremont provided, for
+the time being.  A little later they heard of a comparatively small
+furnished house at Twenty-third and Michigan Avenue, which, with horses
+and carriages thrown in, was to be had for a season or two on lease.
+They contracted for it at once, installing a butler, servants, and the
+general service of a well-appointed home. Here, because he thought it
+was only courteous, and not because he thought it was essential or wise
+at this time to attempt a social onslaught, he invited the Addisons and
+one or two others whom he felt sure would come--Alexander Rambaud,
+president of the Chicago & Northwestern, and his wife, and Taylor Lord,
+an architect whom he had recently called into consultation and whom he
+found socially acceptable.  Lord, like the Addisons, was in society,
+but only as a minor figure.
+
+Trust Cowperwood to do the thing as it should be done.  The place they
+had leased was a charming little gray-stone house, with a neat flight
+of granite, balustraded steps leading up to its wide-arched door, and a
+judicious use of stained glass to give its interior an artistically
+subdued atmosphere.  Fortunately, it was furnished in good taste.
+Cowperwood turned over the matter of the dinner to a caterer and
+decorator.  Aileen had nothing to do but dress, and wait, and look her
+best.
+
+"I needn't tell you," he said, in the morning, on leaving, "that I want
+you to look nice to-night, pet.  I want the Addisons and Mr. Rambaud to
+like you."
+
+A hint was more than sufficient for Aileen, though really it was not
+needed.  On arriving at Chicago she had sought and discovered a French
+maid.  Although she had brought plenty of dresses from Philadelphia,
+she had been having additional winter costumes prepared by the best and
+most expensive mistress of the art in Chicago--Theresa Donovan.  Only
+the day before she had welcomed home a golden-yellow silk under heavy
+green lace, which, with her reddish-gold hair and her white arms and
+neck, seemed to constitute an unusual harmony.  Her boudoir on the
+night of the dinner presented a veritable riot of silks, satins, laces,
+lingerie, hair ornaments, perfumes, jewels--anything and everything
+which might contribute to the feminine art of being beautiful.  Once in
+the throes of a toilet composition, Aileen invariably became restless
+and energetic, almost fidgety, and her maid, Fadette, was compelled to
+move quickly. Fresh from her bath, a smooth, ivory Venus, she worked
+quickly through silken lingerie, stockings and shoes, to her hair.
+Fadette had an idea to suggest for the hair.  Would Madame let her try
+a new swirl she had seen? Madame would--yes.  So there were movings of
+her mass of rich glinting tresses this way and that.  Somehow it would
+not do.  A braided effect was then tried, and instantly discarded;
+finally a double looping, without braids, low over the forehead, caught
+back with two dark-green bands, crossing like an X above the center of
+her forehead and fastened with a diamond sunburst, served admirably.
+In her filmy, lacy boudoir costume of pink silk Aileen stood up and
+surveyed herself in the full-length mirror.
+
+"Yes," she said, turning her head this way and that.
+
+Then came the dress from Donovan's, rustling and crisping.  She slipped
+into it wonderingly, critically, while Fadette worked at the back, the
+arms, about her knees, doing one little essential thing after another.
+
+"Oh, Madame!" she exclaimed.  "Oh, charmant! Ze hair, it go weeth it
+perfect.  It ees so full, so beyutiful here"--she pointed to the hips,
+where the lace formed a clinging basque.  "Oh, tees varee, varee nize."
+
+Aileen glowed, but with scarcely a smile.  She was concerned.  It
+wasn't so much her toilet, which must be everything that it should
+be--but this Mr. Addison, who was so rich and in society, and Mr.
+Rambaud, who was very powerful, Frank said, must like her.  It was the
+necessity to put her best foot forward now that was really troubling
+her.  She must interest these men mentally, perhaps, as well as
+physically, and with social graces, and that was not so easy.  For all
+her money and comfort in Philadelphia she had never been in society in
+its best aspects, had never done social entertaining of any real
+importance.  Frank was the most important man who had ever crossed her
+path.  No doubt Mr. Rambaud had a severe, old-fashioned wife.  How
+would she talk to her? And Mrs. Addison! She would know and see
+everything.  Aileen almost talked out loud to herself in a consoling
+way as she dressed, so strenuous were her thoughts; but she went on,
+adding the last touches to her physical graces.
+
+When she finally went down-stairs to see how the dining and reception
+rooms looked, and Fadette began putting away the welter of discarded
+garments--she was a radiant vision--a splendid greenish-gold figure,
+with gorgeous hair, smooth, soft, shapely ivory arms, a splendid neck
+and bust, and a swelling form.  She felt beautiful, and yet she was a
+little nervous--truly.  Frank himself would be critical. She went about
+looking into the dining-room, which, by the caterer's art, had been
+transformed into a kind of jewel-box glowing with flowers, silver,
+gold, tinted glass, and the snowy whiteness of linen.  It reminded her
+of an opal flashing all its soft fires. She went into the general
+reception-room, where was a grand piano finished in pink and gold, upon
+which, with due thought to her one accomplishment--her playing--she had
+arranged the songs and instrumental pieces she did best.  Aileen was
+really not a brilliant musician.  For the first time in her life she
+felt matronly--as if now she were not a girl any more, but a woman
+grown, with some serious responsibilities, and yet she was not really
+suited to the role.  As a matter of fact, her thoughts were always
+fixed on the artistic, social, and dramatic aspects of life, with
+unfortunately a kind of nebulosity of conception which permitted no
+condensation into anything definite or concrete.  She could only be
+wildly and feverishly interested.  Just then the door clicked to
+Frank's key--it was nearing six--and in he came, smiling, confident, a
+perfect atmosphere of assurance.
+
+"Well!" he observed, surveying her in the soft glow of the
+reception-room lighted by wall candles judiciously arranged. "Who's the
+vision floating around here? I'm almost afraid to touch you.  Much
+powder on those arms?"
+
+He drew her into his arms, and she put up her mouth with a sense of
+relief.  Obviously, he must think that she looked charming.
+
+"I am chalky, I guess.  You'll just have to stand it, though. You're
+going to dress, anyhow."
+
+She put her smooth, plump arms about his neck, and he felt pleased.
+This was the kind of a woman to have--a beauty.  Her neck was
+resplendent with a string of turquoise, her fingers too heavily
+jeweled, but still beautiful.  She was faintly redolent of hyacinth or
+lavender.  Her hair appealed to him, and, above all, the rich yellow
+silk of her dress, flashing fulgurously through the closely netted
+green.
+
+"Charming, girlie.  You've outdone yourself.  I haven't seen this dress
+before.  Where did you get it?"
+
+"Here in Chicago."
+
+He lifted her warm fingers, surveying her train, and turned her about.
+
+"You don't need any advice.  You ought to start a school."
+
+"Am I all right?" she queried, smartly, but with a sense of
+self-distrust for the moment, and all because of him.
+
+"You're perfect.  Couldn't be nicer.  Splendid!"
+
+She took heart.
+
+"I wish your friends would think so.  You'd better hurry."
+
+He went up-stairs, and she followed, looking first into the dining-room
+again.  At least that was right.  Surely Frank was a master.
+
+At seven the plop of the feet of carriage-horses was heard, and a
+moment later Louis, the butler, was opening the door.  Aileen went
+down, a little nervous, a little frigid, trying to think of many
+pleasant things, and wondering whether she would really succeed in
+being entertaining.  Cowperwood accompanied her, a very different
+person in so far as mood and self-poise were concerned.  To himself his
+own future was always secure, and that of Aileen's if he wished to make
+it so.  The arduous, upward-ascending rungs of the social ladder that
+were troubling her had no such significance to him.
+
+The dinner, as such simple things go, was a success from what might be
+called a managerial and pictorial point of view.  Cowperwood, because
+of his varied tastes and interests, could discuss railroading with Mr.
+Rambaud in a very definite and illuminating way; could talk
+architecture with Mr. Lord as a student, for instance, of rare promise
+would talk with a master; and with a woman like Mrs. Addison or Mrs.
+Rambaud he could suggest or follow appropriate leads.  Aileen,
+unfortunately, was not so much at home, for her natural state and mood
+were remote not so much from a serious as from an accurate conception
+of life.  So many things, except in a very nebulous and suggestive way,
+were sealed books to Aileen--merely faint, distant tinklings.  She knew
+nothing of literature except certain authors who to the truly cultured
+might seem banal.  As for art, it was merely a jingle of names gathered
+from Cowperwood's private comments.  Her one redeeming feature was that
+she was truly beautiful herself--a radiant, vibrating objet d'art.  A
+man like Rambaud, remote, conservative, constructive, saw the place of
+a woman like Aileen in the life of a man like Cowperwood on the
+instant.  She was such a woman as he would have prized himself in a
+certain capacity.
+
+Sex interest in all strong men usually endures unto the end, governed
+sometimes by a stoic resignation.  The experiment of such attraction
+can, as they well know, be made over and over, but to what end? For
+many it becomes too troublesome.  Yet the presence of so glittering a
+spectacle as Aileen on this night touched Mr. Rambaud with an ancient
+ambition.  He looked at her almost sadly. Once he was much younger.
+But alas, he had never attracted the flaming interest of any such
+woman.  As he studied her now he wished that he might have enjoyed such
+good fortune.
+
+In contrast with Aileen's orchid glow and tinted richness Mrs.
+Rambaud's simple gray silk, the collar of which came almost to her
+ears, was disturbing--almost reproving--but Mrs. Rambaud's ladylike
+courtesy and generosity made everything all right.  She came out of
+intellectual New England--the Emerson-Thoreau-Channing Phillips school
+of philosophy--and was broadly tolerant.  As a matter of fact, she
+liked Aileen and all the Orient richness she represented. "Such a sweet
+little house this is," she said, smilingly.  "We've noticed it often.
+We're not so far removed from you but what we might be called
+neighbors."
+
+Aileen's eyes spoke appreciation.  Although she could not fully grasp
+Mrs. Rambaud, she understood her, in a way, and liked her. She was
+probably something like her own mother would have been if the latter
+had been highly educated.  While they were moving into the
+reception-room Taylor Lord was announced.  Cowperwood took his hand and
+brought him forward to the others.
+
+"Mrs. Cowperwood," said Lord, admiringly--a tall, rugged, thoughtful
+person--"let me be one of many to welcome you to Chicago.  After
+Philadelphia you will find some things to desire at first, but we all
+come to like it eventually."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure I shall," smiled Aileen.
+
+"I lived in Philadelphia years ago, but only for a little while," added
+Lord.  "I left there to come here."
+
+The observation gave Aileen the least pause, but she passed it over
+lightly.  This sort of accidental reference she must learn to expect;
+there might be much worse bridges to cross.
+
+"I find Chicago all right," she replied, briskly.  "There's nothing the
+matter with it.  It has more snap than Philadelphia ever had."
+
+"I'm glad to hear you say that.  I like it so much.  Perhaps it's
+because I find such interesting things to do here."
+
+He was admiring the splendor of her arms and hair.  What need had
+beautiful woman to be intellectual, anyhow, he was saying to himself,
+sensing that Aileen might be deficient in ultimate refinement.
+
+Once more an announcement from the butler, and now Mr. and Mrs. Addison
+entered.  Addison was not at all concerned over coming here--liked the
+idea of it; his own position and that of his wife in Chicago was
+secure.  "How are you, Cowperwood?" he beamed, laying one hand on the
+latter's shoulder.  "This is fine of you to have us in to-night.  Mrs.
+Cowperwood, I've been telling your husband for nearly a year now that
+he should bring you out here. Did he tell you?" (Addison had not as yet
+confided to his wife the true history of Cowperwood and Aileen.)
+
+"Yes, indeed," replied Aileen, gaily, feeling that Addison was charmed
+by her beauty.  "I've been wanting to come, too.  It's his fault that I
+wasn't here sooner."
+
+Addison, looking circumspectly at Aileen, said to himself that she was
+certainly a stunning-looking woman.  So she was the cause of the first
+wife's suit.  No wonder.  What a splendid creature! He contrasted her
+with Mrs. Addison, and to his wife's disadvantage. She had never been
+as striking, as stand-upish as Aileen, though possibly she might have
+more sense.  Jove! if he could find a woman like Aileen to-day.  Life
+would take on a new luster.  And yet he had women--very carefully, very
+subterraneously.  But he had them.
+
+"It's such a pleasure to meet you," Mrs. Addison, a corpulent,
+bejeweled lady, was saying to Aileen.  "My husband and yours have
+become the best of friends, apparently.  We must see more of each
+other."
+
+She babbled on in a puffy social way, and Aileen felt as though she
+were getting along swiftly.  The butler brought in a great tray of
+appetizers and cordials, and put them softly on a remote table.  Dinner
+was served, and the talk flowed on; they discussed the growth of the
+city, a new church that Lord was building ten blocks farther out;
+Rambaud told about some humorous land swindles. It was quite gay.
+Meanwhile Aileen did her best to become interested in Mrs. Rambaud and
+Mrs. Addison.  She liked the latter somewhat better, solely because it
+was a little easier to talk to her.  Mrs. Rambaud Aileen knew to be the
+wiser and more charitable woman, but she frightened her a little;
+presently she had to fall back on Mr. Lord's help.  He came to her
+rescue gallantly, talking of everything that came into his mind.  All
+the men outside of Cowperwood were thinking how splendid Aileen was
+physically, how white were her arms, how rounded her neck and
+shoulders, how rich her hair.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+Chicago Gas
+
+
+Old Peter Laughlin, rejuvenated by Cowperwood's electric ideas, was
+making money for the house.  He brought many bits of interesting gossip
+from the floor, and such shrewd guesses as to what certain groups and
+individuals were up to, that Cowperwood was able to make some very
+brilliant deductions.
+
+"By Gosh! Frank, I think I know exactly what them fellers are trying to
+do," Laughlin would frequently remark of a morning, after he had lain
+in his lonely Harrison Street bed meditating the major portion of the
+night.  "That there Stock Yards gang" (and by gang he meant most of the
+great manipulators, like Arneel, Hand, Schryhart and others) "are after
+corn again.  We want to git long o' that now, or I miss my guess.  What
+do you think, huh?"
+
+Cowperwood, schooled by now in many Western subtleties which he had not
+previously known, and daily becoming wiser, would as a rule give an
+instantaneous decision.
+
+"You're right.  Risk a hundred thousand bushels.  I think New York
+Central is going to drop a point or two in a few days.  We'd better go
+short a point."
+
+Laughlin could never figure out quite how it was that Cowperwood always
+seemed to know and was ready to act quite as quickly in local matters
+as he was himself.  He understood his wisdom concerning Eastern shares
+and things dealt in on the Eastern exchange, but these Chicago matters?
+
+"Whut makes you think that?" he asked Cowperwood, one day, quite
+curiously.
+
+"Why, Peter," Cowperwood replied, quite simply, "Anton Videra" (one of
+the directors of the Wheat and Corn Bank) "was in here yesterday while
+you were on 'change, and he was telling me." He described a situation
+which Videra had outlined.
+
+Laughlin knew Videra as a strong, wealthy Pole who had come up in the
+last few years.  It was strange how Cowperwood naturally got in with
+these wealthy men and won their confidence so quickly. Videra would
+never have become so confidential with him.
+
+"Huh!" he exclaimed.  "Well, if he says it it's more'n likely so."
+
+So Laughlin bought, and Peter Laughlin & Co. won.
+
+But this grain and commission business, while it was yielding a profit
+which would average about twenty thousand a year to each partner, was
+nothing more to Cowperwood than a source of information.
+
+He wanted to "get in" on something that was sure to bring very great
+returns within a reasonable time and that would not leave him in any
+such desperate situation as he was at the time of the Chicago
+fire--spread out very thin, as he put it.  He had interested in his
+ventures a small group of Chicago men who were watching him--Judah
+Addison, Alexander Rambaud, Millard Bailey, Anton Videra--men who,
+although not supreme figures by any means, had free capital.  He knew
+that he could go to them with any truly sound proposition.  The one
+thing that most attracted his attention was the Chicago gas situation,
+because there was a chance to step in almost unheralded in an as yet
+unoccupied territory; with franchises once secured--the reader can
+quite imagine how--he could present himself, like a Hamilcar Barca in
+the heart of Spain or a Hannibal at the gates of Rome, with a demand
+for surrender and a division of spoils.
+
+There were at this time three gas companies operating in the three
+different divisions of the city--the three sections, or "sides," as
+they were called--South, West, and North, and of these the Chicago Gas,
+Light, and Coke Company, organized in 1848 to do business on the South
+Side, was the most flourishing and important. The People's Gas, Light,
+and Coke Company, doing business on the West Side, was a few years
+younger than the South Chicago company, and had been allowed to spring
+into existence through the foolish self-confidence of the organizer and
+directors of the South Side company, who had fancied that neither the
+West Side nor the North Side was going to develop very rapidly for a
+number of years to come, and had counted on the city council's allowing
+them to extend their mains at any time to these other portions of the
+city.  A third company, the North Chicago Gas Illuminating Company, had
+been organized almost simultaneously with the West Side company by the
+same process through which the other companies had been brought into
+life--their avowed intention, like that of the West Side company, being
+to confine their activities to the sections from which the organizers
+presumably came.
+
+Cowperwood's first project was to buy out and combine the three old
+city companies.  With this in view he looked up the holders in all
+three corporations--their financial and social status. It was his idea
+that by offering them three for one, or even four for one, for every
+dollar represented by the market value of their stock he might buy in
+and capitalize the three companies as one. Then, by issuing sufficient
+stock to cover all his obligations, he would reap a rich harvest and at
+the same time leave himself in charge.  He approached Judah Addison
+first as the most available man to help float a scheme of this kind.
+He did not want him as a partner so much as he wanted him as an
+investor.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you how I feel about this," said Addison, finally.
+"You've hit on a great idea here.  It's a wonder it hasn't occurred to
+some one else before.  And you'll want to keep rather quiet about it,
+or some one else will rush in and do it.  We have a lot of venturesome
+men out here.  But I like you, and I'm with you. Now it wouldn't be
+advisable for me to go in on this personally--not openly, anyhow--but
+I'll promise to see that you get some of the money you want.  I like
+your idea of a central holding company, or pool, with you in charge as
+trustee, and I'm perfectly willing that you should manage it, for I
+think you can do it. Anyhow, that leaves me out, apparently, except as
+an Investor. But you will have to get two or three others to help carry
+this guarantee with me.  Have you any one in mind?"
+
+"Oh yes," replied Cowperwood.  "Certainly.  I merely came to you
+first." He mentioned Rambaud, Videra, Bailey, and others.
+
+"They're all right," said Addison, "if you can get them.  But I'm not
+sure, even then, that you can induce these other fellows to sell out.
+They're not investors in the ordinary sense.  They're people who look
+on this gas business as their private business. They started it.  They
+like it.  They built the gas-tanks and laid the mains.  It won't be
+easy."
+
+Cowperwood found, as Addison predicted, that it was not such an easy
+matter to induce the various stock-holders and directors in the old
+companies to come in on any such scheme of reorganization. A closer,
+more unresponsive set of men he was satisfied he had never met.  His
+offer to buy outright at three or four for one they refused absolutely.
+The stock in each case was selling from one hundred and seventy to two
+hundred and ten, and intrinsically was worth more every year, as the
+city was growing larger and its need of gas greater.  At the same time
+they were suspicious--one and all--of any combination scheme by an
+outsider.  Who was he? Whom did he represent? He could make it clear
+that he had ample capital, but not who his backers were.  The old
+officers and directors fancied that it was a scheme on the part of some
+of the officers and directors of one of the other companies to get
+control and oust them.  Why should they sell? Why be tempted by greater
+profits from their stock when they were doing very well as it was?
+Because of his newness to Chicago and his lack of connection as yet
+with large affairs Cowperwood was eventually compelled to turn to
+another scheme--that of organizing new companies in the suburbs as an
+entering-wedge of attack upon the city proper.  Suburbs such as Lake
+View and Hyde Park, having town or village councils of their own, were
+permitted to grant franchises to water, gas, and street-railway
+companies duly incorporated under the laws of the state.  Cowperwood
+calculated that if he could form separate and seemingly distinct
+companies for each of the villages and towns, and one general company
+for the city later, he would be in a position to dictate terms to the
+older organizations.  It was simply a question of obtaining his
+charters and franchises before his rivals had awakened to the situation.
+
+The one difficulty was that he knew absolutely nothing of the business
+of gas--its practical manufacture and distribution--and had never been
+particularly interested init.  Street-railroading, his favorite form of
+municipal profit-seeking, and one upon which he had acquired an almost
+endless fund of specialized information, offered no present practical
+opportunity for him here in Chicago. He meditated on the situation, did
+some reading on the manufacture of gas, and then suddenly, as was his
+luck, found an implement ready to his hand.
+
+It appeared that in the course of the life and growth of the South Side
+company there had once been a smaller organization founded by a man by
+the name of Sippens--Henry De Soto Sippens--who had entered and
+actually secured, by some hocus-pocus, a franchise to manufacture and
+sell gas in the down-town districts, but who had been annoyed by all
+sorts of legal processes until he had finally been driven out or
+persuaded to get out.  He was now in the real-estate business in Lake
+View.  Old Peter Laughlin knew him.
+
+"He's a smart little cuss," Laughlin told Cowperwood.  "I thort onct
+he'd make a go of it, but they ketched him where his hair was short,
+and he had to let go.  There was an explosion in his tank over here
+near the river onct, an I think he thort them fellers blew him up.
+Anyhow, he got out.  I ain't seen ner heard sight of him fer years."
+
+Cowperwood sent old Peter to look up Mr. Sippens and find out what he
+was really doing, and whether he would be interested to get back in the
+gas business.  Enter, then, a few days later into the office of Peter
+Laughlin & Co. Henry De Soto Sippens.  He was a very little man, about
+fifty years of age; he wore a high, four-cornered, stiff felt hat, with
+a short brown business coat (which in summer became seersucker) and
+square-toed shoes; he looked for all the world like a country drug or
+book store owner, with perhaps the air of a country doctor or lawyer
+superadded. His cuffs protruded too far from his coat-sleeves, his
+necktie bulged too far out of his vest, and his high hat was set a
+little too far back on his forehead; otherwise he was acceptable,
+pleasant, and interesting.  He had short side-burns--reddish
+brown--which stuck out quite defiantly, and his eyebrows were heavy.
+
+"Mr. Sippens," said Cowperwood, blandly, "you were once in the gas
+manufacturing and distributing business here in Chicago, weren't you?"
+
+"I think I know as much about the manufacture of gas as any one,"
+replied Sippens, almost contentiously.  "I worked at it for a number of
+years."
+
+"Well, now, Mr. Sippens, I was thinking that it might be interesting to
+start a little gas company in one of these outlying villages that are
+growing so fast and see if we couldn't make some money out of it.  I'm
+not a practical gas man myself, but I thought I might interest some one
+who was." He looked at Sippens in a friendly, estimating way.  "I have
+heard of you as some one who has had considerable experience in this
+field here in Chicago.  If I should get up a company of this kind, with
+considerable backing, do you think you might be willing to take the
+management of it?"
+
+"Oh, I know all about this gas field," Mr. Sippens was about to say.
+"It can't be done." But he changed his mind before opening his lips.
+"If I were paid enough," he said, cautiously.  "I suppose you know what
+you have to contend with?"
+
+"Oh yes," Cowperwood replied, smiling.  "What would you consider 'paid
+enough' to mean?"
+
+"Oh, if I were given six thousand a year and a sufficient interest in
+the company--say, a half, or something like that--I might consider it,"
+replied Sippens, determined, as he thought, to frighten Cowperwood off
+by his exorbitant demands.  He was making almost six thousand dollars a
+year out of his present business.
+
+"You wouldn't think that four thousand in several companies--say up to
+fifteen thousand dollars--and an interest of about a tenth in each
+would be better?"
+
+Mr. Sippens meditated carefully on this.  Plainly, the man before him
+was no trifling beginner.  He looked at Cowperwood shrewdly and saw at
+once, without any additional explanation of any kind, that the latter
+was preparing a big fight of some sort.  Ten years before Sippens had
+sensed the immense possibilities of the gas business.  He had tried to
+"get in on it," but had been sued, waylaid, enjoined, financially
+blockaded, and finally blown up. He had always resented the treatment
+he had received, and he had bitterly regretted his inability to
+retaliate.  He had thought his days of financial effort were over, but
+here was a man who was subtly suggesting a stirring fight, and who was
+calling him, like a hunter with horn, to the chase.
+
+"Well, Mr. Cowperwood," he replied, with less defiance and more
+camaraderie, "if you could show me that you have a legitimate
+proposition in hand I am a practical gas man.  I know all about mains,
+franchise contracts, and gas-machinery.  I organized and installed the
+plant at Dayton, Ohio, and Rochester, New York.  I would have been rich
+if I had got here a little earlier." The echo of regret was in his
+voice.
+
+"Well, now, here's your chance, Mr. Sippens," urged Cowperwood, subtly.
+"Between you and me there's going to be a big new gas company in the
+field.  We'll make these old fellows step up and see us quickly.
+Doesn't that interest you? There'll be plenty of money.  It isn't that
+that's wanting--it's an organizer, a fighter, a practical gas man to
+build the plant, lay the mains, and so on." Cowperwood rose suddenly,
+straight and determined--a trick with him when he wanted to really
+impress any one.  He seemed to radiate force, conquest, victory.  "Do
+you want to come in?"
+
+"Yes, I do, Mr. Cowperwood!" exclaimed Sippens, jumping to his feet,
+putting on his hat and shoving it far back on his head.  He looked like
+a chest-swollen bantam rooster.
+
+Cowperwood took his extended hand.
+
+"Get your real-estate affairs in order.  I'll want you to get me a
+franchise in Lake View shortly and build me a plant.  I'll give you all
+the help you need.  I'll arrange everything to your satisfaction within
+a week or so.  We will want a good lawyer or two."
+
+Sippens smiled ecstatically as he left the office.  Oh, the wonder of
+this, and after ten years! Now he would show those crooks.  Now he had
+a real fighter behind him--a man like himself.  Now, by George, the fur
+would begin to fly! Who was this man, anyhow? What a wonder! He would
+look him up.  He knew that from now on he would do almost anything
+Cowperwood wanted him to do.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Now This is Fighting
+
+
+When Cowperwood, after failing in his overtures to the three city gas
+companies, confided to Addison his plan of organizing rival companies
+in the suburbs, the banker glared at him appreciatively. "You're a
+smart one!" he finally exclaimed.  "You'll do! I back you to win!" He
+went on to advise Cowperwood that he would need the assistance of some
+of the strong men on the various village councils.  "They're all as
+crooked as eels' teeth," he went on. "But there are one or two that are
+more crooked than others and safer--bell-wethers.  Have you got your
+lawyer?"
+
+"I haven't picked one yet, but I will.  I'm looking around for the
+right man now.
+
+"Well, of course, I needn't tell you how important that is.  There is
+one man, old General Van Sickle, who has had considerable training in
+these matters.  He's fairly reliable."
+
+The entrance of Gen. Judson P. Van Sickle threw at the very outset a
+suggestive light on the whole situation.  The old soldier, over fifty,
+had been a general of division during the Civil War, and had got his
+real start in life by filing false titles to property in southern
+Illinois, and then bringing suits to substantiate his fraudulent claims
+before friendly associates.  He was now a prosperous go-between,
+requiring heavy retainers, and yet not over-prosperous. There was only
+one kind of business that came to the General--this kind; and one
+instinctively compared him to that decoy sheep at the stock-yards that
+had been trained to go forth into nervous, frightened flocks of its
+fellow-sheep, balking at being driven into the slaughtering-pens, and
+lead them peacefully into the shambles, knowing enough always to make
+his own way quietly to the rear during the onward progress and thus
+escape.  A dusty old lawyer, this, with Heaven knows what welter of
+altered wills, broken promises, suborned juries, influenced judges,
+bribed councilmen and legislators, double-intentioned agreements and
+contracts, and a whole world of shifty legal calculations and false
+pretenses floating around in his brain.  Among the politicians, judges,
+and lawyers generally, by reason of past useful services, he was
+supposed to have some powerful connections.  He liked to be called into
+any case largely because it meant something to do and kept him from
+being bored.  When compelled to keep an appointment in winter, he would
+slip on an old greatcoat of gray twill that he had worn until it was
+shabby, then, taking down a soft felt hat, twisted and pulled out of
+shape by use, he would pull it low over his dull gray eyes and amble
+forth.  In summer his clothes looked as crinkled as though he had slept
+in them for weeks.  He smoked. In cast of countenance he was not wholly
+unlike General Grant, with a short gray beard and mustache which always
+seemed more or less unkempt and hair that hung down over his forehead
+in a gray mass.  The poor General! He was neither very happy nor very
+unhappy--a doubting Thomas without faith or hope in humanity and
+without any particular affection for anybody.
+
+"I'll tell you how it is with these small councils, Mr. Cowperwood,"
+observed Van Sickle, sagely, after the preliminaries of the first
+interview had been dispensed with.
+
+"They're worse than the city council almost, and that's about as bad as
+it can be.  You can't do anything without money where these little
+fellows are concerned.  I don't like to be too hard on men, but these
+fellows--" He shook his head.
+
+"I understand," commented Cowperwood.  "They're not very pleasing, even
+after you make all allowances."
+
+"Most of them," went on the General, "won't stay put when you think you
+have them.  They sell out.  They're just as apt as not to run to this
+North Side Gas Company and tell them all about the whole thing before
+you get well under way.  Then you have to pay them more money, rival
+bills will be introduced, and all that." The old General pulled a long
+face.  "Still, there are one or two of them that are all right," he
+added, "if you can once get them interested--Mr. Duniway and Mr.
+Gerecht."
+
+"I'm not so much concerned with how it has to be done, General,"
+suggested Cowperwood, amiably, "but I want to be sure that it will be
+done quickly and quietly.  I don't want to be bothered with details.
+Can it be done without too much publicity, and about what do you think
+it is going to cost?"
+
+"Well, that's pretty hard to say until I look into the matter," said
+the General, thoughtfully.  "It might cost only four and it might cost
+all of forty thousand dollars--even more.  I can't tell. I'd like to
+take a little time and look into it." The old gentleman was wondering
+how much Cowperwood was prepared to spend.
+
+"Well, we won't bother about that now.  I'm willing to be as liberal as
+necessary.  I've sent for Mr. Sippens, the president of the Lake View
+Gas and Fuel Company, and he'll be here in a little while.  You will
+want to work with him as closely as you can."  The energetic Sippens
+came after a few moments, and he and Van Sickle, after being instructed
+to be mutually helpful and to keep Cowperwood's name out of all matters
+relating to this work, departed together. They were an odd pair--the
+dusty old General phlegmatic, disillusioned, useful, but not inclined
+to feel so; and the smart, chipper Sippens, determined to wreak a kind
+of poetic vengeance on his old-time enemy, the South Side Gas Company,
+via this seemingly remote Northside conspiracy.  In ten minutes they
+were hand in glove, the General describing to Sippens the penurious and
+unscrupulous brand of Councilman Duniway's politics and the friendly
+but expensive character of Jacob Gerecht.  Such is life.
+
+In the organization of the Hyde Park company Cowperwood, because he
+never cared to put all his eggs in one basket, decided to secure a
+second lawyer and a second dummy president, although he proposed to
+keep De Soto Sippens as general practical adviser for all three or four
+companies.  He was thinking this matter over when there appeared on the
+scene a very much younger man than the old General, one Kent Barrows
+McKibben, the only son of ex-Judge Marshall Scammon McKibben, of the
+State Supreme Court.  Kent McKibben was thirty-three years old, tall,
+athletic, and, after a fashion, handsome.  He was not at all vague
+intellectually--that is, in the matter of the conduct of his
+business--but dandified and at times remote.  He had an office in one
+of the best blocks in Dearborn Street, which he reached in a reserved,
+speculative mood every morning at nine, unless something important
+called him down-town earlier.  It so happened that he had drawn up the
+deeds and agreements for the real-estate company that sold Cowperwood
+his lots at Thirty-seventh Street and Michigan Avenue, and when they
+were ready he journeyed to the latter's office to ask if there were any
+additional details which Cowperwood might want to have taken into
+consideration.  When he was ushered in, Cowperwood turned to him his
+keen, analytical eyes and saw at once a personality he liked.  McKibben
+was just remote and artistic enough to suit him.  He liked his clothes,
+his agnostic unreadableness, his social air.  McKibben, on his part,
+caught the significance of the superior financial atmosphere at once.
+He noted Cowperwood's light-brown suit picked out with strands of red,
+his maroon tie, and small cameo cuff-links.  His desk, glass-covered,
+looked clean and official.  The woodwork of the rooms was all cherry,
+hand-rubbed and oiled, the pictures interesting steel-engravings of
+American life, appropriately framed. The typewriter--at that time just
+introduced--was in evidence, and the stock-ticker--also new--was
+ticking volubly the prices current. The secretary who waited on
+Cowperwood was a young Polish girl named Antoinette Nowak, reserved,
+seemingly astute, dark, and very attractive.
+
+"What sort of business is it you handle, Mr. McKibben?" asked
+Cowperwood, quite casually, in the course of the conversation. And
+after listening to McKibben's explanation he added, idly: "You might
+come and see me some time next week.  It is just possible that I may
+have something in your line."
+
+In another man McKibben would have resented this remote suggestion of
+future aid.  Now, instead, he was intensely pleased.  The man before
+him gripped his imagination.  His remote intellectuality relaxed.  When
+he came again and Cowperwood indicated the nature of the work he might
+wish to have done McKibben rose to the bait like a fish to a fly.
+
+"I wish you would let me undertake that, Mr. Cowperwood," he said,
+quite eagerly.  "It's something I've never done, but I'm satisfied I
+can do it.  I live out in Hyde Park and know most of the councilmen. I
+can bring considerable influence to bear for you."
+
+Cowperwood smiled pleasantly.
+
+So a second company, officered by dummies of McKibben's selection, was
+organized.  De Soto Sippens, without old General Van Sickle's
+knowledge, was taken in as practical adviser.  An application for a
+franchise was drawn up, and Kent Barrows McKibben began silent, polite
+work on the South Side, coming into the confidence, by degrees, of the
+various councilmen.
+
+There was still a third lawyer, Burton Stimson, the youngest but
+assuredly not the least able of the three, a pale, dark-haired Romeoish
+youth with burning eyes, whom Cowperwood had encountered doing some
+little work for Laughlin, and who was engaged to work on the West Side
+with old Laughlin as ostensible organizer and the sprightly De Soto
+Sippens as practical adviser.  Stimson was no mooning Romeo, however,
+but an eager, incisive soul, born very poor, eager to advance himself.
+Cowperwood detected that pliability of intellect which, while it might
+spell disaster to some, spelled success for him.  He wanted the
+intellectual servants.  He was willing to pay them handsomely, to keep
+them busy, to treat them with almost princely courtesy, but he must
+have the utmost loyalty. Stimson, while maintaining his calm and
+reserve, could have kissed the arch-episcopal hand.  Such is the
+subtlety of contact.
+
+Behold then at once on the North Side, the South Side, the West
+Side--dark goings to and fro and walkings up and down in the earth. In
+Lake View old General Van Sickle and De Soto Sippens, conferring with
+shrewd Councilman Duniway, druggist, and with Jacob Gerecht, ward boss
+and wholesale butcher, both of whom were agreeable but exacting,
+holding pleasant back-room and drug-store confabs with almost tabulated
+details of rewards and benefits.  In Hyde Park, Mr. Kent Barrows
+McKibben, smug and well dressed, a Chesterfield among lawyers, and with
+him one J. J. Bergdoll, a noble hireling, long-haired and dusty,
+ostensibly president of the Hyde Park Gas and Fuel Company, conferring
+with Councilman Alfred B. Davis, manufacturer of willow and rattan
+ware, and Mr. Patrick Gilgan, saloon-keeper, arranging a prospective
+distribution of shares, offering certain cash consideration, lots,
+favors, and the like. Observe also in the village of Douglas and West
+Park on the West Side, just over the city line, the angular, humorous
+Peter Laughlin and Burton Stimson arranging a similar deal or deals.
+
+The enemy, the city gas companies, being divided into three factions,
+were in no way prepared for what was now coming.  When the news finally
+leaked out that applications for franchises had been made to the
+several corporate village bodies each old company suspected the other
+of invasion, treachery, robbery.  Pettifogging lawyers were sent, one
+by each company, to the village council in each particular territory
+involved, but no one of the companies had as yet the slightest idea who
+was back of it all or of the general plan of operations.  Before any
+one of them could reasonably protest, before it could decide that it
+was willing to pay a very great deal to have the suburb adjacent to its
+particular territory left free, before it could organize a legal fight,
+councilmanic ordinances were introduced giving the applying company
+what it sought; and after a single reading in each case and one open
+hearing, as the law compelled, they were almost unanimously passed.
+There were loud cries of dismay from minor suburban papers which had
+almost been forgotten in the arrangement of rewards.  The large city
+newspapers cared little at first, seeing these were outlying districts;
+they merely made the comment that the villages were beginning well,
+following in the steps of the city council in its distinguished career
+of crime.
+
+Cowperwood smiled as he saw in the morning papers the announcement of
+the passage of each ordinance granting him a franchise.  He listened
+with comfort thereafter on many a day to accounts by Laughlin, Sippens,
+McKibben, and Van Sickle of overtures made to buy them out, or to take
+over their franchises.  He worked on plans with Sippens looking to the
+actual introduction of gas-plants. There were bond issues now to float,
+stock to be marketed, contracts for supplies to be awarded, actual
+reservoirs and tanks to be built, and pipes to be laid.  A pumped-up
+public opposition had to be smoothed over.  In all this De Soto Sippens
+proved a trump.  With Van Sickle, McKibben, and Stimson as his advisers
+in different sections of the city he would present tabloid propositions
+to Cowperwood, to which the latter had merely to bow his head in assent
+or say no.  Then De Soto would buy, build, and excavate.  Cowperwood
+was so pleased that he was determined to keep De Soto with him
+permanently.  De Soto was pleased to think that he was being given a
+chance to pay up old scores and to do large things; he was really
+grateful.
+
+"We're not through with those sharpers," he declared to Cowperwood,
+triumphantly, one day.  "They'll fight us with suits.  They may join
+hands later.  They blew up my gas-plant.  They may blow up ours."
+
+"Let them blow," said Cowperwood.  "We can blow, too, and sue also. I
+like lawsuits.  We'll tie them up so that they'll beg for quarter." His
+eyes twinkled cheerfully.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+In Search of Victory
+
+
+In the mean time the social affairs of Aileen had been prospering in a
+small way, for while it was plain that they were not to be taken up at
+once--that was not to be expected--it was also plain that they were not
+to be ignored entirely.  One thing that helped in providing a nice
+harmonious working atmosphere was the obvious warm affection of
+Cowperwood for his wife.  While many might consider Aileen a little
+brash or crude, still in the hands of so strong and capable a man as
+Cowperwood she might prove available. So thought Mrs. Addison, for
+instance, and Mrs. Rambaud.  McKibben and Lord felt the same way.  If
+Cowperwood loved her, as he seemed to do, he would probably "put her
+through" successfully.  And he really did love her, after his fashion.
+He could never forget how splendid she had been to him in those old
+days when, knowing full well the circumstances of his home, his wife,
+his children, the probable opposition of her own family, she had thrown
+over convention and sought his love.  How freely she had given of hers!
+No petty, squeamish bickering and dickering here.  He had been "her
+Frank" from the start, and he still felt keenly that longing in her to
+be with him, to be his, which had produced those first wonderful,
+almost terrible days.  She might quarrel, fret, fuss, argue, suspect,
+and accuse him of flirtation with other women; but slight variations
+from the norm in his case did not trouble her--at least she argued that
+they wouldn't.  She had never had any evidence. She was ready to
+forgive him anything, she said, and she was, too, if only he would love
+her.
+
+"You devil," she used to say to him, playfully.  "I know you.  I can
+see you looking around.  That's a nice stenographer you have in the
+office.  I suppose it's her."
+
+"Don't be silly, Aileen," he would reply.  "Don't be coarse.  You know
+I wouldn't take up with a stenographer.  An office isn't the place for
+that sort of thing."
+
+"Oh, isn't it? Don't silly me.  I know you.  Any old place is good
+enough for you."
+
+He laughed, and so did she.  She could not help it.  She loved him so.
+There was no particular bitterness in her assaults.  She loved him, and
+very often he would take her in his arms, kiss her tenderly, and coo:
+"Are you my fine big baby? Are you my red-headed doll? Do you really
+love me so much? Kiss me, then." Frankly, pagan passion in these two
+ran high.  So long as they were not alienated by extraneous things he
+could never hope for more delicious human contact.  There was no
+reaction either, to speak of, no gloomy disgust.  She was physically
+acceptable to him.  He could always talk to her in a genial, teasing
+way, even tender, for she did not offend his intellectuality with
+prudish or conventional notions. Loving and foolish as she was in some
+ways, she would stand blunt reproof or correction.  She could suggest
+in a nebulous, blundering way things that would be good for them to do.
+Most of all at present their thoughts centered upon Chicago society,
+the new house, which by now had been contracted for, and what it would
+do to facilitate their introduction and standing.  Never did a woman's
+life look more rosy, Aileen thought.  It was almost too good to be
+true.  Her Frank was so handsome, so loving, so generous.  There was
+not a small idea about him.  What if he did stray from her at times? He
+remained faithful to her spiritually, and she knew as yet of no single
+instance in which he had failed her.  She little knew, as much as she
+knew, how blandly he could lie and protest in these matters.  But he
+was fond of her just the same, and he really had not strayed to any
+extent.
+
+By now also, Cowperwood had invested about one hundred thousand dollars
+in his gas-company speculations, and he was jubilant over his
+prospects; the franchises were good for twenty years.  By that time he
+would be nearly sixty, and he would probably have bought, combined
+with, or sold out to the older companies at a great profit. The future
+of Chicago was all in his favor.  He decided to invest as much as
+thirty thousand dollars in pictures, if he could find the right ones,
+and to have Aileen's portrait painted while she was still so beautiful.
+This matter of art was again beginning to interest him immensely.
+Addison had four or five good pictures--a Rousseau, a Greuze, a
+Wouverman, and one Lawrence--picked up Heaven knows where.  A hotel-man
+by the name of Collard, a dry-goods and real-estate merchant, was said
+to have a very striking collection. Addison had told him of one Davis
+Trask, a hardware prince, who was now collecting.  There were many
+homes, he knew where art was beginning to be assembled.  He must begin,
+too.
+
+Cowperwood, once the franchises had been secured, had installed Sippens
+in his own office, giving him charge for the time being. Small rented
+offices and clerks were maintained in the region where practical
+plant-building was going on.  All sorts of suits to enjoin, annul, and
+restrain had been begun by the various old companies, but McKibben,
+Stimson, and old General Van Sickle were fighting these with Trojan
+vigor and complacency.  It was a pleasant scene.  Still no one knew
+very much of Cowperwood's entrance into Chicago as yet.  He was a very
+minor figure.  His name had not even appeared in connection with this
+work.  Other men were being celebrated daily, a little to his envy.
+When would he begin to shine? Soon, now, surely.  So off they went in
+June, comfortable, rich, gay, in the best of health and spirits, intent
+upon enjoying to the full their first holiday abroad.
+
+It was a wonderful trip.  Addison was good enough to telegraph flowers
+to New York for Mrs. Cowperwood to be delivered on shipboard. McKibben
+sent books of travel.  Cowperwood, uncertain whether anybody would send
+flowers, ordered them himself--two amazing baskets, which with
+Addison's made three--and these, with attached cards, awaited them in
+the lobby of the main deck.  Several at the captain's table took pains
+to seek out the Cowperwoods.  They were invited to join several
+card-parties and to attend informal concerts. It was a rough passage,
+however, and Aileen was sick.  It was hard to make herself look just
+nice enough, and so she kept to her room. She was very haughty, distant
+to all but a few, and to these careful of her conversation.  She felt
+herself coming to be a very important person.
+
+Before leaving she had almost exhausted the resources of the Donovan
+establishment in Chicago.  Lingerie, boudoir costumes,
+walking-costumes, riding-costumes, evening-costumes she possessed in
+plenty.  She had a jewel-bag hidden away about her person containing
+all of thirty thousand dollars' worth of jewels.  Her shoes, stockings,
+hats, and accessories in general were innumerable.  Because of all this
+Cowperwood was rather proud of her.  She had such a capacity for life.
+His first wife had been pale and rather anemic, while Aileen was fairly
+bursting with sheer physical vitality.  She hummed and jested and
+primped and posed.  There are some souls that just are, without
+previous revision or introspection.  The earth with all its long past
+was a mere suggestion to Aileen, dimly visualized if at all.  She may
+have heard that there were once dinosaurs and flying reptiles, but if
+so it made no deep impression on her. Somebody had said, or was saying,
+that we were descended from monkeys, which was quite absurd, though it
+might be true enough. On the sea the thrashing hills of green water
+suggested a kind of immensity and terror, but not the immensity of the
+poet's heart. The ship was safe, the captain at table in brass buttons
+and blue uniform, eager to be nice to her--told her so.  Her faith
+really, was in the captain.  And there with her, always, was
+Cowperwood, looking at this whole, moving spectacle of life with a
+suspicious, not apprehensive, but wary eye, and saying nothing about it.
+
+In London letters given them by Addison brought several invitations to
+the opera, to dinner, to Goodwood for a weekend, and so on. Carriages,
+tallyhoes, cabs for riding were invoked.  A week-end invitation to a
+houseboat on the Thames was secured.  Their English hosts, looking on
+all this as a financial adventure, good financial wisdom, were
+courteous and civil, nothing more.  Aileen was intensely curious.  She
+noted servants, manners, forms.  Immediately she began to think that
+America was not good enough, perhaps; it wanted so many things.
+
+"Now, Aileen, you and I have to live in Chicago for years and years,"
+commented Cowperwood.  "Don't get wild.  These people don't care for
+Americans, can't you see that? They wouldn't accept us if we were over
+here--not yet, anyhow.  We're merely passing strangers, being
+courteously entertained." Cowperwood saw it all.
+
+Aileen was being spoiled in a way, but there was no help.  She dressed
+and dressed.  The Englishmen used to look at her in Hyde Park, where
+she rode and drove; at Claridges' where they stayed; in Bond Street,
+where she shopped.  The Englishwomen, the majority of them remote,
+ultra-conservative, simple in their tastes, lifted their eyes.
+Cowperwood sensed the situation, but said nothing. He loved Aileen, and
+she was satisfactory to him, at least for the present, anyhow,
+beautiful.  If he could adjust her station in Chicago, that would be
+sufficient for a beginning.  After three weeks of very active life,
+during which Aileen patronized the ancient and honorable glories of
+England, they went on to Paris.
+
+Here she was quickened to a child-like enthusiasm.  "You know," she
+said to Cowperwood, quite solemnly, the second morning, "the English
+don't know how to dress.  I thought they did, but the smartest of them
+copy the French.  Take those men we saw last night in the Cafe
+d'Anglais.  There wasn't an Englishman I saw that compared with them."
+
+"My dear, your tastes are exotic," replied Cowperwood, who was watching
+her with pleased interest while he adjusted his tie. "The French smart
+crowd are almost too smart, dandified.  I think some of those young
+fellows had on corsets."
+
+"What of it?" replied Aileen.  "I like it.  If you're going to be
+smart, why not be very smart?"
+
+"I know that's your theory, my dear," he said, "but it can be overdone.
+There is such a thing as going too far.  You have to compromise even if
+you don't look as well as you might.  You can't be too very
+conspicuously different from your neighbors, even in the right
+direction."
+
+"You know," she said, stopping and looking at him, "I believe you're
+going to get very conservative some day--like my brothers."
+
+She came over and touched his tie and smoothed his hair.
+
+"Well, one of us ought to be, for the good of the family," he
+commented, half smiling.
+
+"I'm not so sure, though, that it will be you, either."
+
+"It's a charming day.  See how nice those white-marble statues look.
+Shall we go to the Cluny or Versailles or Fontainbleau? To-night we
+ought to see Bernhardt at the Francaise."
+
+Aileen was so gay.  It was so splendid to be traveling with her true
+husband at last.
+
+It was on this trip that Cowperwood's taste for art and life and his
+determination to possess them revived to the fullest.  He made the
+acquaintance in London, Paris, and Brussels of the important art
+dealers.  His conception of great masters and the older schools of art
+shaped themselves.  By one of the dealers in London, who at once
+recognized in him a possible future patron, he was invited with Aileen
+to view certain private collections, and here and there was an artist,
+such as Lord Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Whistler, to whom he
+was introduced casually, an interested stranger. These men only saw a
+strong, polite, remote, conservative man. He realized the emotional,
+egotistic, and artistic soul.  He felt on the instant that there could
+be little in common between such men and himself in so far as personal
+contact was concerned, yet there was mutual ground on which they could
+meet.  He could not be a slavish admirer of anything, only a princely
+patron.  So he walked and saw, wondering how soon his dreams of
+grandeur were to be realized.
+
+In London he bought a portrait by Raeburn; in Paris a plowing scene by
+Millet, a small Jan Steen, a battle piece by Meissonier, and a romantic
+courtyard scene by Isabey.  Thus began the revival of his former
+interest in art; the nucleus of that future collection which was to
+mean so much to him in later years.
+
+On their return, the building of the new Chicago mansion created the
+next interesting diversion in the lives of Aileen and Cowperwood.
+Because of some chateaux they saw in France that form, or rather a
+modification of it as suggested by Taylor Lord, was adopted.  Mr. Lord
+figured that it would take all of a year, perhaps a year and a half, to
+deliver it in perfect order, but time was of no great importance in
+this connection.  In the mean while they could strengthen their social
+connections and prepare for that interesting day when they should be of
+the Chicago elite.
+
+There were, at this time, several elements in Chicago--those who,
+having grown suddenly rich from dull poverty, could not so easily
+forget the village church and the village social standards; those who,
+having inherited wealth, or migrated from the East where wealth was
+old, understood more of the savoir faire of the game; and those who,
+being newly born into wealth and seeing the drift toward a smarter
+American life, were beginning to wish they might shine in it--these
+last the very young people.  The latter were just beginning to dream of
+dances at Kinsley's, a stated Kirmess, and summer diversions of the
+European kind, but they had not arrived as yet.  The first class,
+although by far the dullest and most bovine, was still the most
+powerful because they were the richest, money as yet providing the
+highest standard.  The functions which these people provided were
+stupid to the verge of distraction; really they were only the week-day
+receptions and Sunday-afternoon calls of Squeedunk and Hohokus raised
+to the Nth power.  The purpose of the whole matter was to see and be
+seen.  Novelty in either thought or action was decidedly eschewed.  It
+was, as a matter of fact, customariness of thought and action and the
+quintessence of convention that was desired.  The idea of introducing a
+"play actress," for instance, as was done occasionally in the East or
+in London--never; even a singer or an artist was eyed askance. One
+could easily go too far! But if a European prince should have strayed
+to Chicago (which he never did) or if an Eastern social magnate chanced
+to stay over a train or two, then the topmost circle of local wealth
+was prepared to strain itself to the breaking-point.  Cowperwood had
+sensed all this on his arrival, but he fancied that if he became rich
+and powerful enough he and Aileen, with their fine house to help them,
+might well be the leaven which would lighten the whole lump.
+Unfortunately, Aileen was too obviously on the qui vive for those
+opportunities which might lead to social recognition and equality, if
+not supremacy. Like the savage, unorganized for protection and at the
+mercy of the horrific caprice of nature, she was almost tremulous at
+times with thoughts of possible failure.  Almost at once she had
+recognized herself as unsuited temperamentally for association with
+certain types of society women.  The wife of Anson Merrill, the great
+dry-goods prince, whom she saw in one of the down-town stores one day,
+impressed her as much too cold and remote.  Mrs. Merrill was a woman of
+superior mood and education who found herself, in her own estimation,
+hard put to it for suitable companionship in Chicago.  She was
+Eastern-bred-Boston--and familiar in an offhand way with the superior
+world of London, which she had visited several times.  Chicago at its
+best was to her a sordid commercial mess. She preferred New York or
+Washington, but she had to live here. Thus she patronized nearly all of
+those with whom she condescended to associate, using an upward tilt of
+the head, a tired droop of the eyelids, and a fine upward arching of
+the brows to indicate how trite it all was.
+
+It was a Mrs. Henry Huddlestone who had pointed out Mrs. Merrill to
+Aileen.  Mrs. Huddlestone was the wife of a soap manufacturer living
+very close to the Cowperwoods' temporary home, and she and her husband
+were on the outer fringe of society.  She had heard that the
+Cowperwoods were people of wealth, that they were friendly with the
+Addisons, and that they were going to build a
+two-hundred-thousand-dollar mansion.  (The value of houses always grows
+in the telling.) That was enough.  She had called, being three doors
+away, to leave her card; and Aileen, willing to curry favor here and
+there, had responded.  Mrs. Huddlestone was a little woman, not very
+attractive in appearance, clever in a social way, and eminently
+practical.
+
+"Speaking of Mrs. Merrill," commented Mrs. Huddlestone, on this
+particular day, "there she is--near the dress-goods counter.  She
+always carries that lorgnette in just that way."
+
+Aileen turned and examined critically a tall, dark, slender woman of
+the high world of the West, very remote, disdainful, superior.
+
+"You don't know her?" questioned Aileen, curiously, surveying her at
+leisure.
+
+"No," replied Mrs. Huddlestone, defensively.  "They live on the North
+Side, and the different sets don't mingle so much."
+
+As a matter of fact, it was just the glory of the principal families
+that they were above this arbitrary division of "sides," and could pick
+their associates from all three divisions.
+
+"Oh!" observed Aileen, nonchalantly.  She was secretly irritated to
+think that Mrs. Huddlestone should find it necessary to point out Mrs.
+Merrill to her as a superior person.
+
+"You know, she darkens her eyebrows a little, I think," suggested Mrs.
+Huddlestone, studying her enviously.  "Her husband, they say, isn't the
+most faithful person in the world.  There's another woman, a Mrs.
+Gladdens, that lives very close to them that he's very much interested
+in."
+
+"Oh!" said Aileen, cautiously.  After her own Philadelphia experience
+she had decided to be on her guard and not indulge in too much gossip.
+Arrows of this particular kind could so readily fly in her direction.
+
+"But her set is really much the smartest," complimented Aileen's
+companion.
+
+Thereafter it was Aileen's ambition to associate with Mrs. Anson
+Merrill, to be fully and freely accepted by her.  She did not know,
+although she might have feared, that that ambition was never to be
+realized.
+
+But there were others who had called at the first Cowperwood home, or
+with whom the Cowperwoods managed to form an acquaintance. There were
+the Sunderland Sledds, Mr. Sledd being general traffic manager of one
+of the southwestern railways entering the city, and a gentleman of
+taste and culture and some wealth; his wife an ambitious nobody.  There
+were the Walter Rysam Cottons, Cotton being a wholesale coffee-broker,
+but more especially a local social litterateur; his wife a graduate of
+Vassar.  There were the Norrie Simmses, Simms being secretary and
+treasurer of the Douglas Trust and Savings Company, and a power in
+another group of financial people, a group entirely distinct from that
+represented by Addison and Rambaud.
+
+Others included the Stanislau Hoecksemas, wealthy furriers; the Duane
+Kingslands, wholesale flour; the Webster Israelses, packers; the
+Bradford Candas, jewelers.  All these people amounted to something
+socially.  They all had substantial homes and substantial incomes, so
+that they were worthy of consideration.  The difference between Aileen
+and most of the women involved a difference between naturalism and
+illusion.  But this calls for some explanation.
+
+To really know the state of the feminine mind at this time, one would
+have to go back to that period in the Middle Ages when the Church
+flourished and the industrious poet, half schooled in the facts of
+life, surrounded women with a mystical halo.  Since that day the maiden
+and the matron as well has been schooled to believe that she is of a
+finer clay than man, that she was born to uplift him, and that her
+favors are priceless.  This rose-tinted mist of romance, having nothing
+to do with personal morality, has brought about, nevertheless, a
+holier-than-thou attitude of women toward men, and even of women toward
+women.  Now the Chicago atmosphere in which Aileen found herself was
+composed in part of this very illusion.  The ladies to whom she had
+been introduced were of this high world of fancy.  They conceived
+themselves to be perfect, even as they were represented in religious
+art and in fiction. Their husbands must be models, worthy of their high
+ideals, and other women must have no blemish of any kind.  Aileen,
+urgent, elemental, would have laughed at all this if she could have
+understood.  Not understanding, she felt diffident and uncertain of
+herself in certain presences.
+
+Instance in this connection Mrs. Norrie Simms, who was a satellite of
+Mrs. Anson Merrill.  To be invited to the Anson Merrills' for tea,
+dinner, luncheon, or to be driven down-town by Mrs. Merrill, was
+paradise to Mrs. Simms.  She loved to recite the bon mots of her idol,
+to discourse upon her astonishing degree of culture, to narrate how
+people refused on occasion to believe that she was the wife of Anson
+Merrill, even though she herself declared it--those old chestnuts of
+the social world which must have had their origin in Egypt and Chaldea.
+Mrs. Simms herself was of a nondescript type, not a real personage,
+clever, good-looking, tasteful, a social climber.  The two Simms
+children (little girls) had been taught all the social graces of the
+day--to pose, smirk, genuflect, and the like, to the immense delight of
+their elders.  The nurse in charge was in uniform, the governess was a
+much put-upon person. Mrs. Simms had a high manner, eyes for those
+above her only, a serene contempt for the commonplace world in which
+she had to dwell.
+
+During the first dinner at which she entertained the Cowperwoods Mrs.
+Simms attempted to dig into Aileen's Philadelphia history, asking if
+she knew the Arthur Leighs, the Trevor Drakes, Roberta Willing, or the
+Martyn Walkers.  Mrs. Simms did not know them herself, but she had
+heard Mrs. Merrill speak of them, and that was enough of a handle
+whereby to swing them.  Aileen, quick on the defense, ready to lie
+manfully on her own behalf, assured her that she had known them, as
+indeed she had--very casually--and before the rumor which connected her
+with Cowperwood had been voiced abroad.  This pleased Mrs. Simms.
+
+"I must tell Nellie," she said, referring thus familiarly to Mrs.
+Merrill.
+
+Aileen feared that if this sort of thing continued it would soon be all
+over town that she had been a mistress before she had been a wife, that
+she had been the unmentioned corespondent in the divorce suit, and that
+Cowperwood had been in prison.  Only his wealth and her beauty could
+save her; and would they?
+
+One night they had been to dinner at the Duane Kingslands', and Mrs.
+Bradford Canda had asked her, in what seemed a very significant way,
+whether she had ever met her friend Mrs. Schuyler Evans, of
+Philadelphia.  This frightened Aileen.
+
+"Don't you suppose they must know, some of them, about us?" she asked
+Cowperwood, on the way home.
+
+"I suppose so," he replied, thoughtfully.  "I'm sure I don't know. I
+wouldn't worry about that if I were you.  If you worry about it you'll
+suggest it to them.  I haven't made any secret of my term in prison in
+Philadelphia, and I don't intend to.  It wasn't a square deal, and they
+had no right to put me there."
+
+"I know, dear," replied Aileen, "it might not make so much difference
+if they did know.  I don't see why it should.  We are not the only ones
+that have had marriage troubles, I'm sure.
+
+"There's just one thing about this; either they accept us or they
+don't.  If they don't, well and good; we can't help it.  We'll go on
+and finish the house, and give them a chance to be decent.  If they
+won't be, there are other cities.  Money will arrange matters in New
+York--that I know.  We can build a real place there, and go in on equal
+terms if we have money enough--and I will have money enough," he added,
+after a moment's pondering.  "Never fear.  I'll make millions here,
+whether they want me to or not, and after that--well, after that, we'll
+see what we'll see.  Don't worry.  I haven't seen many troubles in this
+world that money wouldn't cure."
+
+His teeth had that even set that they always assumed when he was
+dangerously in earnest.  He took Aileen's hand, however, and pressed it
+gently.
+
+"Don't worry," he repeated.  "Chicago isn't the only city, and we won't
+be the poorest people in America, either, in ten years. Just keep up
+your courage.  It will all come out right.  It's certain to."
+
+Aileen looked out on the lamp-lit length of Michigan Avenue, down which
+they were rolling past many silent mansions.  The tops of all the lamps
+were white, and gleamed through the shadows, receding to a thin point.
+It was dark, but fresh and pleasant.  Oh, if only Frank's money could
+buy them position and friendship in this interesting world; if it only
+would! She did not quite realize how much on her own personality, or
+the lack of it, this struggle depended.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+A Test
+
+
+The opening of the house in Michigan Avenue occurred late in November
+in the fall of eighteen seventy-eight.  When Aileen and Cowperwood had
+been in Chicago about two years.  Altogether, between people whom they
+had met at the races, at various dinners and teas, and at receptions of
+the Union and Calumet Clubs (to which Cowperwood, through Addison's
+backing, had been admitted) and those whom McKibben and Lord
+influenced, they were able to send invitations to about three hundred,
+of whom some two hundred and fifty responded. Up to this time, owing to
+Cowperwood's quiet manipulation of his affairs, there had been no
+comment on his past--no particular interest in it.  He had money,
+affable ways, a magnetic personality. The business men of the
+city--those whom he met socially--were inclined to consider him
+fascinating and very clever.  Aileen being beautiful and graceful for
+attention, was accepted at more or less her own value, though the
+kingly high world knew them not.
+
+It is amazing what a showing the socially unplaced can make on occasion
+where tact and discrimination are used.  There was a weekly social
+paper published in Chicago at this time, a rather able publication as
+such things go, which Cowperwood, with McKibben's assistance, had
+pressed into service.  Not much can be done under any circumstances
+where the cause is not essentially strong; but where, as in this case,
+there is a semblance of respectability, considerable wealth, and great
+force and magnetism, all things are possible.  Kent McKibben knew
+Horton Biggers, the editor, who was a rather desolate and disillusioned
+person of forty-five, gray, and depressed-looking--a sort of human
+sponge or barnacle who was only galvanized into seeming interest and
+cheerfulness by sheer necessity.  Those were the days when the society
+editor was accepted as a member of society--de facto--and treated more
+as a guest than a reporter, though even then the tendency was toward
+elimination. Working for Cowperwood, and liking him, McKibben said to
+Biggers one evening:
+
+"You know the Cowperwoods, don't you, Biggers?"
+
+"No," replied the latter, who devoted himself barnacle-wise to the more
+exclusive circles.  "Who are they?"
+
+"Why, he's a banker over here in La Salle Street.  They're from
+Philadelphia.  Mrs. Cowperwood's a beautiful woman--young and all that.
+They're building a house out here on Michigan Avenue.  You ought to
+know them.  They're going to get in, I think.  The Addisons like them.
+If you were to be nice to them now I think they'd appreciate it later.
+He's rather liberal, and a good fellow."
+
+Biggers pricked up his ears.  This social journalism was thin picking
+at best, and he had very few ways of turning an honest penny.  The
+would be's and half-in's who expected nice things said of them had to
+subscribe, and rather liberally, to his paper.  Not long after this
+brief talk Cowperwood received a subscription blank from the business
+office of the Saturday Review, and immediately sent a check for one
+hundred dollars to Mr. Horton Biggers direct. Subsequently certain not
+very significant personages noticed that when the Cowperwoods dined at
+their boards the function received comment by the Saturday Review, not
+otherwise.  It looked as though the Cowperwoods must be favored; but
+who were they, anyhow?
+
+The danger of publicity, and even moderate social success, is that
+scandal loves a shining mark.  When you begin to stand out the least
+way in life, as separate from the mass, the cognoscenti wish to know
+who, what, and why.  The enthusiasm of Aileen, combined with the genius
+of Cowperwood, was for making their opening entertainment a very
+exceptional affair, which, under the circumstances, and all things
+considered, was a dangerous thing to do.  As yet Chicago was
+exceedingly slow socially.  Its movements were, as has been said, more
+or less bovine and phlegmatic.  To rush in with something utterly
+brilliant and pyrotechnic was to take notable chances.  The more
+cautious members of Chicago society, even if they did not attend, would
+hear, and then would come ultimate comment and decision.
+
+The function began with a reception at four, which lasted until
+six-thirty, and this was followed by a dance at nine, with music by a
+famous stringed orchestra of Chicago, a musical programme by artists of
+considerable importance, and a gorgeous supper from eleven until one in
+a Chinese fairyland of lights, at small tables filling three of the
+ground-floor rooms.  As an added fillip to the occasion Cowperwood had
+hung, not only the important pictures which he had purchased abroad,
+but a new one--a particularly brilliant Gerome, then in the heyday of
+his exotic popularity--a picture of nude odalisques of the harem,
+idling beside the highly colored stone marquetry of an oriental bath.
+It was more or less "loose" art for Chicago, shocking to the
+uninitiated, though harmless enough to the illuminati; but it gave a
+touch of color to the art-gallery which the latter needed.  There was
+also, newly arrived and newly hung, a portrait of Aileen by a Dutch
+artist, Jan van Beers, whom they had encountered the previous summer at
+Brussels.  He had painted Aileen in nine sittings, a rather brilliant
+canvas, high in key, with a summery, out-of-door world behind her--a
+low stone-curbed pool, the red corner of a Dutch brick palace, a
+tulip-bed, and a blue sky with fleecy clouds.  Aileen was seated on the
+curved arm of a stone bench, green grass at her feet, a pink-and-white
+parasol with a lacy edge held idly to one side; her rounded, vigorous
+figure clad in the latest mode of Paris, a white and blue striped-silk
+walking-suit, with a blue-and-white-banded straw hat, wide-brimmed,
+airy, shading her lusty, animal eyes.  The artist had caught her spirit
+quite accurately, the dash, the assumption, the bravado based on the
+courage of inexperience, or lack of true subtlety.  A refreshing thing
+in its way, a little showy, as everything that related to her was, and
+inclined to arouse jealousy in those not so liberally endowed by life,
+but fine as a character piece.  In the warm glow of the guttered
+gas-jets she looked particularly brilliant here, pampered, idle,
+jaunty--the well-kept, stall-fed pet of the world. Many stopped to see,
+and many were the comments, private and otherwise.
+
+This day began with a flurry of uncertainty and worried anticipation on
+the part of Aileen.  At Cowperwood's suggestion she had employed a
+social secretary, a poor hack of a girl, who had sent out all the
+letters, tabulated the replies, run errands, and advised on one detail
+and another.  Fadette, her French maid, was in the throes of preparing
+for two toilets which would have to be made this day, one by two
+o'clock at least, another between six and eight.  Her "mon dieus" and
+"par bleus" could be heard continuously as she hunted for some article
+of dress or polished an ornament, buckle, or pin.  The struggle of
+Aileen to be perfect was, as usual, severe.  Her meditations, as to the
+most becoming gown to wear were trying.  Her portrait was on the east
+wall in the art-gallery, a spur to emulation; she felt as though all
+society were about to judge her.  Theresa Donovan, the local
+dressmaker, had given some advice; but Aileen decided on a heavy brown
+velvet constructed by Worth, of Paris--a thing of varying aspects,
+showing her neck and arms to perfection, and composing charmingly with
+her flesh and hair.  She tried amethyst ear-rings and changed to topaz;
+she stockinged her legs in brown silk, and her feet were shod in brown
+slippers with red enamel buttons.
+
+The trouble with Aileen was that she never did these things with that
+ease which is a sure sign of the socially efficient.  She never quite
+so much dominated a situation as she permitted it to dominate her.
+Only the superior ease and graciousness of Cowperwood carried her
+through at times; but that always did.  When he was near she felt quite
+the great lady, suited to any realm.  When she was alone her courage,
+great as it was, often trembled in the balance.  Her dangerous past was
+never quite out of her mind.
+
+At four Kent McKibben, smug in his afternoon frock, his quick,
+receptive eyes approving only partially of all this show and effort,
+took his place in the general reception-room, talking to Taylor Lord,
+who had completed his last observation and was leaving to return later
+in the evening.  If these two had been closer friends, quite intimate,
+they would have discussed the Cowperwoods' social prospects; but as it
+was, they confined themselves to dull conventionalities.  At this
+moment Aileen came down-stairs for a moment, radiant.  Kent McKibben
+thought he had never seen her look more beautiful.  After all,
+contrasted with some of the stuffy creatures who moved about in
+society, shrewd, hard, bony, calculating, trading on their assured
+position, she was admirable.  It was a pity she did not have more
+poise; she ought to be a little harder--not quite so genial.  Still,
+with Cowperwood at her side, she might go far.
+
+"Really, Mrs. Cowperwood," he said, "it is all most charming.  I was
+just telling Mr. Lord here that I consider the house a triumph."
+
+From McKibben, who was in society, and with Lord, another "in" standing
+by, this was like wine to Aileen.  She beamed joyously.
+
+Among the first arrivals were Mrs. Webster Israels, Mrs. Bradford
+Canda, and Mrs. Walter Rysam Cotton, who were to assist in receiving.
+These ladies did not know that they were taking their future
+reputations for sagacity and discrimination in their hands; they had
+been carried away by the show of luxury of Aileen, the growing
+financial repute of Cowperwood, and the artistic qualities of the new
+house.  Mrs. Webster Israels's mouth was of such a peculiar shape that
+Aileen was always reminded of a fish; but she was not utterly homely,
+and to-day she looked brisk and attractive.  Mrs. Bradford Canda, whose
+old rose and silver-gray dress made up in part for an amazing
+angularity, but who was charming withal, was the soul of interest, for
+she believed this to be a very significant affair.  Mrs. Walter Rysam
+Cotton, a younger woman than either of the others, had the polish of
+Vassar life about her, and was "above" many things.  Somehow she half
+suspected the Cowperwoods might not do, but they were making strides,
+and might possibly surpass all other aspirants.  It behooved her to be
+pleasant.
+
+Life passes from individuality and separateness at times to a sort of
+Monticelliesque mood of color, where individuality is nothing, the
+glittering totality all.  The new house, with its charming French
+windows on the ground floor, its heavy bands of stone flowers and
+deep-sunk florated door, was soon crowded with a moving, colorful flow
+of people.
+
+Many whom Aileen and Cowperwood did not know at all had been invited by
+McKibben and Lord; they came, and were now introduced.  The adjacent
+side streets and the open space in front of the house were crowded with
+champing horses and smartly veneered carriages. All with whom the
+Cowperwoods had been the least intimate came early, and, finding the
+scene colorful and interesting, they remained for some time.  The
+caterer, Kinsley, had supplied a small army of trained servants who
+were posted like soldiers, and carefully supervised by the Cowperwood
+butler.  The new dining-room, rich with a Pompeian scheme of color, was
+aglow with a wealth of glass and an artistic arrangement of delicacies.
+The afternoon costumes of the women, ranging through autumnal grays,
+purples, browns, and greens, blended effectively with the brown-tinted
+walls of the entry-hall, the deep gray and gold of the general
+living-room, the old-Roman red of the dining-room, the white-and-gold
+of the music-room, and the neutral sepia of the art-gallery.
+
+Aileen, backed by the courageous presence of Cowperwood, who, in the
+dining-room, the library, and the art-gallery, was holding a private
+levee of men, stood up in her vain beauty, a thing to see--almost to
+weep over, embodying the vanity of all seeming things, the mockery of
+having and yet not having.  This parading throng that was more curious
+than interested, more jealous than sympathetic, more critical than
+kind, was coming almost solely to observe.
+
+"Do you know, Mrs. Cowperwood," Mrs. Simms remarked, lightly, "your
+house reminds me of an art exhibit to-day.  I hardly know why."
+
+Aileen, who caught the implied slur, had no clever words wherewith to
+reply.  She was not gifted in that way, but she flared with resentment.
+
+"Do you think so?" she replied, caustically.
+
+Mrs. Simms, not all dissatisfied with the effect she had produced,
+passed on with a gay air, attended by a young artist who followed
+amorously in her train.
+
+Aileen saw from this and other things like it how little she was really
+"in." The exclusive set did not take either her or Cowperwood seriously
+as yet.  She almost hated the comparatively dull Mrs. Israels, who had
+been standing beside her at the time, and who had heard the remark; and
+yet Mrs. Israels was much better than nothing. Mrs. Simms had
+condescended a mild "how'd do" to the latter.
+
+It was in vain that the Addisons, Sledds, Kingslands, Hoecksemas, and
+others made their appearance; Aileen was not reassured. However, after
+dinner the younger set, influenced by McKibben, came to dance, and
+Aileen was at her best in spite of her doubts. She was gay, bold,
+attractive.  Kent McKibben, a past master in the mazes and mysteries of
+the grand march, had the pleasure of leading her in that airy, fairy
+procession, followed by Cowperwood, who gave his arm to Mrs. Simms.
+Aileen, in white satin with a touch of silver here and there and
+necklet, bracelet, ear-rings, and hair-ornament of diamonds, glittered
+in almost an exotic way. She was positively radiant.  McKibben, almost
+smitten, was most attentive.
+
+"This is such a pleasure," he whispered, intimately.  "You are very
+beautiful--a dream!"
+
+"You would find me a very substantial one," returned Aileen. "Would
+that I might find," he laughed, gaily; and Aileen, gathering the hidden
+significance, showed her teeth teasingly.  Mrs. Simms, engrossed by
+Cowperwood, could not hear as she would have liked.
+
+After the march Aileen, surrounded by a half-dozen of gay, rudely
+thoughtless young bloods, escorted them all to see her portrait. The
+conservative commented on the flow of wine, the intensely nude Gerome
+at one end of the gallery, and the sparkling portrait of Aileen at the
+other, the enthusiasm of some of the young men for her company.  Mrs.
+Rambaud, pleasant and kindly, remarked to her husband that Aileen was
+"very eager for life," she thought.  Mrs. Addison, astonished at the
+material flare of the Cowperwoods, quite transcending in glitter if not
+in size and solidity anything she and Addison had ever achieved,
+remarked to her husband that "he must be making money very fast."
+
+"The man's a born financier, Ella," Addison explained, sententiously.
+"He's a manipulator, and he's sure to make money.  Whether they can get
+into society I don't know.  He could if he were alone, that's sure.
+She's beautiful, but he needs another kind of woman, I'm afraid.  She's
+almost too good-looking."
+
+"That's what I think, too.  I like her, but I'm afraid she's not going
+to play her cards right.  It's too bad, too."
+
+Just then Aileen came by, a smiling youth on either side, her own face
+glowing with a warmth of joy engendered by much flattery. The
+ball-room, which was composed of the music and drawing rooms thrown
+into one, was now the objective.  It glittered before her with a moving
+throng; the air was full of the odor of flowers, and the sound of music
+and voices.
+
+"Mrs. Cowperwood," observed Bradford Canda to Horton Biggers, the
+society editor, "is one of the prettiest women I have seen in a long
+time.  She's almost too pretty."
+
+"How do you think she's taking?" queried the cautious Biggers.
+"Charming, but she's hardly cold enough, I'm afraid; hardly clever
+enough.  It takes a more serious type.  She's a little too
+high-spirited.  These old women would never want to get near her; she
+makes them look too old.  She'd do better if she were not so young and
+so pretty."
+
+"That's what I think exactly," said Biggers.  As a matter of fact, he
+did not think so at all; he had no power of drawing any such accurate
+conclusions.  But he believed it now, because Bradford Canda had said
+it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+The Fruits of Daring
+
+
+Next morning, over the breakfast cups at the Norrie Simmses' and
+elsewhere, the import of the Cowperwoods' social efforts was discussed
+and the problem of their eventual acceptance or non-acceptance
+carefully weighed.
+
+"The trouble with Mrs. Cowperwood," observed Mrs. Simms, "is that she
+is too gauche.  The whole thing was much too showy.  The idea of her
+portrait at one end of the gallery and that Gerome at the other! And
+then this item in the Press this morning! Why, you'd really think they
+were in society." Mrs. Simms was already a little angry at having let
+herself be used, as she now fancied she had been, by Taylor Lord and
+Kent McKibben, both friends of hers.
+
+"What did you think of the crowd?" asked Norrie, buttering a roll.
+
+"Why, it wasn't representative at all, of course.  We were the most
+important people they had there, and I'm sorry now that we went.  Who
+are the Israelses and the Hoecksemas, anyhow? That dreadful woman!"
+(She was referring to Mrs. Hoecksema.) "I never listened to duller
+remarks in my life."
+
+"I was talking to Haguenin of the Press in the afternoon," observed
+Norrie.  "He says that Cowperwood failed in Philadelphia before he came
+here, and that there were a lot of lawsuits.  Did you ever hear that?"
+
+"No.  But she says she knows the Drakes and the Walkers there. I've
+been intending to ask Nellie about that.  I have often wondered why he
+should leave Philadelphia if he was getting along so well. People don't
+usually do that."
+
+Simms was envious already of the financial showing Cowperwood was
+making in Chicago.  Besides, Cowperwood's manner bespoke supreme
+intelligence and courage, and that is always resented by all save the
+suppliants or the triumphant masters of other walks in life. Simms was
+really interested at last to know something more about Cowperwood,
+something definite.
+
+Before this social situation had time to adjust itself one way or the
+other, however, a matter arose which in its way was far more vital,
+though Aileen might not have thought so.  The feeling between the new
+and old gas companies was becoming strained; the stockholders of the
+older organization were getting uneasy.  They were eager to find out
+who was back of these new gas companies which were threatening to poach
+on their exclusive preserves.  Finally one of the lawyers who had been
+employed by the North Chicago Gas Illuminating Company to fight the
+machinations of De Soto Sippens and old General Van Sickle, finding
+that the Lake View Council had finally granted the franchise to the new
+company and that the Appellate Court was about to sustain it, hit upon
+the idea of charging conspiracy and wholesale bribery of councilmen.
+Considerable evidence had accumulated that Duniway, Jacob Gerecht, and
+others on the North Side had been influenced by cash, and to bring
+legal action would delay final approval of the franchises and give the
+old company time to think what else to do.  This North Side company
+lawyer, a man by the name of Parsons, had been following up the
+movements of Sippens and old General Van Sickle, and had finally
+concluded that they were mere dummies and pawns, and that the real
+instigator in all this excitement was Cowperwood, or, if not he, then
+men whom he represented.  Parsons visited Cowperwood's office one day
+in order to see him; getting no satisfaction, he proceeded to look up
+his record and connections.  These various investigations and
+counter-schemings came to a head in a court proceeding filed in the
+United States Circuit Court late in November, charging Frank Algernon
+Cowperwood, Henry De Soto Sippens, Judson P. Van Sickle, and others
+with conspiracy; this again was followed almost immediately by suits
+begun by the West and South Side companies charging the same thing.  In
+each case Cowperwood's name was mentioned as the secret power behind
+the new companies, conspiring to force the old companies to buy him
+out.  His Philadelphia history was published, but only in part--a
+highly modified account he had furnished the newspapers some time
+before.  Though conspiracy and bribery are ugly words, still lawyers'
+charges prove nothing.  But a penitentiary record, for whatever reason
+served, coupled with previous failure, divorce, and scandal (though the
+newspapers made only the most guarded reference to all this), served to
+whet public interest and to fix Cowperwood and his wife in the public
+eye.
+
+Cowperwood himself was solicited for an interview, but his answer was
+that he was merely a financial agent for the three new companies, not
+an investor; and that the charges, in so far as he was concerned, were
+untrue, mere legal fol-de-rol trumped up to make the situation as
+annoying as possible.  He threatened to sue for libel. Nevertheless,
+although these suits eventually did come to nothing (for he had fixed
+it so that he could not be traced save as a financial agent in each
+case), yet the charges had been made, and he was now revealed as a
+shrewd, manipulative factor, with a record that was certainly
+spectacular.
+
+"I see," said Anson Merrill to his wife, one morning at breakfast,
+"that this man Cowperwood is beginning to get his name in the papers."
+He had the Times on the table before him, and was looking at a headline
+which, after the old-fashioned pyramids then in vogue, read:
+"Conspiracy charged against various Chicago citizens. Frank Algernon
+Cowperwood, Judson P. Van Sickle, Henry De Soto Sippens, and others
+named in Circuit Court complaint." It went on to specify other facts.
+"I supposed he was just a broker."
+
+"I don't know much about them," replied his wife, "except what Bella
+Simms tells me.  What does it say?"
+
+He handed her the paper.
+
+"I have always thought they were merely climbers," continued Mrs.
+Merrill.  "From what I hear she is impossible.  I never saw her."
+
+"He begins well for a Philadelphian," smiled Merrill.  "I've seen him
+at the Calumet.  He looks like a very shrewd man to me.  He's going
+about his work in a brisk spirit, anyhow."
+
+Similarly Mr. Norman Schryhart, a man who up to this time had taken no
+thought of Cowperwood, although he had noted his appearance about the
+halls of the Calumet and Union League Clubs, began to ask seriously who
+he was.  Schryhart, a man of great physical and mental vigor, six feet
+tall, hale and stolid as an ox, a very different type of man from Anson
+Merrill, met Addison one day at the Calumet Club shortly after the
+newspaper talk began.  Sinking into a great leather divan beside him,
+he observed:
+
+"Who is this man Cowperwood whose name is in the papers these days,
+Addison? You know: all these people.  Didn't you introduce him to me
+once?"
+
+"I surely did," replied Addison, cheerfully, who, in spite of the
+attacks on Cowperwood, was rather pleased than otherwise.  It was quite
+plain from the concurrent excitement that attended all this struggle,
+that Cowperwood must be managing things rather adroitly, and, best of
+all, he was keeping his backers' names from view. "He's a Philadelphian
+by birth.  He came out here several years ago, and went into the grain
+and commission business.  He's a banker now.  A rather shrewd man, I
+should say.  He has a lot of money."
+
+"Is it true, as the papers say, that he failed for a million in
+Philadelphia in 1871?"
+
+"In so far as I know, it is."
+
+"Well, was he in the penitentiary down there?"
+
+"I think so--yes.  I believe it was for nothing really criminal,
+though.  There appears to have been some political-financial mix-up,
+from all I can learn."
+
+"And is he only forty, as the papers say?"
+
+"About that, I should judge.  Why?"
+
+"Oh, this scheme of his looks rather pretentious to me--holding up the
+old gas companies here.  Do you suppose he'll manage to do it?"
+
+"I don't know that.  All I know is what I have read in the papers,"
+replied Addison, cautiously.  As a matter of fact, he did not care to
+talk about this business at all.  Cowperwood was busy at this very
+time, through an agent, attempting to effect a compromise and union of
+all interests concerned.  It was not going very well.
+
+"Humph!" commented Schryhart.  He was wondering why men like himself,
+Merrill, Arneel, and others had not worked into this field long ago or
+bought out the old companies.  He went away interested, and a day or
+two later--even the next morning--had formulated a scheme.  Not unlike
+Cowperwood, he was a shrewd, hard, cold man. He believed in Chicago
+implicitly and in all that related to its future.  This gas situation,
+now that Cowperwood had seen the point, was very clear to him.  Even
+yet it might not be impossible for a third party to step in and by
+intricate manipulation secure the much coveted rewards.  Perhaps
+Cowperwood himself could be taken over--who could tell?
+
+Mr. Schryhart, being a very dominating type of person, did not believe
+in minor partnerships or investments.  If he went into a thing of this
+kind it was his preference to rule.  He decided to invite Cowperwood to
+visit the Schryhart office and talk matters over.  Accordingly, he had
+his secretary pen a note, which in rather lofty phrases invited
+Cowperwood to call "on a matter of importance."
+
+Now just at this time, it so chanced, Cowperwood was feeling rather
+secure as to his place in the Chicago financial world, although he was
+still smarting from the bitterness of the aspersions recently cast upon
+him from various quarters.  Under such circumstances it was his
+temperament to evince a rugged contempt for humanity, rich and poor
+alike.  He was well aware that Schryhart, although introduced, had
+never previously troubled to notice him.
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood begs me to say," wrote Miss Antoinette Nowak, at his
+dictation, "that he finds himself very much pressed for time at
+present, but he would be glad to see Mr. Schryhart at his office at any
+time."
+
+This irritated the dominating, self-sufficient Schryhart a little, but
+nevertheless he was satisfied that a conference could do no harm in
+this instance--was advisable, in fact.  So one Wednesday afternoon he
+journeyed to the office of Cowperwood, and was most hospitably received.
+
+"How do you do, Mr. Schryhart," observed Cowperwood, cordially,
+extending his hand.  "I'm glad to see you again.  I believe we met once
+before several years ago."
+
+"I think so myself," replied Mr. Schryhart, who was broad-shouldered,
+square-headed, black-eyed, and with a short black mustache gracing a
+firm upper lip.  He had hard, dark, piercing eyes.  "I see by the
+papers, if they can be trusted," he said, coming direct to the point,
+"that you are interesting yourself in local gas.  Is that true?"
+
+"I'm afraid the papers cannot be generally relied on," replied
+Cowperwood, quite blandly.  "Would you mind telling me what makes you
+interested to know whether I am or not?"
+
+"Well, to tell the truth," replied Schryhart, staring at the financier,
+"I am interested in this local gas situation myself. It offers a rather
+profitable field for investment, and several members of the old
+companies have come to me recently to ask me to help them combine."
+(This was not true at all.) "I have been wondering what chance you
+thought you had of winning along the lines you are now taking."
+
+Cowperwood smiled.  "I hardly care to discuss that," he said, "unless I
+know much more of your motives and connections than I do at present.
+Do I understand that you have really been appealed to by stockholders
+of the old companies to come in and help adjust this matter?"
+
+"Exactly," said Schryhart.
+
+"And you think you can get them to combine? On what basis?"
+
+"Oh, I should say it would be a simple matter to give each of them two
+or three shares of a new company for one in each of the old. We could
+then elect one set of officers, have one set of offices, stop all these
+suits, and leave everybody happy."
+
+He said this in an easy, patronizing way, as though Cowperwood had not
+really thought it all out years before.  It amazed the latter no little
+to see his own scheme patronizingly brought back to him, and that, too,
+by a very powerful man locally--one who thus far had chosen to overlook
+him utterly.
+
+"On what basis," asked Cowperwood, cautiously, "would you expect these
+new companies to come in?"
+
+"On the same basis as the others, if they are not too heavily
+capitalized.  I haven't thought out all the details.  Two or three for
+one, according to investment.  Of course, the prejudices of these old
+companies have to be considered."
+
+Cowperwood meditated.  Should or should he not entertain this offer?
+Here was a chance to realize quickly by selling out to the old
+companies.  Only Schryhart, not himself, would be taking the big end in
+this manipulative deal.  Whereas if he waited--even if Schryhart
+managed to combine the three old companies into one--he might be able
+to force better terms.  He was not sure.  Finally he asked, "How much
+stock of the new company would be left in your hands--or in the hands
+of the organizing group--after each of the old and new companies had
+been provided for on this basis?"
+
+"Oh, possibly thirty-five or forty per cent. of the whole," replied
+Schryhart, ingratiatingly.  "The laborer is worthy of his hire."
+
+"Quite so," replied Cowperwood, smiling, "but, seeing that I am the man
+who has been cutting the pole to knock this persimmon it seems to me
+that a pretty good share of that should come to me; don't you think so?"
+
+"Just what do you mean?"
+
+"Just what I have said.  I personally have organized the new companies
+which have made this proposed combination possible.  The plan you
+propose is nothing more than what I have been proposing for some time.
+The officers and directors of the old companies are angry at me merely
+because I am supposed to have invaded the fields that belong to them.
+Now, if on account of that they are willing to operate through you
+rather than through me, it seems to me that I should have a much larger
+share in the surplus.  My personal interest in these new companies is
+not very large.  I am really more of a fiscal agent than anything
+else." (This was not true, but Cowperwood preferred to have his guest
+think so.)
+
+Schryhart smiled.  "But, my dear sir," he explained, "you forget that I
+will be supplying nearly all the capital to do this."
+
+"You forget," retorted Cowperwood, "that I am not a novice.  I will
+guarantee to supply all the capital myself, and give you a good bonus
+for your services, if you want that.  The plants and franchises of the
+old and new companies are worth something.  You must remember that
+Chicago is growing."
+
+"I know that," replied Schryhart, evasively, "but I also know that you
+have a long, expensive fight ahead of you.  As things are now you
+cannot, of yourself, expect to bring these old companies to terms.
+They won't work with you, as I understand it.  It will require an
+outsider like myself--some one of influence, or perhaps, I had better
+say, of old standing in Chicago, some one who knows these people--to
+bring about this combination.  Have you any one, do you think, who can
+do it better than I?"
+
+"It is not at all impossible that I will find some one," replied
+Cowperwood, quite easily.
+
+"I hardly think so; certainly not as things are now.  The old companies
+are not disposed to work through you, and they are through me.  Don't
+you think you had better accept my terms and allow me to go ahead and
+close this matter up?"
+
+"Not at all on that basis," replied Cowperwood, quite simply.  "We have
+invaded the enemies' country too far and done too much.  Three for one
+or four for one--whatever terms are given the stockholders of the old
+companies--is the best I will do about the new shares, and I must have
+one-half of whatever is left for myself.  At that I will have to divide
+with others." (This was not true either.)
+
+"No," replied Schryhart, evasively and opposingly, shaking his square
+head.  "It can't be done.  The risks are too great.  I might allow you
+one-fourth, possibly--I can't tell yet."
+
+"One-half or nothing," said Cowperwood, definitely.
+
+Schryhart got up.  "That's the best you will do, is it?" he inquired.
+
+"The very best."
+
+"I'm afraid then," he said, "we can't come to terms.  I'm sorry. You
+may find this a rather long and expensive fight."
+
+"I have fully anticipated that," replied the financier.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+A New Retainer
+
+
+Cowperwood, who had rebuffed Schryhart so courteously but firmly, was
+to learn that he who takes the sword may well perish by the sword.  His
+own watchful attorney, on guard at the state capitol, where
+certificates of incorporation were issued in the city and village
+councils, in the courts and so forth, was not long in learning that a
+counter-movement of significance was under way. Old General Van Sickle
+was the first to report that something was in the wind in connection
+with the North Side company.  He came in late one afternoon, his dusty
+greatcoat thrown loosely about his shoulders, his small, soft hat low
+over his shaggy eyes, and in response to Cowperwood's "Evening,
+General, what can I do for you?" seated himself portentously.
+
+"I think you'll have to prepare for real rough weather in the future,
+Captain," he remarked, addressing the financier with a courtesy title
+that he had fallen in the habit of using.
+
+"What's the trouble now?" asked Cowperwood.
+
+"No real trouble as yet, but there may be.  Some one--I don't know
+who--is getting these three old companies together in one. There's a
+certificate of incorporation been applied for at Springfield for the
+United Gas and Fuel Company of Chicago, and there are some directors'
+meetings now going on at the Douglas Trust Company.  I got this from
+Duniway, who seems to have friends somewhere that know."
+
+Cowperwood put the ends of his fingers together in his customary way
+and began to tap them lightly and rhythmically.
+
+"Let me see--the Douglas Trust Company.  Mr. Simms is president of
+that.  He isn't shrewd enough to organize a thing of that kind. Who are
+the incorporators?"
+
+The General produced a list of four names, none of them officers or
+directors of the old companies.
+
+"Dummies, every one," said Cowperwood, succinctly.  "I think I know,"
+he said, after a few moments' reflection, "who is behind it, General;
+but don't let that worry you.  They can't harm us if they do unite.
+They're bound to sell out to us or buy us out eventually."
+
+Still it irritated him to think that Schryhart had succeeded in
+persuading the old companies to combine on any basis; he had meant to
+have Addison go shortly, posing as an outside party, and propose this
+very thing.  Schryhart, he was sure, had acted swiftly following their
+interview.  He hurried to Addison's office in the Lake National.
+
+"Have you heard the news?" exclaimed that individual, the moment
+Cowperwood appeared.  "They're planning to combine.  It's Schryhart. I
+was afraid of that.  Simms of the Douglas Trust is going to act as the
+fiscal agent.  I had the information not ten minutes ago."
+
+"So did I," replied Cowperwood, calmly.  "We should have acted a little
+sooner.  Still, it isn't our fault exactly.  Do you know the terms of
+agreement?"
+
+"They're going to pool their stock on a basis of three to one, with
+about thirty per cent. of the holding company left for Schryhart to
+sell or keep, as he wants to.  He guarantees the interest.  We did that
+for him--drove the game right into his bag."
+
+"Nevertheless," replied Cowperwood, "he still has us to deal with. I
+propose now that we go into the city council and ask for a blanket
+franchise.  It can be had.  If we should get it, it will bring them to
+their knees.  We will really be in a better position than they are with
+these smaller companies as feeders.  We can unite with ourselves."
+
+"That will take considerable money, won't it?"
+
+"Not so much.  We may never need to lay a pipe or build a plant. They
+will offer to sell out, buy, or combine before that.  We can fix the
+terms.  Leave it to me.  You don't happen to know by any chance this
+Mr. McKenty, who has so much say in local affairs here--John J.
+McKenty?"
+
+Cowperwood was referring to a man who was at once gambler, rumored
+owner or controller of a series of houses of prostitution, rumored
+maker of mayors and aldermen, rumored financial backer of many saloons
+and contracting companies--in short, the patron saint of the political
+and social underworld of Chicago, and who was naturally to be reckoned
+with in matters which related to the city and state legislative
+programme.
+
+"I don't," said Addison; "but I can get you a letter.  Why?"
+
+"Don't trouble to ask me that now.  Get me as strong an introduction as
+you can."
+
+"I'll have one for you to-day some time," replied Addison, efficiently.
+"I'll send it over to you."
+
+Cowperwood went out while Addison speculated as to this newest move.
+Trust Cowperwood to dig a pit into which the enemy might fall.  He
+marveled sometimes at the man's resourcefulness.  He never quarreled
+with the directness and incisiveness of Cowperwood's action.
+
+The man, McKenty, whom Cowperwood had in mind in this rather disturbing
+hour, was as interesting and forceful an individual as one would care
+to meet anywhere, a typical figure of Chicago and the West at the time.
+He was a pleasant, smiling, bland, affable person, not unlike
+Cowperwood in magnetism and subtlety, but different by a degree of
+animal coarseness (not visible on the surface) which Cowperwood would
+scarcely have understood, and in a kind of temperamental pull drawing
+to him that vast pathetic life of the underworld in which his soul
+found its solution.  There is a kind of nature, not artistic, not
+spiritual, in no way emotional, nor yet unduly philosophical, that is
+nevertheless a sphered content of life; not crystalline, perhaps, and
+yet not utterly dark--an agate temperament, cloudy and strange.  As a
+three-year-old child McKenty had been brought from Ireland by his
+emigrant parents during a period of famine.  He had been raised on the
+far South Side in a shanty which stood near a maze of railroad-tracks,
+and as a naked baby he had crawled on its earthen floor.  His father
+had been promoted to a section boss after working for years as a
+day-laborer on the adjoining railroad, and John, junior, one of eight
+other children, had been sent out early to do many things--to be an
+errand-boy in a store, a messenger-boy for a telegraph company, an
+emergency sweep about a saloon, and finally a bartender.  This last was
+his true beginning, for he was discovered by a keen-minded politician
+and encouraged to run for the state legislature and to study law.  Even
+as a stripling what things had he not learned--robbery, ballot-box
+stuffing, the sale of votes, the appointive power of leaders, graft,
+nepotism, vice exploitation--all the things that go to make up (or did)
+the American world of politics and financial and social strife.  There
+is a strong assumption in the upper walks of life that there is nothing
+to be learned at the bottom.  If you could have looked into the
+capacious but balanced temperament of John J. McKenty you would have
+seen a strange wisdom there and stranger memories--whole worlds of
+brutalities, tendernesses, errors, immoralities suffered, endured, even
+rejoiced in--the hardy, eager life of the animal that has nothing but
+its perceptions, instincts, appetites to guide it.  Yet the man had the
+air and the poise of a gentleman.
+
+To-day, at forty-eight, McKenty was an exceedingly important personage.
+His roomy house on the West Side, at Harrison Street and Ashland
+Avenue, was visited at sundry times by financiers, business men,
+office-holders, priests, saloon-keepers--in short, the whole range and
+gamut of active, subtle, political life.  From McKenty they could
+obtain that counsel, wisdom, surety, solution which all of them on
+occasion were anxious to have, and which in one deft way and
+another--often by no more than gratitude and an acknowledgment of his
+leadership--they were willing to pay for. To police captains and
+officers whose places he occasionally saved, when they should justly
+have been discharged; to mothers whose erring boys or girls he took out
+of prison and sent home again; to keepers of bawdy houses whom he
+protected from a too harsh invasion of the grafting propensities of the
+local police; to politicians and saloon-keepers who were in danger of
+being destroyed by public upheavals of one kind and another, he seemed,
+in hours of stress, when his smooth, genial, almost artistic face
+beamed on them, like a heaven-sent son of light, a kind of Western god,
+all-powerful, all-merciful, perfect.  On the other hand, there were
+ingrates, uncompromising or pharasaical religionists and reformers,
+plotting, scheming rivals, who found him deadly to contend with.  There
+were many henchmen--runners from an almost imperial throne--to do his
+bidding.  He was simple in dress and taste, married and (apparently)
+very happy, a professing though virtually non-practising Catholic, a
+suave, genial Buddha-like man, powerful and enigmatic.
+
+When Cowperwood and McKenty first met, it was on a spring evening at
+the latter's home.  The windows of the large house were pleasantly
+open, though screened, and the curtains were blowing faintly in a light
+air.  Along with a sense of the new green life everywhere came a breath
+of stock-yards.
+
+On the presentation of Addison's letter and of another, secured through
+Van Sickle from a well-known political judge, Cowperwood had been
+invited to call.  On his arrival he was offered a drink, a cigar,
+introduced to Mrs. McKenty--who, lacking an organized social life of
+any kind, was always pleased to meet these celebrities of the upper
+world, if only for a moment--and shown eventually into the library.
+Mrs. McKenty, as he might have observed if he had had the eye for it,
+was plump and fifty, a sort of superannuated Aileen, but still showing
+traces of a former hardy beauty, and concealing pretty well the
+evidences that she had once been a prostitute.  It so happened that on
+this particular evening McKenty was in a most genial frame of mind.
+There were no immediate political troubles bothering him just now.  It
+was early in May. Outside the trees were budding, the sparrows and
+robins were voicing their several moods.  A delicious haze was in the
+air, and some early mosquitoes were reconnoitering the screens which
+protected the windows and doors.  Cowperwood, in spite of his various
+troubles, was in a complacent state of mind himself.  He liked
+life--even its very difficult complications--perhaps its complications
+best of all.  Nature was beautiful, tender at times, but difficulties,
+plans, plots, schemes to unravel and make smooth--these things were
+what made existence worth while.
+
+"Well now, Mr. Cowperwood," McKenty began, when they finally entered
+the cool, pleasant library, "what can I do for you?"
+
+"Well, Mr. McKenty," said Cowperwood, choosing his words and bringing
+the finest resources of his temperament into play, "it isn't so much,
+and yet it is.  I want a franchise from the Chicago city council, and I
+want you to help me get it if you will.  I know you may say to me why
+not go to the councilmen direct.  I would do that, except that there
+are certain other elements--individuals--who might come to you.  It
+won't offend you, I know, when I say that I have always understood that
+you are a sort of clearing-house for political troubles in Chicago."
+
+Mr. McKenty smiled.  "That's flattering," he replied, dryly.
+
+"Now, I am rather new myself to Chicago," went on Cowperwood, softly.
+"I have been here only a year or two.  I come from Philadelphia.  I
+have been interested as a fiscal agent and an investor in several gas
+companies that have been organized in Lake View, Hyde Park, and
+elsewhere outside the city limits, as you may possibly have seen by the
+papers lately.  I am not their owner, in the sense that I have provided
+all or even a good part of the money invested in them.  I am not even
+their manager, except in a very general way.  I might better be called
+their promoter and guardian; but I am that for other people and myself."
+
+Mr. McKenty nodded.
+
+"Now, Mr. McKenty, it was not very long after I started out to get
+franchises to do business in Lake View and Hyde Park before I found
+myself confronted by the interests which control the three old city gas
+companies.  They were very much opposed to our entering the field in
+Cook County anywhere, as you may imagine, although we were not really
+crowding in on their field.  Since then they have fought me with
+lawsuits, injunctions, and charges of bribery and conspiracy."
+
+"I know," put in Mr. McKenty.  "I have heard something of it."
+
+"Quite so," replied Cowperwood.  "Because of their opposition I made
+them an offer to combine these three companies and the three new ones
+into one, take out a new charter, and give the city a uniform gas
+service.  They would not do that--largely because I was an outsider, I
+think.  Since then another person, Mr. Schryhart"--McKenty nodded--"who
+has never had anything to do with the gas business here, has stepped in
+and offered to combine them. His plan is to do exactly what I wanted to
+do; only his further proposition is, once he has the three old
+companies united, to invade this new gas field of ours and hold us up,
+or force us to sell by obtaining rival franchises in these outlying
+places.  There is talk of combining these suburbs with Chicago, as you
+know, which would allow these three down-town franchises to become
+mutually operative with our own.  This makes it essential for us to do
+one of several things, as you may see--either to sell out on the best
+terms we can now, or to continue the fight at a rather heavy expense
+without making any attempt to strike back, or to get into the city
+council and ask for a franchise to do business in the down-town
+section--a general blanket franchise to sell gas in Chicago alongside
+of the old companies--with the sole intention of protecting ourselves,
+as one of my officers is fond of saying," added Cowperwood, humorously.
+
+McKenty smiled again.  "I see," he said.  "Isn't that a rather large
+order, though, Mr. Cowperwood, seeking a new franchise? Do you suppose
+the general public would agree that the city needs an extra gas
+company? It's true the old companies haven't been any too generous.  My
+own gas isn't of the best." He smiled vaguely, prepared to listen
+further.
+
+"Now, Mr. McKenty, I know that you are a practical man," went on
+Cowperwood, ignoring this interruption, "and so am I.  I am not coming
+to you with any vague story concerning my troubles and expecting you to
+be interested as a matter of sympathy.  I realize that to go into the
+city council of Chicago with a legitimate proposition is one thing.  To
+get it passed and approved by the city authorities is another.  I need
+advice and assistance, and I am not begging it.  If I could get a
+general franchise, such as I have described, it would be worth a very
+great deal of money to me.  It would help me to close up and realize on
+these new companies which are entirely sound and needed.  It would help
+me to prevent the old companies from eating me up.  As a matter of
+fact, I must have such a franchise to protect my interests and give me
+a running fighting chance.  Now, I know that none of us are in politics
+or finance for our health.  If I could get such a franchise it would be
+worth from one-fourth to one-half of all I personally would make out of
+it, providing my plan of combining these new companies with the old
+ones should go through--say, from three to four hundred thousand
+dollars." (Here again Cowperwood was not quite frank, but safe.) "It is
+needless to say to you that I can command ample capital.  This
+franchise would do that.  Briefly, I want to know if you won't give me
+your political support in this matter and join in with me on the basis
+that I propose? I will make it perfectly clear to you beforehand who my
+associates are.  I will put all the data and details on the table
+before you so that you can see for yourself how things are.  If you
+should find at any time that I have misrepresented anything you are at
+full liberty, of course, to withdraw.  As I said before," he concluded,
+"I am not a beggar. I am not coming here to conceal any facts or to
+hide anything which might deceive you as to the worth of all this to
+us.  I want you to know the facts.  I want you to give me your aid on
+such terms as you think are fair and equitable.  Really the only
+trouble with me in this situation is that I am not a silk stocking.  If
+I were this gas war would have been adjusted long ago.  These gentlemen
+who are so willing to reorganize through Mr. Schryhart are largely
+opposed to me because I am--comparatively--a stranger in Chicago and
+not in their set.  If I were"--he moved his hand slightly--"I don't
+suppose I would be here this evening asking for your favor, although
+that does not say that I am not glad to be here, or that I would not be
+glad to work with you in any way that I might. Circumstances simply
+have not thrown me across your path before."
+
+As he talked his eye fixed McKenty steadily, almost innocently; and the
+latter, following him clearly, felt all the while that he was listening
+to a strange, able, dark, and very forceful man. There was no beating
+about the bush here, no squeamishness of spirit, and yet there was
+subtlety--the kind McKenty liked.  While he was amused by Cowperwood's
+casual reference to the silk stockings who were keeping him out, it
+appealed to him.  He caught the point of view as well as the intention
+of it.  Cowperwood represented a new and rather pleasing type of
+financier to him.  Evidently, he was traveling in able company if one
+could believe the men who had introduced him so warmly.  McKenty, as
+Cowperwood was well aware, had personally no interest in the old
+companies and also--though this he did not say--no particular sympathy
+with them.  They were just remote financial corporations to him, paying
+political tribute on demand, expecting political favors in return.
+Every few weeks now they were in council, asking for one gas-main
+franchise after another (special privileges in certain streets), asking
+for better (more profitable) light-contracts, asking for dock
+privileges in the river, a lower tax rate, and so forth and so on.
+McKenty did not pay much attention to these things personally.  He had
+a subordinate in council, a very powerful henchman by the name of
+Patrick Dowling, a meaty, vigorous Irishman and a true watch-dog of
+graft for the machine, who worked with the mayor, the city treasurer,
+the city tax receiver--in fact, all the officers of the current
+administration--and saw that such minor matters were properly
+equalized.  Mr. McKenty had only met two or three of the officers of
+the South Side Gas Company, and that quite casually.  He did not like
+them very well.  The truth was that the old companies were officered by
+men who considered politicians of the McKenty and Dowling stripe as
+very evil men; if they paid them and did other such wicked things it
+was because they were forced to do so.
+
+"Well," McKenty replied, lingering his thin gold watch-chain in a
+thoughtful manner, "that's an interesting scheme you have.  Of course
+the old companies wouldn't like your asking for a rival franchise, but
+once you had it they couldn't object very well, could they?" He smiled.
+Mr. McKenty spoke with no suggestion of a brogue.  "From one point of
+view it might be looked upon as bad business, but not entirely.  They
+would be sure to make a great cry, though they haven't been any too
+kind to the public themselves. But if you offered to combine with them
+I see no objection.  It's certain to be as good for them in the long
+run as it is for you. This merely permits you to make a better bargain."
+
+"Exactly," said Cowperwood.
+
+"And you have the means, you tell me, to lay mains in every part of the
+city, and fight with them for business if they won't give in?"
+
+"I have the means," said Cowperwood, "or if I haven't I can get them."
+
+Mr. McKenty looked at Mr. Cowperwood very solemnly.  There was a kind
+of mutual sympathy, understanding, and admiration between the two men,
+but it was still heavily veiled by self-interest.  To Mr. McKenty
+Cowperwood was interesting because he was one of the few business men
+he had met who were not ponderous, pharasaical, even hypocritical when
+they were dealing with him.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what I'll do, Mr. Cowperwood," he said, finally.
+"I'll take it all under consideration.  Let me think it over until
+Monday, anyhow.  There is more of an excuse now for the introduction of
+a general gas ordinance than there would be a little later--I can see
+that.  Why don't you draw up your proposed franchise and let me see it?
+Then we might find out what some of the other gentlemen of the city
+council think."
+
+Cowperwood almost smiled at the word "gentlemen."
+
+"I have already done that," he said.  "Here it is."
+
+McKenty took it, surprised and yet pleased at this evidence of business
+proficiency.  He liked a strong manipulator of this kind--the more
+since he was not one himself, and most of those that he did know were
+thin-blooded and squeamish.
+
+"Let me take this," he said.  "I'll see you next Monday again if you
+wish.  Come Monday."
+
+Cowperwood got up.  "I thought I'd come and talk to you direct, Mr.
+McKenty," he said, "and now I'm glad that I did.  You will find, if you
+will take the trouble to look into this matter, that it is just as I
+represent it.  There is a very great deal of money here in one way and
+another, though it will take some little time to work it out."
+
+Mr. McKenty saw the point.  "Yes," he said, sweetly, "to be sure."
+
+They looked into each other's eyes as they shook hands.
+
+"I'm not sure but you haven't hit upon a very good idea here,"
+concluded McKenty, sympathetically.  "A very good idea, indeed. Come
+and see me again next Monday, or about that time, and I'll let you know
+what I think.  Come any time you have anything else you want of me.
+I'll always be glad to see you.  It's a fine night, isn't it?" he
+added, looking out as they neared the door. "A nice moon that!" he
+added.  A sickle moon was in the sky.  "Good night."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+The Die is Cast
+
+
+The significance of this visit was not long in manifesting itself. At
+the top, in large affairs, life goes off into almost inexplicable
+tangles of personalities.  Mr. McKenty, now that the matter had been
+called to his attention, was interested to learn about this gas
+situation from all sides--whether it might not be more profitable to
+deal with the Schryhart end of the argument, and so on.  But his
+eventual conclusion was that Cowperwood's plan, as he had outlined it,
+was the most feasible for political purposes, largely because the
+Schryhart faction, not being in a position where they needed to ask the
+city council for anything at present, were so obtuse as to forget to
+make overtures of any kind to the bucaneering forces at the City Hall.
+
+When Cowperwood next came to McKenty's house the latter was in a
+receptive frame of mind.  "Well," he said, after a few genial
+preliminary remarks, "I've been learning what's going on.  Your
+proposition is fair enough.  Organize your company, and arrange your
+plan conditionally.  Then introduce your ordinance, and we'll see what
+can be done." They went into a long, intimate discussion as to how the
+forthcoming stock should be divided, how it was to be held in escrow by
+a favorite bank of Mr. McKenty's until the terms of the agreement under
+the eventual affiliation with the old companies or the new union
+company should be fulfilled, and details of that sort.  It was rather a
+complicated arrangement, not as satisfactory to Cowperwood as it might
+have been, but satisfactory in that it permitted him to win.  It
+required the undivided services of General Van Sickle, Henry De Soto
+Sippens, Kent Barrows McKibben, and Alderman Dowling for some little
+time.  But finally all was in readiness for the coup.
+
+On a certain Monday night, therefore, following the Thursday on which,
+according to the rules of the city council, an ordinance of this
+character would have to be introduced, the plan, after being publicly
+broached but this very little while, was quickly considered by the city
+council and passed.  There had been really no time for public
+discussion.  This was just the thing, of course, that Cowperwood and
+McKenty were trying to avoid.  On the day following the particular
+Thursday on which the ordinance had been broached in council as certain
+to be brought up for passage, Schryhart, through his lawyers and the
+officers of the old individual gas companies, had run to the newspapers
+and denounced the whole thing as plain robbery; but what were they to
+do? There was so little time for agitation.  True the newspapers,
+obedient to this larger financial influence, began to talk of "fair
+play to the old companies," and the uselessness of two large rival
+companies in the field when one would serve as well.  Still the public,
+instructed or urged by the McKenty agents to the contrary, were not
+prepared to believe it.  They had not been so well treated by the old
+companies as to make any outcry on their behalf.
+
+Standing outside the city council door, on the Monday evening when the
+bill was finally passed, Mr. Samuel Blackman, president of the South
+Side Gas Company, a little, wispy man with shoe-brush whiskers,
+declared emphatically:
+
+"This is a scoundrelly piece of business.  If the mayor signs that he
+should be impeached.  There is not a vote in there to-night that has
+not been purchased--not one.  This is a fine element of brigandage to
+introduce into Chicago; why, people who have worked years and years to
+build up a business are not safe!"
+
+"It's true, every word of it," complained Mr. Jordan Jules, president
+of the North Side company, a short, stout man with a head like an egg
+lying lengthwise, a mere fringe of hair, and hard, blue eyes. He was
+with Mr. Hudson Baker, tall and ambling, who was president of the West
+Chicago company.  All of these had come to protest.
+
+"It's that scoundrel from Philadelphia.  He's the cause of all our
+troubles.  It's high time the respectable business element of Chicago
+realized just what sort of a man they have to deal with in him.  He
+ought to be driven out of here.  Look at his Philadelphia record.  They
+sent him to the penitentiary down there, and they ought to do it here."
+
+Mr. Baker, very recently the guest of Schryhart, and his henchman, too,
+was also properly chagrined.  "The man is a charlatan," he protested to
+Blackman.  "He doesn't play fair.  It is plain that he doesn't belong
+in respectable society."
+
+Nevertheless, and in spite of this, the ordinance was passed.  It was a
+bitter lesson for Mr. Norman Schryhart, Mr. Norrie Simms, and all those
+who had unfortunately become involved.  A committee composed of all
+three of the old companies visited the mayor; but the latter, a tool of
+McKenty, giving his future into the hands of the enemy, signed it just
+the same.  Cowperwood had his franchise, and, groan as they might, it
+was now necessary, in the language of a later day, "to step up and see
+the captain." Only Schryhart felt personally that his score with
+Cowperwood was not settled. He would meet him on some other ground
+later.  The next time he would try to fight fire with fire.  But for
+the present, shrewd man that he was, he was prepared to compromise.
+
+Thereafter, dissembling his chagrin as best he could, he kept on the
+lookout for Cowperwood at both of the clubs of which he was a member;
+but Cowperwood had avoided them during this period of excitement, and
+Mahomet would have to go to the mountain.  So one drowsy June afternoon
+Mr. Schryhart called at Cowperwood's office. He had on a bright, new,
+steel-gray suit and a straw hat.  From his pocket, according to the
+fashion of the time, protruded a neat, blue-bordered silk handkerchief,
+and his feet were immaculate in new, shining Oxford ties.
+
+"I'm sailing for Europe in a few days, Mr. Cowperwood," he remarked,
+genially, "and I thought I'd drop round to see if you and I could reach
+some agreement in regard to this gas situation.  The officers of the
+old companies naturally feel that they do not care to have a rival in
+the field, and I'm sure that you are not interested in carrying on a
+useless rate war that won't leave anybody any profit. I recall that you
+were willing to compromise on a half-and-half basis with me before, and
+I was wondering whether you were still of that mind."
+
+"Sit down, sit down, Mr. Schryhart," remarked Cowperwood, cheerfully,
+waving the new-comer to a chair.  "I'm pleased to see you again. No,
+I'm no more anxious for a rate war than you are.  As a matter of fact,
+I hope to avoid it; but, as you see, things have changed somewhat since
+I saw you.  The gentlemen who have organized and invested their money
+in this new city gas company are perfectly willing--rather anxious, in
+fact--to go on and establish a legitimate business.  They feel all the
+confidence in the world that they can do this, and I agree with them.
+A compromise might be effected between the old and the new companies,
+but not on the basis on which I was willing to settle some time ago.  A
+new company has been organized since then, stock issued, and a great
+deal of money expended." (This was not true.) "That stock will have to
+figure in any new agreement.  I think a general union of all the
+companies is desirable, but it will have to be on a basis of one, two,
+three, or four shares--whatever is decided--at par for all stock
+involved."
+
+Mr. Schryhart pulled a long face.  "Don't you think that's rather
+steep?" he said, solemnly.
+
+"Not at all, not at all!" replied Cowperwood.  "You know these new
+expenditures were not undertaken voluntarily." (The irony of this did
+not escape Mr. Schryhart, but he said nothing.)
+
+"I admit all that, but don't you think, since your shares are worth
+practically nothing at present, that you ought to be satisfied if they
+were accepted at par?"
+
+"I can't see why," replied Cowperwood.  "Our future prospects are
+splendid.  There must be an even adjustment here or nothing.  What I
+want to know is how much treasury stock you would expect to have in the
+safe for the promotion of this new organization after all the old
+stockholders have been satisfied?"
+
+"Well, as I thought before, from thirty to forty per cent. of the total
+issue," replied Schryhart, still hopeful of a profitable adjustment.
+"I should think it could be worked on that basis."
+
+"And who gets that?"
+
+"Why, the organizer," said Schryhart, evasively.  "Yourself, perhaps,
+and myself."
+
+"And how would you divide it? Half and half, as before?"
+
+"I should think that would be fair."
+
+"It isn't enough," returned Cowperwood, incisively.  "Since I talked to
+you last I have been compelled to shoulder obligations and make
+agreements which I did not anticipate then.  The best I can do now is
+to accept three-fourths."
+
+Schryhart straightened up determinedly and offensively.  This was
+outrageous, he thought, impossible! The effrontery of it!
+
+"It can never be done, Mr. Cowperwood," he replied, forcefully. "You
+are trying to unload too much worthless stock on the company as it is.
+The old companies' stock is selling right now, as you know, for from
+one-fifty to two-ten.  Your stock is worth nothing. If you are to be
+given two or three for one for that, and three-fourths of the remainder
+in the treasury, I for one want nothing to do with the deal.  You would
+be in control of the company, and it will be water-logged, at that.
+Talk about getting something for nothing! The best I would suggest to
+the stockholders of the old companies would be half and half.  And I
+may say to you frankly, although you may not believe it, that the old
+companies will not join in with you in any scheme that gives you
+control. They are too much incensed.  Feeling is running too high.  It
+will mean a long, expensive fight, and they will never compromise. Now,
+if you have anything really reasonable to offer I would be glad to hear
+it.  Otherwise I am afraid these negotiations are not going to come to
+anything."
+
+"Share and share alike, and three-fourths of the remainder," repeated
+Cowperwood, grimly.  "I do not want to control.  If they want to raise
+the money and buy me out on that basis I am willing to sell.  I want a
+decent return for investments I have made, and I am going to have it.
+I cannot speak for the others behind me, but as long as they deal
+through me that is what they will expect."
+
+Mr. Schryhart went angrily away.  He was exceedingly wroth.  This
+proposition as Cowperwood now outlined it was bucaneering at its best.
+He proposed for himself to withdraw from the old companies if
+necessary, to close out his holdings and let the old companies deal
+with Cowperwood as best they could.  So long as he had anything to do
+with it, Cowperwood should never gain control of the gas situation.
+Better to take him at his suggestion, raise the money and buy him out,
+even at an exorbitant figure.  Then the old gas companies could go
+along and do business in their old-fashioned way without being
+disturbed.  This bucaneer! This upstart! What a shrewd, quick, forceful
+move he had made! It irritated Mr. Schryhart greatly.
+
+The end of all this was a compromise in which Cowperwood accepted
+one-half of the surplus stock of the new general issue, and two for one
+of every share of stock for which his new companies had been organized,
+at the same time selling out to the old companies--clearing out
+completely.  It was a most profitable deal, and he was enabled to
+provide handsomely not only for Mr. McKenty and Addison, but for all
+the others connected with him.  It was a splendid coup, as McKenty and
+Addison assured him.  Having now done so much, he began to turn his
+eyes elsewhere for other fields to conquer.
+
+But this victory in one direction brought with it corresponding
+reverses in another: the social future of Cowperwood and Aileen was now
+in great jeopardy.  Schryhart, who was a force socially, having met
+with defeat at the hands of Cowperwood, was now bitterly opposed to
+him.  Norrie Simms naturally sided with his old associates. But the
+worst blow came through Mrs. Anson Merrill.  Shortly after the
+housewarming, and when the gas argument and the conspiracy charges were
+rising to their heights, she had been to New York and had there chanced
+to encounter an old acquaintance of hers, Mrs. Martyn Walker, of
+Philadelphia, one of the circle which Cowperwood once upon a time had
+been vainly ambitious to enter.  Mrs. Merrill, aware of the interest
+the Cowperwoods had aroused in Mrs. Simms and others, welcomed the
+opportunity to find out something definite.
+
+"By the way, did you ever chance to hear of a Frank Algernon Cowperwood
+or his wife in Philadelphia?" she inquired of Mrs. Walker.
+
+"Why, my dear Nellie," replied her friend, nonplussed that a woman so
+smart as Mrs. Merrill should even refer to them, "have those people
+established themselves in Chicago? His career in Philadelphia was, to
+say the least, spectacular.  He was connected with a city treasurer
+there who stole five hundred thousand dollars, and they both went to
+the penitentiary.  That wasn't the worst of it! He became intimate with
+some young girl--a Miss Butler, the sister of Owen Butler, by the way,
+who is now such a power down there, and--" She merely lifted her eyes.
+"While he was in the penitentiary her father died and the family broke
+up.  I even heard it rumored that the old gentleman killed himself."
+(She was referring to Aileen's father, Edward Malia Butler.) "When he
+came out of the penitentiary Cowperwood disappeared, and I did hear
+some one say that he had gone West, and divorced his wife and married
+again. His first wife is still living in Philadelphia somewhere with
+his two children."
+
+Mrs. Merrill was properly astonished, but she did not show it. "Quite
+an interesting story, isn't it?" she commented, distantly, thinking how
+easy it would be to adjust the Cowperwood situation, and how pleased
+she was that she had never shown any interest in them.  "Did you ever
+see her--his new wife?"
+
+"I think so, but I forget where.  I believe she used to ride and drive
+a great deal in Philadelphia."
+
+"Did she have red hair?"
+
+"Oh yes.  She was a very striking blonde."
+
+"I fancy it must be the same person.  They have been in the papers
+recently in Chicago.  I wanted to be sure."
+
+Mrs. Merrill was meditating some fine comments to be made in the future.
+
+"I suppose now they're trying to get into Chicago society?" Mrs. Walker
+smiled condescendingly and contemptuously--as much at Chicago society
+as at the Cowperwoods.
+
+"It's possible that they might attempt something like that in the East
+and succeed--I'm sure I don't know," replied Mrs. Merrill, caustically,
+resenting the slur, "but attempting and achieving are quite different
+things in Chicago."
+
+The answer was sufficient.  It ended the discussion.  When next Mrs.
+Simms was rash enough to mention the Cowperwoods, or, rather, the
+peculiar publicity in connection with him, her future viewpoint was
+definitely fixed for her.
+
+"If you take my advice," commented Mrs. Merrill, finally, "the less you
+have to do with these friends of yours the better.  I know all about
+them.  You might have seen that from the first. They can never be
+accepted."
+
+Mrs. Merrill did not trouble to explain why, but Mrs. Simms through her
+husband soon learned the whole truth, and she was righteously indignant
+and even terrified.  Who was to blame for this sort of thing, anyhow?
+she thought.  Who had introduced them? The Addisons, of course.  But
+the Addisons were socially unassailable, if not all-powerful, and so
+the best had to be made of that.  But the Cowperwoods could be dropped
+from the lists of herself and her friends instantly, and that was now
+done.  A sudden slump in their social significance began to manifest
+itself, though not so swiftly but what for the time being it was
+slightly deceptive.
+
+The first evidence of change which Aileen observed was when the
+customary cards and invitations for receptions and the like, which had
+come to them quite freely of late, began to decline sharply in number,
+and when the guests to her own Wednesday afternoons, which rather
+prematurely she had ventured to establish, became a mere negligible
+handful.  At first she could not understand this, not being willing to
+believe that, following so soon upon her apparent triumph as a hostess
+in her own home, there could be so marked a decline in her local
+importance.  Of a possible seventy-five or fifty who might have called
+or left cards, within three weeks after the housewarming only twenty
+responded.  A week later it had declined to ten, and within five weeks,
+all told, there was scarcely a caller.  It is true that a very few of
+the unimportant--those who had looked to her for influence and the
+self-protecting Taylor Lord and Kent McKibben, who were commercially
+obligated to Cowperwood--were still faithful, but they were really
+worse than nothing. Aileen was beside herself with disappointment,
+opposition, chagrin, shame.  There are many natures, rhinoceros-bided
+and iron-souled, who can endure almost any rebuff in the hope of
+eventual victory, who are almost too thick-skinned to suffer, but hers
+was not one of these.  Already, in spite of her original daring in
+regard to the opinion of society and the rights of the former Mrs.
+Cowperwood, she was sensitive on the score of her future and what her
+past might mean to her.  Really her original actions could be
+attributed to her youthful passion and the powerful sex magnetism of
+Cowperwood. Under more fortunate circumstances she would have married
+safely enough and without the scandal which followed.  As it was now,
+her social future here needed to end satisfactorily in order to justify
+herself to herself, and, she thought, to him.
+
+"You may put the sandwiches in the ice-box," she said to Louis, the
+butler, after one of the earliest of the "at home" failures, referring
+to the undue supply of pink-and-blue-ribboned titbits which, uneaten,
+honored some fine Sevres with their presence. "Send the flowers to the
+hospital.  The servants may drink the claret cup and lemonade.  Keep
+some of the cakes fresh for dinner."
+
+The butler nodded his head.  "Yes, Madame," he said.  Then, by way of
+pouring oil on what appeared to him to be a troubled situation, he
+added: "Eet's a rough day.  I suppose zat has somepsing to do weeth it."
+
+Aileen was aflame in a moment.  She was about to exclaim: "Mind your
+business!" but changed her mind.  "Yes, I presume so," was her answer,
+as she ascended to her room.  If a single poor "at home" was to be
+commented on by servants, things were coming to a pretty pass.  She
+waited until the next week to see whether this was the weather or a
+real change in public sentiment.  It was worse than the one before.
+The singers she had engaged had to be dismissed without performing the
+service for which they had come.  Kent McKibben and Taylor Lord, very
+well aware of the rumors now flying about, called, but in a remote and
+troubled spirit.  Aileen saw that, too.  An affair of this kind, with
+only these two and Mrs. Webster Israels and Mrs. Henry Huddlestone
+calling, was a sad indication of something wrong.  She had to plead
+illness and excuse herself.  The third week, fearing a worse defeat
+than before, Aileen pretended to be ill.  She would see how many cards
+were left. There were just three.  That was the end.  She realized that
+her "at homes" were a notable failure.
+
+At the same time Cowperwood was not to be spared his share in the
+distrust and social opposition which was now rampant.
+
+His first inkling of the true state of affairs came in connection with
+a dinner which, on the strength of an old invitation, they
+unfortunately attended at a time when Aileen was still uncertain. It
+had been originally arranged by the Sunderland Sledds, who were not so
+much socially, and who at the time it occurred were as yet unaware of
+the ugly gossip going about, or at least of society's new attitude
+toward the Cowperwoods.  At this time it was understood by nearly
+all--the Simms, Candas, Cottons, and Kingslands--that a great mistake
+had been made, and that the Cowperwoods were by no means admissible.
+
+To this particular dinner a number of people, whom the latter knew, had
+been invited.  Uniformly all, when they learned or recalled that the
+Cowperwoods were expected, sent eleventh-hour regrets--"so sorry."
+Outside the Sledds there was only one other couple--the Stanislau
+Hoecksemas, for whom the Cowperwoods did not particularly care.  It was
+a dull evening.  Aileen complained of a headache, and they went home.
+
+Very shortly afterward, at a reception given by their neighbors, the
+Haatstaedts, to which they had long since been invited, there was an
+evident shyness in regard to them, quite new in its aspect, although
+the hosts themselves were still friendly enough.  Previous to this,
+when strangers of prominence had been present at an affair of this kind
+they were glad to be brought over to the Cowperwoods, who were always
+conspicuous because of Aileen's beauty.  On this day, for no reason
+obvious to Aileen or Cowperwood (although both suspected),
+introductions were almost uniformly refused.  There were a number who
+knew them, and who talked casually, but the general tendency on the
+part of all was to steer clear of them. Cowperwood sensed the
+difficulty at once.  "I think we'd better leave early," he remarked to
+Aileen, after a little while.  "This isn't very interesting."
+
+They returned to their own home, and Cowperwood to avoid discussion
+went down-town.  He did not care to say what he thought of this as yet.
+
+It was previous to a reception given by the Union League that the first
+real blow was struck at him personally, and that in a roundabout way.
+Addison, talking to him at the Lake National Bank one morning, had said
+quite confidentially, and out of a clear sky:
+
+"I want to tell you something, Cowperwood.  You know by now something
+about Chicago society.  You also know where I stand in regard to some
+things you told me about your past when I first met you. Well, there's
+a lot of talk going around about you now in regard to all that, and
+these two clubs to which you and I belong are filled with a lot of
+two-faced, double-breasted hypocrites who've been stirred up by this
+talk of conspiracy in the papers.  There are four or five stockholders
+of the old companies who are members, and they are trying to drive you
+out.  They've looked up that story you told me, and they're talking
+about filing charges with the house committees at both places.  Now,
+nothing can come of it in either case--they've been talking to me; but
+when this next reception comes along you'll know what to do.  They'll
+have to extend you an invitation; but they won't mean it." (Cowperwood
+understood.) "This whole thing is certain to blow over, in my judgment;
+it will if I have anything to do with it; but for the present--"
+
+He stared at Cowperwood in a friendly way.
+
+The latter smiled.  "I expected something like this, Judah, to tell you
+the truth," he said, easily.  "I've expected it all along. You needn't
+worry about me.  I know all about this.  I've seen which way the wind
+is blowing, and I know how to trim my sails."
+
+Addison reached out and took his hand.  "But don't resign, whatever you
+do," he said, cautiously.  "That would be a confession of weakness, and
+they don't expect you to.  I wouldn't want you to. Stand your ground.
+This whole thing will blow over.  They're jealous, I think."
+
+"I never intended to," replied Cowperwood.  "There's no legitimate
+charge against me.  I know it will all blow over if I'm given time
+enough." Nevertheless he was chagrined to think that he should be
+subjected to such a conversation as this with any one.
+
+Similarly in other ways "society"--so called--was quite able to enforce
+its mandates and conclusions.
+
+The one thing that Cowperwood most resented, when he learned of it much
+later, was a snub direct given to Aileen at the door of the Norrie
+Simmses'; she called there only to be told that Mrs. Simms was not at
+home, although the carriages of others were in the street.  A few days
+afterward Aileen, much to his regret and astonishment--for he did not
+then know the cause--actually became ill.
+
+If it had not been for Cowperwood's eventual financial triumph over all
+opposition--the complete routing of the enemy--in the struggle for
+control in the gas situation--the situation would have been hard,
+indeed.  As it was, Aileen suffered bitterly; she felt that the slight
+was principally directed at her, and would remain in force.  In the
+privacy of their own home they were compelled eventually to admit, the
+one to the other, that their house of cards, resplendent and forceful
+looking as it was, had fallen to the ground.  Personal confidences
+between people so closely united are really the most trying of all.
+Human souls are constantly trying to find each other, and rarely
+succeeding.
+
+"You know," he finally said to her once, when he came in rather
+unexpectedly and found her sick in bed, her eyes wet, and her maid
+dismissed for the day, "I understand what this is all about.  To tell
+you the truth, Aileen, I rather expected it.  We have been going too
+fast, you and I.  We have been pushing this matter too hard.  Now, I
+don't like to see you taking it this way, dear. This battle isn't lost.
+Why, I thought you had more courage than this.  Let me tell you
+something which you don't seem to remember. Money will solve all this
+sometime.  I'm winning in this fight right now, and I'll win in others.
+They are coming to me.  Why, dearie, you oughtn't to despair.  You're
+too young.  I never do. You'll win yet.  We can adjust this matter
+right here in Chicago, and when we do we will pay up a lot of scores at
+the same time. We're rich, and we're going to be richer.  That will
+settle it. Now put on a good face and look pleased; there are plenty of
+things to live for in this world besides society.  Get up now and
+dress, and we'll go for a drive and dinner down-town.  You have me yet.
+Isn't that something?"
+
+"Oh yes," sighed Aileen, heavily; but she sank back again.  She put her
+arms about his neck and cried, as much out of joy over the consolation
+he offered as over the loss she had endured.  "It was as much for you
+as for me," she sighed.
+
+"I know that," he soothed; "but don't worry about it now.  You will
+come out all right.  We both will.  Come, get up." Nevertheless, he was
+sorry to see her yield so weakly.  It did not please him. He resolved
+some day to have a grim adjustment with society on this score.
+Meanwhile Aileen was recovering her spirits.  She was ashamed of her
+weakness when she saw how forcefully he faced it all.
+
+"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, finally, "you're always so wonderful.
+You're such a darling."
+
+"Never mind," he said, cheerfully.  "If we don't win this game here in
+Chicago, we will somewhere."
+
+He was thinking of the brilliant manner in which he had adjusted his
+affairs with the old gas companies and Mr. Schryhart, and how
+thoroughly he would handle some other matters when the time came.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+Undercurrents
+
+
+It was during the year that followed their social repudiation, and the
+next and the next, that Cowperwood achieved a keen realization of what
+it would mean to spend the rest of his days in social isolation, or at
+least confined in his sources of entertainment to a circle or element
+which constantly reminded him of the fact that he was not identified
+with the best, or, at least, not the most significant, however dull
+that might be.  When he had first attempted to introduce Aileen into
+society it was his idea that, however tame they might chance to find it
+to begin with, they themselves, once admitted, could make it into
+something very interesting and even brilliant.  Since the time the
+Cowperwoods had been repudiated, however, they had found it necessary,
+if they wished any social diversion at all, to fall back upon such
+various minor elements as they could scrape an acquaintance
+with--passing actors and actresses, to whom occasionally they could
+give a dinner; artists and singers whom they could invite to the house
+upon gaining an introduction; and, of course, a number of the socially
+unimportant, such as the Haatstaedts, Hoecksemas, Videras, Baileys, and
+others still friendly and willing to come in a casual way.  Cowperwood
+found it interesting from time to time to invite a business friend, a
+lover of pictures, or some young artist to the house to dinner or for
+the evening, and on these occasions Aileen was always present.  The
+Addisons called or invited them occasionally.  But it was a dull game,
+the more so since their complete defeat was thus all the more plainly
+indicated.
+
+This defeat, as Cowperwood kept reflecting, was really not his fault at
+all.  He had been getting along well enough personally. If Aileen had
+only been a somewhat different type of woman! Nevertheless, he was in
+no way prepared to desert or reproach her. She had clung to him through
+his stormy prison days.  She had encouraged him when he needed
+encouragement.  He would stand by her and see what could be done a
+little later; but this ostracism was a rather dreary thing to endure.
+Besides, personally, he appeared to be becoming more and more
+interesting to men and to women.  The men friends he had made he
+retained--Addison, Bailey, Videra, McKibben, Rambaud, and others.
+There were women in society, a number of them, who regretted his
+disappearance if not that of Aileen.  Occasionally the experiment would
+be tried of inviting him without his wife.  At first he refused
+invariably; later he went alone occasionally to a dinner-party without
+her knowledge.
+
+It was during this interregnum that Cowperwood for the first time
+clearly began to get the idea that there was a marked difference
+between him and Aileen intellectually and spiritually; and that while
+he might be in accord with her in many ways--emotionally, physically,
+idyllicly--there were, nevertheless, many things which he could do
+alone which she could not do--heights to which he could rise where she
+could not possibly follow.  Chicago society might be a negligible
+quantity, but he was now to contrast her sharply with the best of what
+the Old World had to offer in the matter of femininity, for following
+their social expulsion in Chicago and his financial victory, he once
+more decided to go abroad.  In Rome, at the Japanese and Brazilian
+embassies (where, because of his wealth, he gained introduction), and
+at the newly established Italian Court, he encountered at a distance
+charming social figures of considerable significance--Italian
+countesses, English ladies of high degree, talented American women of
+strong artistic and social proclivities.  As a rule they were quick to
+recognize the charm of his manner, the incisiveness and grip of his
+mind, and to estimate at all its worth the high individuality of his
+soul; but he could also always see that Aileen was not so acceptable.
+She was too rich in her entourage, too showy.  Her glowing health and
+beauty was a species of affront to the paler, more sublimated souls of
+many who were not in themselves unattractive.
+
+"Isn't that the typical American for you," he heard a woman remark, at
+one of those large, very general court receptions to which so many are
+freely admitted, and to which Aileen had been determined to go.  He was
+standing aside talking to an acquaintance he had made--an
+English-speaking Greek banker stopping at the Grand Hotel--while Aileen
+promenaded with the banker's wife.  The speaker was an Englishwoman.
+"So gaudy, so self-conscious, and so naive!"
+
+Cowperwood turned to look.  It was Aileen, and the lady speaking was
+undoubtedly well bred, thoughtful, good-looking.  He had to admit that
+much that she said was true, but how were you to gage a woman like
+Aileen, anyhow? She was not reprehensible in any way--just a
+full-blooded animal glowing with a love of life.  She was attractive to
+him.  It was too bad that people of obviously more conservative
+tendencies were so opposed to her.  Why could they not see what he
+saw--a kind of childish enthusiasm for luxury and show which sprang,
+perhaps, from the fact that in her youth she had not enjoyed the social
+opportunities which she needed and longed for.  He felt sorry for her.
+At the same time he was inclined to feel that perhaps now another type
+of woman would be better for him socially.  If he had a harder type,
+one with keener artistic perceptions and a penchant for just the right
+social touch or note, how much better he would do! He came home
+bringing a Perugino, brilliant examples of Luini, Previtali, and
+Pinturrichio (this last a portrait of Caesar Borgia), which he picked
+up in Italy, to say nothing of two red African vases of great size that
+he found in Cairo, a tall gilt Louis Fifteenth standard of carved wood
+that he discovered in Rome, two ornate candelabra from Venice for his
+walls, and a pair of Italian torcheras from Naples to decorate the
+corners of his library.  It was thus by degrees that his art collection
+was growing.
+
+At the same time it should be said, in the matter of women and the sex
+question, his judgment and views had begun to change tremendously. When
+he had first met Aileen he had many keen intuitions regarding life and
+sex, and above all clear faith that he had a right to do as he pleased.
+Since he had been out of prison and once more on his upward way there
+had been many a stray glance cast in his direction; he had so often had
+it clearly forced upon him that he was fascinating to women.  Although
+he had only so recently acquired Aileen legally, yet she was years old
+to him as a mistress, and the first engrossing--it had been almost
+all-engrossing--enthusiasm was over.  He loved her not only for her
+beauty, but for her faithful enthusiasm; but the power of others to
+provoke in him a momentary interest, and passion even, was something
+which he did not pretend to understand, explain, or moralize about.  So
+it was and so he was.  He did not want to hurt Aileen's feelings by
+letting her know that his impulses thus wantonly strayed to others, but
+so it was.
+
+Not long after he had returned from the European trip he stopped one
+afternoon in the one exclusive drygoods store in State Street to
+purchase a tie.  As he was entering a woman crossed the aisle before
+him, from one counter to another--a type of woman which he was coming
+to admire, but only from a rather distant point of view, seeing them
+going here and there in the world.  She was a dashing type, essentially
+smart and trig, with a neat figure, dark hair and eyes, an olive skin,
+small mouth, quaint nose--all in all quite a figure for Chicago at the
+time.  She had, furthermore, a curious look of current wisdom in her
+eyes, an air of saucy insolence which aroused Cowperwood's sense of
+mastery, his desire to dominate. To the look of provocation and
+defiance which she flung him for the fraction of a second he returned a
+curiously leonine glare which went over her like a dash of cold water.
+It was not a hard look, however, merely urgent and full of meaning.
+She was the vagrom-minded wife of a prosperous lawyer who was absorbed
+in his business and in himself.  She pretended indifference for a
+moment after the first glance, but paused a little way off as if to
+examine some laces.  Cowperwood looked after her to catch a second
+fleeting, attracted look.  He was on his way to several engagements
+which he did not wish to break, but he took out a note-book, wrote on a
+slip of paper the name of a hotel, and underneath: "Parlor, second
+floor, Tuesday, 1 P.M." Passing by where she stood, he put it into her
+gloved hand, which was hanging by her side.  The fingers closed over it
+automatically.  She had noted his action.  On the day and hour
+suggested she was there, although he had given no name.  That liaison,
+while delightful to him, was of no great duration.  The lady was
+interesting, but too fanciful.
+
+Similarly, at the Henry Huddlestones', one of their neighbors at the
+first Michigan Avenue house they occupied, he encountered one evening
+at a small dinner-party a girl of twenty-three who interested him
+greatly--for the moment.  Her name was not very attractive--Ella F.
+Hubby, as he eventually learned--but she was not unpleasing. Her
+principal charm was a laughing, hoydenish countenance and roguish eyes.
+She was the daughter of a well-to-do commission merchant in South Water
+Street.  That her interest should have been aroused by that of
+Cowperwood in her was natural enough.  She was young, foolish,
+impressionable, easily struck by the glitter of a reputation, and Mrs.
+Huddlestone had spoken highly of Cowperwood and his wife and the great
+things he was doing or was going to do. When Ella saw him, and saw that
+he was still young-looking, with the love of beauty in his eyes and a
+force of presence which was not at all hard where she was concerned,
+she was charmed; and when Aileen was not looking her glance kept
+constantly wandering to his with a laughing signification of friendship
+and admiration.  It was the most natural thing in the world for him to
+say to her, when they had adjourned to the drawing-room, that if she
+were in the neighborhood of his office some day she might care to look
+in on him.  The look he gave her was one of keen understanding, and
+brought a look of its own kind, warm and flushing, in return.  She
+came, and there began a rather short liaison.  It was interesting but
+not brilliant.  The girl did not have sufficient temperament to bind
+him beyond a period of rather idle investigation.
+
+There was still, for a little while, another woman, whom he had
+known--a Mrs. Josephine Ledwell, a smart widow, who came primarily to
+gamble on the Board of Trade, but who began to see at once, on
+introduction, the charm of a flirtation with Cowperwood.  She was a
+woman not unlike Aileen in type, a little older, not so good-looking,
+and of a harder, more subtle commercial type of mind.  She rather
+interested Cowperwood because she was so trig, self-sufficient, and
+careful.  She did her best to lure him on to a liaison with her, which
+finally resulted, her apartment on the North Side being the center of
+this relationship.  It lasted perhaps six weeks. Through it all he was
+quite satisfied that he did not like her so very well.  Any one who
+associated with him had Aileen's present attractiveness to contend
+with, as well as the original charm of his first wife.  It was no easy
+matter.
+
+It was during this period of social dullness, however, which somewhat
+resembled, though it did not exactly parallel his first years with his
+first wife, that Cowperwood finally met a woman who was destined to
+leave a marked impression on his life.  He could not soon forget her.
+Her name was Rita Sohlberg.  She was the wife of Harold Sohlberg, a
+Danish violinist who was then living in Chicago, a very young man; but
+she was not a Dane, and he was by no means a remarkable violinist,
+though he had unquestionably the musical temperament.
+
+You have perhaps seen the would-be's, the nearly's, the pretenders in
+every field--interesting people all--devoted with a kind of mad
+enthusiasm to the thing they wish to do.  They manifest in some ways
+all the externals or earmarks of their professional traditions, and yet
+are as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.  You would have had to know
+Harold Sohlberg only a little while to appreciate that he belonged to
+this order of artists.  He had a wild, stormy, November eye, a wealth
+of loose, brownish-black hair combed upward from the temples, with one
+lock straggling Napoleonically down toward the eyes; cheeks that had
+almost a babyish tint to them; lips much too rich, red, and sensuous; a
+nose that was fine and large and full, but only faintly aquiline; and
+eyebrows and mustache that somehow seemed to flare quite like his
+errant and foolish soul.  He had been sent away from Denmark
+(Copenhagen) because he had been a never-do-well up to twenty-five and
+because he was constantly falling in love with women who would not have
+anything to do with him.  Here in Chicago as a teacher, with his small
+pension of forty dollars a month sent him by his mother, he had gained
+a few pupils, and by practising a kind of erratic economy, which kept
+him well dressed or hungry by turns, he had managed to make an
+interesting showing and pull himself through.  He was only twenty-eight
+at the time he met Rita Greenough, of Wichita, Kansas, and at the time
+they met Cowperwood Harold was thirty-four and she twenty-seven.
+
+She had been a student at the Chicago Fine Arts School, and at various
+student affairs had encountered Harold when he seemed to play divinely,
+and when life was all romance and art.  Given the spring, the sunshine
+on the lake, white sails of ships, a few walks and talks on pensive
+afternoons when the city swam in a golden haze, and the thing was done.
+There was a sudden Saturday afternoon marriage, a runaway day to
+Milwaukee, a return to the studio now to be fitted out for two, and
+then kisses, kisses, kisses until love was satisfied or eased.
+
+But life cannot exist on that diet alone, and so by degrees the
+difficulties had begun to manifest themselves.  Fortunately, the latter
+were not allied with sharp financial want.  Rita was not poor.  Her
+father conducted a small but profitable grain elevator at Wichita, and,
+after her sudden marriage, decided to continue her allowance, though
+this whole idea of art and music in its upper reaches was to him a
+strange, far-off, uncertain thing.  A thin, meticulous, genial person
+interested in small trade opportunities, and exactly suited to the
+rather sparse social life of Wichita, he found Harold as curious as a
+bomb, and preferred to handle him gingerly.  Gradually, however, being
+a very human if simple person, he came to be very proud of it--boasted
+in Wichita of Rita and her artist husband, invited them home to astound
+the neighbors during the summer-time, and the fall brought his almost
+farmer-like wife on to see them and to enjoy trips, sight-seeing,
+studio teas.  It was amusing, typically American, naive, almost
+impossible from many points of view.
+
+Rita Sohlberg was of the semi-phlegmatic type, soft, full-blooded, with
+a body that was going to be fat at forty, but which at present was
+deliciously alluring.  Having soft, silky, light-brown hair, the color
+of light dust, and moist gray-blue eyes, with a fair skin and even,
+white teeth, she was flatteringly self-conscious of her charms.  She
+pretended in a gay, childlike way to be unconscious of the thrill she
+sent through many susceptible males, and yet she knew well enough all
+the while what she was doing and how she was doing it; it pleased her
+so to do.  She was conscious of the wonder of her smooth, soft arms and
+neck, the fullness and seductiveness of her body, the grace and
+perfection of her clothing, or, at least, the individuality and taste
+which she made them indicate.  She could take an old straw-hat form, a
+ribbon, a feather, or a rose, and with an innate artistry of feeling
+turn it into a bit of millinery which somehow was just the effective
+thing for her. She chose naive combinations of white and blues, pinks
+and white, browns and pale yellows, which somehow suggested her own
+soul, and topped them with great sashes of silky brown (or even red)
+ribbon tied about her waist, and large, soft-brimmed, face-haloing
+hats. She was a graceful dancer, could sing a little, could play
+feelingly--sometimes brilliantly--and could draw.  Her art was a
+makeshift, however; she was no artist.  The most significant thing
+about her was her moods and her thoughts, which were uncertain, casual,
+anarchic.  Rita Sohlberg, from the conventional point of view, was a
+dangerous person, and yet from her own point of view at this time she
+was not so at all--just dreamy and sweet.
+
+A part of the peculiarity of her state was that Sohlberg had begun to
+disappoint Rita--sorely.  Truth to tell, he was suffering from that
+most terrible of all maladies, uncertainty of soul and inability to
+truly find himself.  At times he was not sure whether he was cut out to
+be a great violinist or a great composer, or merely a great teacher,
+which last he was never willing really to admit. "I am an arteest," he
+was fond of saying.  "Ho, how I suffer from my temperament!" And again:
+"These dogs! These cows! These pigs!" This of other people.  The
+quality of his playing was exceedingly erratic, even though at times it
+attained to a kind of subtlety, tenderness, awareness, and charm which
+brought him some attention. As a rule, however, it reflected the
+chaotic state of his own brain.  He would play violently, feverishly,
+with a wild passionateness of gesture which robbed him of all ability
+to control his own technic.
+
+"Oh, Harold!" Rita used to exclaim at first, ecstatically.  Later she
+was not so sure.
+
+Life and character must really get somewhere to be admirable, and
+Harold, really and truly, did not seem to be getting anywhere. He
+taught, stormed, dreamed, wept; but he ate his three meals a day, Rita
+noticed, and he took an excited interest at times in other women.  To
+be the be-all and end-all of some one man's life was the least that
+Rita could conceive or concede as the worth of her personality, and so,
+as the years went on and Harold began to be unfaithful, first in moods,
+transports, then in deeds, her mood became dangerous.  She counted them
+up--a girl music pupil, then an art student, then the wife of a banker
+at whose house Harold played socially.  There followed strange, sullen
+moods on the part of Rita, visits home, groveling repentances on the
+part of Harold, tears, violent, passionate reunions, and then the same
+thing over again.  What would you?
+
+Rita was not jealous of Harold any more; she had lost faith in his
+ability as a musician.  But she was disappointed that her charms were
+not sufficient to blind him to all others.  That was the fly in the
+ointment.  It was an affront to her beauty, and she was still
+beautiful.  She was unctuously full-bodied, not quite so tall as
+Aileen, not really as large, but rounder and plumper, softer and more
+seductive.  Physically she was not well set up, so vigorous; but her
+eyes and mouth and the roving character of her mind held a strange
+lure.  Mentally she was much more aware than Aileen, much more precise
+in her knowledge of art, music, literature, and current events; and in
+the field of romance she was much more vague and alluring.  She knew
+many things about flowers, precious stones, insects, birds, characters
+in fiction, and poetic prose and verse generally.
+
+At the time the Cowperwoods first met the Sohlbergs the latter still
+had their studio in the New Arts Building, and all was seemingly as
+serene as a May morning, only Harold was not getting along very well.
+He was drifting.  The meeting was at a tea given by the Haatstaedts,
+with whom the Cowperwoods were still friendly, and Harold played.
+Aileen, who was there alone, seeing a chance to brighten her own life a
+little, invited the Sohlbergs, who seemed rather above the average, to
+her house to a musical evening.  They came.
+
+On this occasion Cowperwood took one look at Sohlberg and placed him
+exactly.  "An erratic, emotional temperament," he thought. "Probably
+not able to place himself for want of consistency and application." But
+he liked him after a fashion.  Sohlberg was interesting as an artistic
+type or figure--quite like a character in a Japanese print might be.
+He greeted him pleasantly.
+
+"And Mrs. Sohlberg, I suppose," he remarked, feelingly, catching a
+quick suggestion of the rhythm and sufficiency and naive taste that
+went with her.  She was in simple white and blue--small blue ribbons
+threaded above lacy flounces in the skin.  Her arms and throat were
+deliciously soft and bare.  Her eyes were quick, and yet soft and
+babyish--petted eyes.
+
+"You know," she said to him, with a peculiar rounded formation of the
+mouth, which was a characteristic of her when she talked--a pretty,
+pouty mouth, "I thought we would never get heah at all. There was a
+fire"--she pronounced it fy-yah--"at Twelfth Street" (the Twelfth was
+Twalfth in her mouth) "and the engines were all about there.  Oh, such
+sparks and smoke! And the flames coming out of the windows! The flames
+were a very dark red--almost orange and black.  They're pretty when
+they're that way--don't you think so?"
+
+Cowperwood was charmed.  "Indeed, I do," he said, genially, using a
+kind of superior and yet sympathetic air which he could easily assume
+on occasion.  He felt as though Mrs. Sohlberg might be a charming
+daughter to him--she was so cuddling and shy--and yet he could see that
+she was definite and individual.  Her arms and face, he told himself,
+were lovely.  Mrs. Sohlberg only saw before her a smart, cold, exact
+man--capable, very, she presumed--with brilliant, incisive eyes.  How
+different from Harold, she thought, who would never be anything
+much--not even famous.
+
+"I'm so glad you brought your violin," Aileen was saying to Harold, who
+was in another corner.  "I've been looking forward to your coming to
+play for us."
+
+"Very nize ov you, I'm sure," Sohlberg replied, with his sweety drawl.
+"Such a nize plaze you have here--all these loafly books, and jade, and
+glass."
+
+He had an unctuous, yielding way which was charming, Aileen thought. He
+should have a strong, rich woman to take care of him.  He was like a
+stormy, erratic boy.
+
+After refreshments were served Sohlberg played.  Cowperwood was
+interested by his standing figure--his eyes, his hair--but he was much
+more interested in Mrs. Sohlberg, to whom his look constantly strayed.
+He watched her hands on the keys, her fingers, the dimples at her
+elbows.  What an adorable mouth, he thought, and what light, fluffy
+hair! But, more than that, there was a mood that invested it all--a bit
+of tinted color of the mind that reached him and made him sympathetic
+and even passionate toward her.  She was the kind of woman he would
+like.  She was somewhat like Aileen when she was six years younger
+(Aileen was now thirty-three, and Mrs. Sohlberg twenty-seven), only
+Aileen had always been more robust, more vigorous, less nebulous.  Mrs.
+Sohlberg (he finally thought it out for himself) was like the rich
+tinted interior of a South Sea oyster-shell--warm, colorful, delicate.
+But there was something firm there, too.  Nowhere in society had he
+seen any one like her. She was rapt, sensuous, beautiful.  He kept his
+eyes on her until finally she became aware that he was gazing at her,
+and then she looked back at him in an arch, smiling way, fixing her
+mouth in a potent line.  Cowperwood was captivated.  Was she
+vulnerable? was his one thought.  Did that faint smile mean anything
+more than mere social complaisance? Probably not, but could not a
+temperament so rich and full be awakened to feeling by his own? When
+she was through playing he took occasion to say: "Wouldn't you like to
+stroll into the gallery? Are you fond of pictures?" He gave her his arm.
+
+"Now, you know," said Mrs. Sohlberg, quaintly--very captivatingly, he
+thought, because she was so pretty--"at one time I thought I was going
+to be a great artist.  Isn't that funny! I sent my father one of my
+drawings inscribed 'to whom I owe it all.' You would have to see the
+drawing to see how funny that is."
+
+She laughed softly.
+
+Cowperwood responded with a refreshed interest in life.  Her laugh was
+as grateful to him as a summer wind.  "See," he said, gently, as they
+entered the room aglow with the soft light produced by guttered jets,
+"here is a Luini bought last winter." It was "The Mystic Marriage of
+St. Catharine." He paused while she surveyed the rapt expression of the
+attenuated saint.  "And here," he went on, "is my greatest find so
+far." They were before the crafty countenance of Caesar Borgia painted
+by Pinturrichio.
+
+"What a strange face!" commented Mrs. Sohlberg, naively.  "I didn't
+know any one had ever painted him.  He looks somewhat like an artist
+himself, doesn't he?" She had never read the involved and quite Satanic
+history of this man, and only knew the rumor of his crimes and
+machinations.
+
+"He was, in his way," smiled Cowperwood, who had had an outline of his
+life, and that of his father, Pope Alexander VI., furnished him at the
+time of the purchase.  Only so recently had his interest in Caesar
+Borgia begun.  Mrs. Sohlberg scarcely gathered the sly humor of it.
+
+"Oh yes, and here is Mrs. Cowperwood," she commented, turning to the
+painting by Van Beers.  "It's high in key, isn't it?" she said,
+loftily, but with an innocent loftiness that appealed to him.  He liked
+spirit and some presumption in a woman.  "What brilliant colors! I like
+the idea of the garden and the clouds."
+
+She stepped back, and Cowperwood, interested only in her, surveyed the
+line of her back and the profile of her face.  Such co-ordinated
+perfection of line and color!
+
+"Where every motion weaves and sings," he might have commented. Instead
+he said: "That was in Brussels.  The clouds were an afterthought, and
+that vase on the wall, too."
+
+"It's very good, I think," commented Mrs. Sohlberg, and moved away.
+
+"How do you like this Israels?" he asked.  It was the painting called
+"The Frugal Meal."
+
+"I like it," she said, "and also your Bastien Le-Page," referring to
+"The Forge." "But I think your old masters are much more interesting.
+If you get many more you ought to put them together in a room.  Don't
+you think so? I don't care for your Gerome very much." She had a cute
+drawl which he considered infinitely alluring.
+
+"Why not?" asked Cowperwood.
+
+"Oh, it's rather artificial; don't you think so? I like the color, but
+the women's bodies are too perfect, I should say.  It's very pretty,
+though."
+
+He had little faith in the ability of women aside from their value as
+objects of art; and yet now and then, as in this instance, they
+revealed a sweet insight which sharpened his own.  Aileen, he
+reflected, would not be capable of making a remark such as this. She
+was not as beautiful now as this woman--not as alluringly simple,
+naive, delicious, nor yet as wise.  Mrs. Sohlberg, he reflected
+shrewdly, had a kind of fool for a husband.  Would she take an interest
+in him, Frank Cowperwood? Would a woman like this surrender on any
+basis outside of divorce and marriage? He wondered. On her part, Mrs.
+Sohlberg was thinking what a forceful man Cowperwood was, and how close
+he had stayed by her.  She felt his interest, for she had often seen
+these symptoms in other men and knew what they meant.  She knew the
+pull of her own beauty, and, while she heightened it as artfully as she
+dared, yet she kept aloof, too, feeling that she had never met any one
+as yet for whom it was worth while to be different.  But Cowperwood--he
+needed someone more soulful than Aileen, she thought.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+A New Affection
+
+
+The growth of a relationship between Cowperwood and Rita Sohlberg was
+fostered quite accidentally by Aileen, who took a foolishly sentimental
+interest in Harold which yet was not based on anything of real meaning.
+She liked him because he was a superlatively gracious, flattering,
+emotional man where women--pretty women--were concerned.  She had some
+idea she could send him pupils, and, anyhow, it was nice to call at the
+Sohlberg studio.  Her social life was dull enough as it was.  So she
+went, and Cowperwood, mindful of Mrs. Sohlberg, came also.  Shrewd to
+the point of destruction, he encouraged Aileen in her interest in them.
+He suggested that she invite them to dinner, that they give a musical
+at which Sohlberg could play and be paid.  There were boxes at the
+theaters, tickets for concerts sent, invitations to drive Sundays or
+other days.
+
+The very chemistry of life seems to play into the hands of a situation
+of this kind.  Once Cowperwood was thinking vividly, forcefully, of
+her, Rita began to think in like manner of him. Hourly he grew more
+attractive, a strange, gripping man.  Beset by his mood, she was having
+the devil's own time with her conscience. Not that anything had been
+said as yet, but he was investing her, gradually beleaguering her,
+sealing up, apparently, one avenue after another of escape.  One
+Thursday afternoon, when neither Aileen nor he could attend the
+Sohlberg tea, Mrs. Sohlberg received a magnificent bunch of Jacqueminot
+roses.  "For your nooks and corners," said a card.  She knew well
+enough from whom it came and what it was worth.  There were all of
+fifty dollars worth of roses. It gave her breath of a world of money
+that she had never known. Daily she saw the name of his banking and
+brokerage firm advertised in the papers.  Once she met him in Merrill's
+store at noon, and he invited her to lunch; but she felt obliged to
+decline.  Always he looked at her with such straight, vigorous eyes.
+To think that her beauty had done or was doing this! Her mind, quite
+beyond herself, ran forward to an hour when perhaps this eager,
+magnetic man would take charge of her in a way never dreamed of by
+Harold. But she went on practising, shopping, calling, reading,
+brooding over Harold's inefficiency, and stopping oddly sometimes to
+think--the etherealized grip of Cowperwood upon her.  Those strong
+hands of his--how fine they were--and those large, soft-hard, incisive
+eyes.  The puritanism of Wichita (modified sometime since by the art
+life of Chicago, such as it was) was having a severe struggle with the
+manipulative subtlety of the ages--represented in this man.
+
+"You know you are very elusive," he said to her one evening at the
+theater when he sat behind her during the entr'acte, and Harold and
+Aileen had gone to walk in the foyer.  The hubbub of conversation
+drowned the sound of anything that might be said.  Mrs. Sohlberg was
+particularly pleasing in a lacy evening gown.
+
+"No," she replied, amusedly, flattered by his attention and acutely
+conscious of his physical nearness.  By degrees she had been yielding
+herself to his mood, thrilling at his every word.  "It seems to me I am
+very stable," she went on.  "I'm certainly substantial enough."
+
+She looked at her full, smooth arm lying on her lap.
+
+Cowperwood, who was feeling all the drag of her substantiality, but in
+addition the wonder of her temperament, which was so much richer than
+Aileen's, was deeply moved.  Those little blood moods that no words
+ever (or rarely) indicate were coming to him from her--faint
+zephyr-like emanations of emotions, moods, and fancies in her mind
+which allured him.  She was like Aileen in animality, but better, still
+sweeter, more delicate, much richer spiritually. Or was he just tired
+of Aileen for the present, he asked himself at times.  No, no, he told
+himself that could not be.  Rita Sohlberg was by far the most pleasing
+woman he had ever known.
+
+"Yes, but elusive, just the same," he went on, leaning toward her. "You
+remind me of something that I can find no word for--a bit of color or a
+perfume or tone--a flash of something.   I follow you in my thoughts
+all the time now.  Your knowledge of art interests me.  I like your
+playing--it is like you.  You make me think of delightful things that
+have nothing to do with the ordinary run of my life.  Do you
+understand?"
+
+"It is very nice," she said, "if I do." She took a breath, softly,
+dramatically.  "You make me think vain things, you know." (Her mouth
+was a delicious O.) "You paint a pretty picture." She was warm,
+flushed, suffused with a burst of her own temperament.
+
+"You are like that," he went on, insistently.  "You make me feel like
+that all the time.  You know," he added, leaning over her chair, "I
+sometimes think you have never lived.  There is so much that would
+complete your perfectness.  I should like to send you abroad or take
+you--anyhow, you should go.  You are very wonderful to me.  Do you find
+me at all interesting to you?"
+
+"Yes, but"--she paused--"you know I am afraid of all this and of you."
+Her mouth had that same delicious formation which had first attracted
+him.  "I don't think we had better talk like this, do you? Harold is
+very jealous, or would be.  What do you suppose Mrs. Cowperwood would
+think?"
+
+"I know very well, but we needn't stop to consider that now, need we?
+It will do her no harm to let me talk to you.  Life is between
+individuals, Rita.  You and I have very much in common.  Don't you see
+that? You are infinitely the most interesting woman I have ever known.
+You are bringing me something I have never known. Don't you see that? I
+want you to tell me something truly.  Look at me.  You are not happy as
+you are, are you? Not perfectly happy?"
+
+"No." She smoothed her fan with her fingers.
+
+"Are you happy at all?"
+
+"I thought I was once.  I'm not any more, I think."
+
+"It is so plain why," he commented.  "You are so much more wonderful
+than your place gives you scope for.  You are an individual, not an
+acolyte to swing a censer for another.  Mr. Sohlberg is very
+interesting, but you can't be happy that way.  It surprises me you
+haven't seen it."
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, with a touch of weariness, "but perhaps I have."
+
+He looked at her keenly, and she thrilled.  "I don't think we'd better
+talk so here," she replied.  "You'd better be--"
+
+He laid his hand on the back of her chair, almost touching her shoulder.
+
+"Rita," he said, using her given name again, "you wonderful woman!"
+
+"Oh!" she breathed.
+
+Cowperwood did not see Mrs. Sohlberg again for over a week--ten days
+exactly--when one afternoon Aileen came for him in a new kind of trap,
+having stopped first to pick up the Sohlbergs.  Harold was up in front
+with her and she had left a place behind for Cowperwood with Rita.  She
+did not in the vaguest way suspect how interested he was--his manner
+was so deceptive.  Aileen imagined that she was the superior woman of
+the two, the better-looking, the better-dressed, hence the more
+ensnaring.  She could not guess what a lure this woman's temperament
+had for Cowperwood, who was so brisk, dynamic, seemingly unromantic,
+but who, just the same, in his nature concealed (under a very forceful
+exterior) a deep underlying element of romance and fire.
+
+"This is charming," he said, sinking down beside Rita.  "What a fine
+evening! And the nice straw hat with the roses, and the nice linen
+dress.  My, my!" The roses were red; the dress white, with thin, green
+ribbon run through it here and there.  She was keenly aware of the
+reason for his enthusiasm.  He was so different from Harold, so healthy
+and out-of-doorish, so able.  To-day Harold had been in tantrums over
+fate, life, his lack of success.
+
+"Oh, I shouldn't complain so much if I were you," she had said to him,
+bitterly.  "You might work harder and storm less."
+
+This had produced a scene which she had escaped by going for a walk.
+Almost at the very moment when she had returned Aileen had appeared.
+It was a way out.
+
+She had cheered up, and accepted, dressed.  So had Sohlberg. Apparently
+smiling and happy, they had set out on the drive.  Now, as Cowperwood
+spoke, she glanced about her contentedly.  "I'm lovely," she thought,
+"and he loves me.  How wonderful it would be if we dared." But she said
+aloud: "I'm not so very nice.  It's just the day--don't you think so?
+It's a simple dress.  I'm not very happy, though, to-night, either."
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked, cheeringly, the rumble of the traffic
+destroying the carrying-power of their voices.  He leaned toward her,
+very anxious to solve any difficulty which might confront her,
+perfectly willing to ensnare her by kindness.  "Isn't there something I
+can do? We're going now for a long ride to the pavilion in Jackson
+Park, and then, after dinner, we'll come back by moonlight.  Won't that
+be nice? You must be smiling now and like yourself--happy.  You have no
+reason to be otherwise that I know of.  I will do anything for you that
+you want done--that can be done.  You can have anything you want that I
+can give you.  What is it? You know how much I think of you.  If you
+leave your affairs to me you would never have any troubles of any kind."
+
+"Oh, it isn't anything you can do--not now, anyhow.  My affairs! Oh
+yes.  What are they? Very simple, all."
+
+She had that delicious atmosphere of remoteness even from herself. He
+was enchanted.
+
+"But you are not simple to me, Rita," he said, softly, "nor are your
+affairs.  They concern me very much.  You are so important to me.  I
+have told you that.  Don't you see how true it is? You are a strange
+complexity to me--wonderful.  I'm mad over you. Ever since I saw you
+last I have been thinking, thinking.  If you have troubles let me share
+them.  You are so much to me--my only trouble.  I can fix your life.
+Join it with mine.  I need you, and you need me."
+
+"Yes," she said, "I know." Then she paused.  "It's nothing much," she
+went on--"just a quarrel."
+
+"What over?"
+
+"Over me, really." The mouth was delicious.  "I can't swing the censer
+always, as you say." That thought of his had stuck.  "It's all right
+now, though.  Isn't the day lovely, be-yoot-i-ful!"
+
+Cowperwood looked at her and shook his head.  She was such a
+treasure--so inconsequential.  Aileen, busy driving and talking, could
+not see or hear.  She was interested in Sohlberg, and the southward
+crush of vehicles on Michigan Avenue was distracting her attention.  As
+they drove swiftly past budding trees, kempt lawns, fresh-made
+flower-beds, open windows--the whole seductive world of
+spring--Cowperwood felt as though life had once more taken a fresh
+start.  His magnetism, if it had been visible, would have enveloped him
+like a glittering aura.  Mrs. Sohlberg felt that this was going to be a
+wonderful evening.
+
+The dinner was at the Park--an open-air chicken a la Maryland affair,
+with waffles and champagne to help out.  Aileen, flattered by
+Sohlberg's gaiety under her spell, was having a delightful time,
+jesting, toasting, laughing, walking on the grass.  Sohlberg was making
+love to her in a foolish, inconsequential way, as many men were
+inclined to do; but she was putting him off gaily with "silly boy" and
+"hush." She was so sure of herself that she was free to tell Cowperwood
+afterward how emotional he was and how she had to laugh at him.
+Cowperwood, quite certain that she was faithful, took it all in good
+part.  Sohlberg was such a dunce and such a happy convenience ready to
+his hand.  "He's not a bad sort," he commented.  "I rather like him,
+though I don't think he's so much of a violinist."
+
+After dinner they drove along the lake-shore and out through an open
+bit of tree-blocked prairie land, the moon shining in a clear sky,
+filling the fields and topping the lake with a silvery effulgence.
+Mrs. Sohlberg was being inoculated with the virus Cowperwood, and it
+was taking deadly effect.  The tendency of her own disposition, however
+lethargic it might seem, once it was stirred emotionally, was to act.
+She was essentially dynamic and passionate.  Cowperwood was beginning
+to stand out in her mind as the force that he was.  It would be
+wonderful to be loved by such a man.  There would be an eager, vivid
+life between them.  It frightened and drew her like a blazing lamp in
+the dark.  To get control of herself she talked of art, people, of
+Paris, Italy, and he responded in like strain, but all the while he
+smoothed her hand, and once, under the shadow of some trees, he put his
+hand to her hair, turned her face, and put his mouth softly to her
+cheek.  She flushed, trembled, turned pale, in the grip of this strange
+storm, but drew herself together.  It was wonderful--heaven.  Her old
+life was obviously going to pieces.
+
+"Listen," he said, guardedly.  "Will you meet me to-morrow at three
+just beyond the Rush Street bridge? I will pick you up promptly. You
+won't have to wait a moment."
+
+She paused, meditating, dreaming, almost hypnotized by his strange
+world of fancy.
+
+"Will you?" he asked, eagerly.
+
+"Wait," she said, softly.  "Let me think.  Can I?"
+
+She paused.
+
+"Yes," she said, after a time, drawing in a deep breath.  "Yes"--as if
+she had arranged something in her mind.
+
+"My sweet," he whispered, pressing her arm, while he looked at her
+profile in the moonlight.
+
+"But I'm doing a great deal," she replied, softly, a little breathless
+and a little pale.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+A Fateful Interlude
+
+
+Cowperwood was enchanted.  He kept the proposed tryst with eagerness
+and found her all that he had hoped.  She was sweeter, more colorful,
+more elusive than anybody he had ever known.  In their charming
+apartment on the North Side which he at once engaged, and where he
+sometimes spent mornings, evenings, afternoons, as opportunity
+afforded, he studied her with the most critical eye and found her
+almost flawless.  She had that boundless value which youth and a
+certain insouciance of manner contribute.  There was, delicious to
+relate, no melancholy in her nature, but a kind of innate sufficiency
+which neither looked forward to nor back upon troublesome ills.  She
+loved beautiful things, but was not extravagant; and what interested
+him and commanded his respect was that no urgings of his toward
+prodigality, however subtly advanced, could affect her.  She knew what
+she wanted, spent carefully, bought tastefully, arrayed herself in ways
+which appealed to him as the flowers did. His feeling for her became at
+times so great that he wished, one might almost have said, to destroy
+it--to appease the urge and allay the pull in himself, but it was
+useless.  The charm of her endured.  His transports would leave her
+refreshed apparently, prettier, more graceful than ever, it seemed to
+him, putting back her ruffled hair with her hand, mouthing at herself
+prettily in the glass, thinking of many remote delicious things at once.
+
+"Do you remember that picture we saw in the art store the other day,
+Algernon?" she would drawl, calling him by his second name, which she
+had adopted for herself as being more suited to his moods when with her
+and more pleasing to her.  Cowperwood had protested, but she held to
+it.  "Do you remember that lovely blue of the old man's coat?" (It was
+an "Adoration of the Magi.") "Wasn't that be-yoot-i-ful?"
+
+She drawled so sweetly and fixed her mouth in such an odd way that he
+was impelled to kiss her.  "You clover blossom," he would say to her,
+coming over and taking her by the arms.  "You sprig of cherry bloom.
+You Dresden china dream."
+
+"Now, are you going to muss my hair, when I've just managed to fix it?"
+
+The voice was the voice of careless, genial innocence--and the eyes.
+
+"Yes, I am, minx."
+
+"Yes, but you mustn't smother me, you know.  Really, you know you
+almost hurt me with your mouth.  Aren't you going to be nice to me?"
+
+"Yes, sweet.  But I want to hurt you, too."
+
+"Well, then, if you must."
+
+But for all his transports the lure was still there.  She was like a
+butterfly, he thought, yellow and white or blue and gold, fluttering
+over a hedge of wild rose.
+
+In these intimacies it was that he came quickly to understand how much
+she knew of social movements and tendencies, though she was just an
+individual of the outer fringe.  She caught at once a clear
+understanding of his social point of view, his art ambition, his dreams
+of something better for himself in every way.  She seemed to see
+clearly that he had not as yet realized himself, that Aileen was not
+just the woman for him, though she might be one.  She talked of her own
+husband after a time in a tolerant way--his foibles, defects,
+weaknesses.  She was not unsympathetic, he thought, just weary of a
+state that was not properly balanced either in love, ability, or
+insight.  Cowperwood had suggested that she could take a larger studio
+for herself and Harold--do away with the petty economies that had
+hampered her and him--and explain it all on the grounds of a larger
+generosity on the part of her family.  At first she objected; but
+Cowperwood was tactful and finally brought it about.  He again
+suggested a little while later that she should persuade Harold to go to
+Europe.  There would be the same ostensible reason--additional means
+from her relatives. Mrs. Sohlberg, thus urged, petted, made over,
+assured, came finally to accept his liberal rule--to bow to him; she
+became as contented as a cat.  With caution she accepted of his
+largess, and made the cleverest use of it she could.  For something
+over a year neither Sohlberg nor Aileen was aware of the intimacy which
+had sprung up. Sohlberg, easily bamboozled, went back to Denmark for a
+visit, then to study in Germany.  Mrs. Sohlberg followed Cowperwood to
+Europe the following year.  At Aix-les-Bains, Biarritz, Paris, even
+London, Aileen never knew that there was an additional figure in the
+background.  Cowperwood was trained by Rita into a really finer point
+of view.  He came to know better music, books, even the facts.  She
+encouraged him in his idea of a representative collection of the old
+masters, and begged him to be cautious in his selection of moderns.  He
+felt himself to be delightfully situated indeed.
+
+The difficulty with this situation, as with all such where an
+individual ventures thus bucaneeringly on the sea of sex, is the
+possibility of those storms which result from misplaced confidence, and
+from our built-up system of ethics relating to property in women.  To
+Cowperwood, however, who was a law unto himself, who knew no law except
+such as might be imposed upon him by his lack of ability to think, this
+possibility of entanglement, wrath, rage, pain, offered no particular
+obstacle.  It was not at all certain that any such thing would follow.
+Where the average man might have found one such liaison difficult to
+manage, Cowperwood, as we have seen, had previously entered on several
+such affairs almost simultaneously; and now he had ventured on yet
+another; in the last instance with much greater feeling and enthusiasm.
+The previous affairs had been emotional makeshifts at best--more or
+less idle philanderings in which his deeper moods and feelings were not
+concerned.  In the case of Mrs. Sohlberg all this was changed.  For the
+present at least she was really all in all to him.  But this
+temperamental characteristic of his relating to his love of women, his
+artistic if not emotional subjection to their beauty, and the mystery
+of their personalities led him into still a further affair, and this
+last was not so fortunate in its outcome.
+
+Antoinette Nowak had come to him fresh from a West Side high school and
+a Chicago business college, and had been engaged as his private
+stenographer and secretary.  This girl had blossomed forth into
+something exceptional, as American children of foreign parents are wont
+to do.  You would have scarcely believed that she, with her fine, lithe
+body, her good taste in dress, her skill in stenography, bookkeeping,
+and business details, could be the daughter of a struggling Pole, who
+had first worked in the Southwest Chicago Steel Mills, and who had
+later kept a fifth-rate cigar, news, and stationery store in the Polish
+district, the merchandise of playing-cards and a back room for idling
+and casual gaming being the principal reasons for its existence.
+Antoinette, whose first name had not been Antoinette at all, but Minka
+(the Antoinette having been borrowed by her from an article in one of
+the Chicago Sunday papers), was a fine dark, brooding girl, ambitious
+and hopeful, who ten days after she had accepted her new place was
+admiring Cowperwood and following his every daring movement with almost
+excited interest.  To be the wife of such a man, she thought--to even
+command his interest, let alone his affection--must be wonderful.
+After the dull world she had known--it seemed dull compared to the
+upper, rarefied realms which she was beginning to glimpse through
+him--and after the average men in the real-estate office over the way
+where she had first worked, Cowperwood, in his good clothes, his remote
+mood, his easy, commanding manner, touched the most ambitious chords of
+her being.  One day she saw Aileen sweep in from her carriage, wearing
+warm brown furs, smart polished boots, a street-suit of corded brown
+wool, and a fur toque sharpened and emphasized by a long dark-red
+feather which shot upward like a dagger or a quill pen.  Antoinette
+hated her.  She conceived herself to be better, or as good at least.
+Why was life divided so unfairly? What sort of a man was Cowperwood,
+anyhow? One night after she had written out a discreet but truthful
+history of himself which he had dictated to her, and which she had sent
+to the Chicago newspapers for him soon after the opening of his
+brokerage office in Chicago, she went home and dreamed of what he had
+told her, only altered, of course, as in dreams.  She thought that
+Cowperwood stood beside her in his handsome private office in La Salle
+Street and asked her:
+
+"Antoinette, what do you think of me?" Antoinette was nonplussed, but
+brave.  In her dream she found herself intensely interested in him.
+
+"Oh, I don't know what to think.  I'm so sorry," was her answer. Then
+he laid his hand on hers, on her cheek, and she awoke.  She began
+thinking, what a pity, what a shame that such a man should ever have
+been in prison.  He was so handsome.  He had been married twice.
+Perhaps his first wife was very homely or very mean-spirited. She
+thought of this, and the next day went to work meditatively.
+Cowperwood, engrossed in his own plans, was not thinking of her at
+present.  He was thinking of the next moves in his interesting gas war.
+And Aileen, seeing her one day, merely considered her an underling.
+The woman in business was such a novelty that as yet she was declasse.
+Aileen really thought nothing of Antoinette at all.
+
+Somewhat over a year after Cowperwood had become intimate with Mrs.
+Sohlberg his rather practical business relations with Antoinette Nowak
+took on a more intimate color.  What shall we say of this--that he had
+already wearied of Mrs. Sohlberg? Not in the least. He was desperately
+fond of her.  Or that he despised Aileen, whom he was thus grossly
+deceiving? Not at all.  She was to him at times as attractive as
+ever--perhaps more so for the reason that her self-imagined rights were
+being thus roughly infringed upon. He was sorry for her, but inclined
+to justify himself on the ground that these other relations--with
+possibly the exception of Mrs. Sohlherg--were not enduring.  If it had
+been possible to marry Mrs. Sohlberg he might have done so, and he did
+speculate at times as to whether anything would ever induce Aileen to
+leave him; but this was more or less idle speculation.  He rather
+fancied they would live out their days together, seeing that he was
+able thus easily to deceive her.  But as for a girl like Antoinette
+Nowak, she figured in that braided symphony of mere sex attraction
+which somehow makes up that geometric formula of beauty which rules the
+world.  She was charming in a dark way, beautiful, with eyes that
+burned with an unsatisfied fire; and Cowperwood, although at first only
+in the least moved by her, became by degrees interested in her,
+wondering at the amazing, transforming power of the American atmosphere.
+
+"Are your parents English, Antoinette?" he asked her, one morning, with
+that easy familiarity which he assumed to all underlings and minor
+intellects--an air that could not be resented in him, and which was
+usually accepted as a compliment.
+
+Antoinette, clean and fresh in a white shirtwaist, a black
+walking-skirt, a ribbon of black velvet about her neck, and her long,
+black hair laid in a heavy braid low over her forehead and held close
+by a white celluloid comb, looked at him with pleased and grateful
+eyes.  She had been used to such different types of men--the earnest,
+fiery, excitable, sometimes drunken and swearing men of her childhood,
+always striking, marching, praying in the Catholic churches; and then
+the men of the business world, crazy over money, and with no
+understanding of anything save some few facts about Chicago and its
+momentary possibilities.  In Cowperwood's office, taking his letters
+and hearing him talk in his quick, genial way with old Laughlin,
+Sippens, and others, she had learned more of life than she had ever
+dreamed existed.  He was like a vast open window out of which she was
+looking upon an almost illimitable landscape.
+
+"No, sir," she replied, dropping her slim, firm, white hand, holding a
+black lead-pencil restfully on her notebook.  She smiled quite
+innocently because she was pleased.
+
+"I thought not," he said, "and yet you're American enough."
+
+"I don't know how it is," she said, quite solemnly.  "I have a brother
+who is quite as American as I am.  We don't either of us look like our
+father or mother."
+
+"What does your brother do?" he asked, indifferently.
+
+"He's one of the weighers at Arneel & Co.  He expects to be a manager
+sometime." She smiled.
+
+Cowperwood looked at her speculatively, and after a momentary return
+glance she dropped her eyes.  Slowly, in spite of herself, a telltale
+flush rose and mantled her brown cheeks.   It always did when he looked
+at her.
+
+"Take this letter to General Van Sickle," he began, on this occasion
+quite helpfully, and in a few minutes she had recovered.  She could not
+be near Cowperwood for long at a time, however, without being stirred
+by a feeling which was not of her own willing.  He fascinated and
+suffused her with a dull fire.  She sometimes wondered whether a man so
+remarkable would ever be interested in a girl like her.
+
+The end of this essential interest, of course, was the eventual
+assumption of Antoinette.  One might go through all the dissolving
+details of days in which she sat taking dictation, receiving
+instructions, going about her office duties in a state of apparently
+chill, practical, commercial single-mindedness; but it would be to no
+purpose.  As a matter of fact, without in any way affecting the
+preciseness and accuracy of her labor, her thoughts were always upon
+the man in the inner office--the strange master who was then seeing his
+men, and in between, so it seemed, a whole world of individuals, solemn
+and commercial, who came, presented their cards, talked at times almost
+interminably, and went away.  It was the rare individual, however, she
+observed, who had the long conversation with Cowperwood, and that
+interested her the more. His instructions to her were always of the
+briefest, and he depended on her native intelligence to supply much
+that he scarcely more than suggested.
+
+"You understand, do you?" was his customary phrase.
+
+"Yes," she would reply.
+
+She felt as though she were fifty times as significant here as she had
+ever been in her life before.
+
+The office was clean, hard, bright, like Cowperwood himself.  The
+morning sun, streaming in through an almost solid glass east front
+shaded by pale-green roller curtains, came to have an almost romantic
+atmosphere for her.  Cowperwood's private office, as in Philadelphia,
+was a solid cherry-wood box in which he could shut himself
+completely--sight-proof, sound-proof.  When the door was closed it was
+sacrosanct.  He made it a rule, sensibly, to keep his door open as much
+as possible, even when he was dictating, sometimes not.  It was in
+these half-hours of dictation--the door open, as a rule, for he did not
+care for too much privacy--that he and Miss Nowak came closest.  After
+months and months, and because he had been busy with the other woman
+mentioned, of whom she knew nothing, she came to enter sometimes with a
+sense of suffocation, sometimes of maidenly shame.  It would never have
+occurred to her to admit frankly that she wanted Cowperwood to make
+love to her.   It would have frightened her to have thought of herself
+as yielding easily, and yet there was not a detail of his personality
+that was not now burned in her brain.  His light, thick, always
+smoothly parted hair, his wide, clear, inscrutable eyes, his carefully
+manicured hands, so full and firm, his fresh clothing of delicate,
+intricate patterns--how these fascinated her! He seemed always remote
+except just at the moment of doing something, when, curiously enough,
+he seemed intensely intimate and near.
+
+One day, after many exchanges of glances in which her own always fell
+sharply--in the midst of a letter--he arose and closed the half-open
+door.  She did not think so much of that, as a rule--it had happened
+before--but now, to-day, because of a studied glance he had given her,
+neither tender nor smiling, she felt as though something unusual were
+about to happen.  Her own body was going hot and cold by turns--her
+neck and hands.  She had a fine figure, finer than she realized, with
+shapely limbs and torso.  Her head had some of the sharpness of the old
+Greek coinage, and her hair was plaited as in ancient cut stone.
+Cowperwood noted it.  He came back and, without taking his seat, bent
+over her and intimately took her hand.
+
+"Antoinette," he said, lifting her gently.
+
+She looked up, then arose--for he slowly drew her--breathless, the
+color gone, much of the capable practicality that was hers completely
+eliminated.  She felt limp, inert.  She pulled at her hand faintly, and
+then, lifting her eyes, was fixed by that hard, insatiable gaze of his.
+Her head swam--her eyes were filled with a telltale confusion.
+
+"Antoinette!"
+
+"Yes," she murmured.
+
+"You love me, don't you?"
+
+She tried to pull herself together, to inject some of her native
+rigidity of soul into her air--that rigidity which she always imagined
+would never desert her--but it was gone.  There came instead to her a
+picture of the far Blue Island Avenue neighborhood from which she
+emanated--its low brown cottages, and then this smart, hard office and
+this strong man.  He came out of such a marvelous world, apparently.  A
+strange foaming seemed to be in her blood.   She was deliriously,
+deliciously numb and happy.
+
+"Antoinette!"
+
+"Oh, I don't know what I think," she gasped.  "I-- Oh yes, I do, I do."
+
+"I like your name," he said, simply.  "Antoinette." And then, pulling
+her to him, he slipped his arm about her waist.
+
+She was frightened, numb, and then suddenly, not so much from shame as
+shock, tears rushed to her eyes.  She turned and put her hand on the
+desk and hung her head and sobbed.
+
+"Why, Antoinette," he asked, gently, bending over her, "are you so much
+unused to the world? I thought you said you loved me.  Do you want me
+to forget all this and go on as before? I can, of course, if you can,
+you know."
+
+He knew that she loved him, wanted him.
+
+She heard him plainly enough, shaking.
+
+"Do you?" he said, after a time, giving her moments in which to recover.
+
+"Oh, let me cry!" she recovered herself sufficiently to say, quite
+wildly.  "I don't know why I'm crying.  It's just because I'm nervous,
+I suppose.  Please don't mind me now."
+
+"Antoinette," he repeated, "look at me! Will you stop?"
+
+"Oh no, not now.  My eyes are so bad."
+
+"Antoinette! Come, look!" He put his hand under her chin.  "See, I'm
+not so terrible."
+
+"Oh," she said, when her eyes met his again, "I--" And then she folded
+her arms against his breast while he petted her hand and held her close.
+
+"I'm not so bad, Antoinette.  It's you as much as it is me.  You do
+love me, then?"
+
+"Yes, yes--oh yes!"
+
+"And you don't mind?"
+
+"No.  It's all so strange." Her face was hidden.
+
+"Kiss me, then."
+
+She put up her lips and slipped her arms about him.  He held her close.
+
+He tried teasingly to make her say why she cried, thinking the while of
+what Aileen or Rita would think if they knew, but she would not at
+first--admitting later that it was a sense of evil. Curiously she also
+thought of Aileen, and how, on occasion, she had seen her sweep in and
+out.  Now she was sharing with her (the dashing Mrs. Cowperwood, so
+vain and superior) the wonder of his affection.  Strange as it may
+seem, she looked on it now as rather an honor.  She had risen in her
+own estimation--her sense of life and power.  Now, more than ever
+before, she knew something of life because she knew something of love
+and passion.  The future seemed tremulous with promise.  She went back
+to her machine after a while, thinking of this.  What would it all come
+to? she wondered, wildly.  You could not have told by her eyes that she
+had been crying.  Instead, a rich glow in her brown cheeks heightened
+her beauty.  No disturbing sense of Aileen was involved with all this.
+Antoinette was of the newer order that was beginning to privately
+question ethics and morals.  She had a right to her life, lead where it
+would.  And to what it would bring her.  The feel of Cowperwood's lips
+was still fresh on hers.  What would the future reveal to her now? What?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+An Overture to Conflict
+
+
+The result of this understanding was not so important to Cowperwood as
+it was to Antoinette.  In a vagrant mood he had unlocked a spirit here
+which was fiery, passionate, but in his case hopelessly worshipful.
+However much she might be grieved by him, Antoinette, as he
+subsequently learned, would never sin against his personal welfare.
+Yet she was unwittingly the means of first opening the flood-gates of
+suspicion on Aileen, thereby establishing in the latter's mind the fact
+of Cowperwood's persistent unfaithfulness.
+
+The incidents which led up to this were comparatively trivial--nothing
+more, indeed, at first than the sight of Miss Nowak and Cowperwood
+talking intimately in his office one afternoon when the others had gone
+and the fact that she appeared to be a little bit disturbed by Aileen's
+arrival.  Later came the discovery--though of this Aileen could not be
+absolutely sure--of Cowperwood and Antoinette in a closed carriage one
+stormy November afternoon in State Street when he was supposed to be
+out of the city.  She was coming out of Merrill's store at the time,
+and just happened to glance at the passing vehicle, which was running
+near the curb. Aileen, although uncertain, was greatly shocked.  Could
+it be possible that he had not left town? She journeyed to his office
+on the pretext of taking old Laughlin's dog, Jennie, a pretty collar
+she had found; actually to find if Antoinette were away at the same
+time.  Could it be possible, she kept asking herself, that Cowperwood
+had become interested in his own stenographer? The fact that the office
+assumed that he was out of town and that Antoinette was not there gave
+her pause.  Laughlin quite innocently informed her that he thought Miss
+Nowak had gone to one of the libraries to make up certain reports.  It
+left her in doubt.
+
+What was Aileen to think? Her moods and aspirations were linked so
+closely with the love and success of Cowperwood that she could not, in
+spite of herself, but take fire at the least thought of losing him.  He
+himself wondered sometimes, as he threaded the mesh-like paths of sex,
+what she would do once she discovered his variant conduct.  Indeed,
+there had been little occasional squabbles, not sharp, but suggestive,
+when he was trifling about with Mrs. Kittridge, Mrs. Ledwell, and
+others.  There were, as may be imagined, from time to time absences,
+brief and unimportant, which he explained easily, passional
+indifferences which were not explained so easily, and the like; but
+since his affections were not really involved in any of those
+instances, he had managed to smooth the matter over quite nicely.
+
+"Why do you say that?" he would demand, when she suggested, apropos of
+a trip or a day when she had not been with him, that there might have
+been another.  "You know there hasn't.  If I am going in for that sort
+of thing you'll learn it fast enough.  Even if I did, it wouldn't mean
+that I was unfaithful to you spiritually."
+
+"Oh, wouldn't it?" exclaimed Aileen, resentfully, and with some
+disturbance of spirit.  "Well, you can keep your spiritual
+faithfulness.  I'm not going to be content with any sweet thoughts."
+
+Cowperwood laughed even as she laughed, for he knew she was right and
+he felt sorry for her.  At the same time her biting humor pleased him.
+He knew that she did not really suspect him of actual infidelity; he
+was obviously so fond of her.  But she also knew that he was innately
+attractive to women, and that there were enough of the philandering
+type to want to lead him astray and make her life a burden.  Also that
+he might prove a very willing victim.
+
+Sex desire and its fruition being such an integral factor in the
+marriage and every other sex relation, the average woman is prone to
+study the periodic manifestations that go with it quite as one
+dependent on the weather--a sailor, or example--might study the
+barometer.  In this Aileen was no exception.  She was so beautiful
+herself, and had been so much to Cowperwood physically, that she had
+followed the corresponding evidences of feeling in him with the utmost
+interest, accepting the recurring ebullitions of his physical emotions
+as an evidence of her own enduring charm.  As time went on,
+however--and that was long before Mrs. Sohlberg or any one else had
+appeared--the original flare of passion had undergone a form of
+subsidence, though not noticeable enough to be disturbing.  Aileen
+thought and thought, but she did not investigate.  Indeed, because of
+the precariousness of her own situation as a social failure she was
+afraid to do so.
+
+With the arrival of Mrs. Sohlberg and then of Antoinette Nowak as
+factors in the potpourri, the situation became more difficult. Humanly
+fond of Aileen as Cowperwood was, and because of his lapses and her
+affection, desirous of being kind, yet for the time being he was
+alienated almost completely from her.  He grew remote according as his
+clandestine affairs were drifting or blazing, without, however, losing
+his firm grip on his financial affairs, and Aileen noticed it.  It
+worried her.  She was so vain that she could scarcely believe that
+Cowperwood could long be indifferent, and for a while her sentimental
+interest in Sohlberg's future and unhappiness of soul beclouded her
+judgment; but she finally began to feel the drift of affairs.  The
+pathos of all this is that it so quickly descends into the realm of the
+unsatisfactory, the banal, the pseudo intimate.  Aileen noticed it at
+once.  She tried protestations.  "You don't kiss me the way you did
+once," and then a little later, "You haven't noticed me hardly for four
+whole days. What's the matter?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," replied Cowperwood, easily; "I guess I want you as
+much as ever.  I don't see that I am any different." He took her in his
+arms and petted and caressed her; but Aileen was suspicious, nervous.
+
+The psychology of the human animal, when confronted by these tangles,
+these ripping tides of the heart, has little to do with so-called
+reason or logic.  It is amazing how in the face of passion and the
+affections and the changing face of life all plans and theories by
+which we guide ourselves fall to the ground.  Here was Aileen talking
+bravely at the time she invaded Mrs. Lillian Cowperwood's domain of the
+necessity of "her Frank" finding a woman suitable to his needs, tastes,
+abilities, but now that the possibility of another woman equally or
+possibly better suited to him was looming in the offing--although she
+had no idea who it might be--she could not reason in the same way.  Her
+ox, God wot, was the one that was being gored.  What if he should find
+some one whom he could want more than he did her? Dear heaven, how
+terrible that would be! What would she do? she asked herself,
+thoughtfully.  She lapsed into the blues one afternoon--almost
+cried--she could scarcely say why.  Another time she thought of all the
+terrible things she would do, how difficult she would make it for any
+other woman who invaded her preserves.  However, she was not sure.
+Would she declare war if she discovered another? She knew she would
+eventually; and yet she knew, too, that if she did, and Cowperwood were
+set in his passion, thoroughly alienated, it would do no good.  It
+would be terrible, but what could she do to win him back? That was the
+issue.  Once warned, however, by her suspicious questioning, Cowperwood
+was more mechanically attentive than ever.  He did his best to conceal
+his altered mood--his enthusiasms for Mrs. Sohlberg, his interest in
+Antoinette Nowak--and this helped somewhat.
+
+But finally there was a detectable change.  Aileen noticed it first
+after they had been back from Europe nearly a year.  At this time she
+was still interested in Sohlberg, but in a harmlessly flirtatious way.
+She thought he might be interesting physically, but would he be as
+delightful as Cowperwood? Never! When she felt that Cowperwood himself
+might be changing she pulled herself up at once, and when Antoinette
+appeared--the carriage incident--Sohlberg lost his, at best, unstable
+charm.  She began to meditate on what a terrible thing it would be to
+lose Cowperwood, seeing that she had failed to establish herself
+socially.  Perhaps that had something to do with his defection.  No
+doubt it had.  Yet she could not believe, after all his protestations
+of affection in Philadelphia, after all her devotion to him in those
+dark days of his degradation and punishment, that he would really turn
+on her.  No, he might stray momentarily, but if she protested enough,
+made a scene, perhaps, he would not feel so free to injure her--he
+would remember and be loving and devoted again.   After seeing him, or
+imagining she had seen him, in the carriage, she thought at first that
+she would question him, but later decided that she would wait and watch
+more closely.  Perhaps he was beginning to run around with other women.
+There was safety in numbers--that she knew.  Her heart, her pride, was
+hurt, but not broken.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+The Clash
+
+
+The peculiar personality of Rita Sohlberg was such that by her very
+action she ordinarily allayed suspicion, or rather distracted it.
+Although a novice, she had a strange ease, courage, or balance of soul
+which kept her whole and self-possessed under the most trying of
+circumstances.  She might have been overtaken in the most compromising
+of positions, but her manner would always have indicated ease, a sense
+of innocence, nothing unusual, for she had no sense of moral
+degradation in this matter--no troublesome emotion as to what was to
+flow from a relationship of this kind, no worry as to her own soul,
+sin, social opinion, or the like. She was really interested in art and
+life--a pagan, in fact.  Some people are thus hardily equipped.  It is
+the most notable attribute of the hardier type of personalities--not
+necessarily the most brilliant or successful.  You might have said that
+her soul was naively unconscious of the agony of others in loss.  She
+would have taken any loss to herself with an amazing equableness--some
+qualms, of course, but not many--because her vanity and sense of charm
+would have made her look forward to something better or as good.
+
+She had called on Aileen quite regularly in the past, with or without
+Harold, and had frequently driven with the Cowperwoods or joined them
+at the theater or elsewhere.  She had decided, after becoming intimate
+with Cowperwood, to study art again, which was a charming blind, for it
+called for attendance at afternoon or evening classes which she
+frequently skipped.  Besides, since Harold had more money he was
+becoming gayer, more reckless and enthusiastic over women, and
+Cowperwood deliberately advised her to encourage him in some liaison
+which, in case exposure should subsequently come to them, would
+effectually tie his hands.
+
+"Let him get in some affair," Cowperwood told Rita.  "We'll put
+detectives on his trail and get evidence.  He won't have a word to say."
+
+"We don't really need to do that," she protested sweetly, naively.
+"He's been in enough scrapes as it is.  He's given me some of the
+letters--" (she pronounced it "lettahs")--"written him."
+
+"But we'll need actual witnesses if we ever need anything at all. Just
+tell me when he's in love again, and I'll do the rest."
+
+"You know I think," she drawled, amusingly, "that he is now.  I saw him
+on the street the other day with one of his students--rather a pretty
+girl, too."
+
+Cowperwood was pleased.  Under the circumstances he would almost have
+been willing--not quite--for Aileen to succumb to Sohlberg in order to
+entrap her and make his situation secure.  Yet he really did not wish
+it in the last analysis--would have been grieved temporarily if she had
+deserted him.  However, in the case of Sohlberg, detectives were
+employed, the new affair with the flighty pupil was unearthed and sworn
+to by witnesses, and this, combined with the "lettahs" held by Rita,
+constituted ample material wherewith to "hush up" the musician if ever
+he became unduly obstreperous. So Cowperwood and Rita's state was quite
+comfortable.
+
+But Aileen, meditating over Antoinette Nowak, was beside herself with
+curiosity, doubt, worry.  She did not want to injure Cowperwood in any
+way after his bitter Philadelphia experience, and yet when she thought
+of his deserting her in this way she fell into a great rage.  Her
+vanity, as much as her love, was hurt.  What could she do to justify or
+set at rest her suspicions? Watch him personally? She was too dignified
+and vain to lurk about street-corners or offices or hotels.  Never!
+Start a quarrel without additional evidence--that would be silly.  He
+was too shrewd to give her further evidence once she spoke.  He would
+merely deny it.  She brooded irritably, recalling after a time, and
+with an aching heart, that her father had put detectives on her track
+once ten years before, and had actually discovered her relations with
+Cowperwood and their rendezvous.  Bitter as that memory
+was--torturing--yet now the same means seemed not too abhorrent to
+employ under the circumstances.  No harm had come to Cowperwood in the
+former instance, she reasoned to herself--no especial harm--from that
+discovery (this was not true), and none would come to him now.  (This
+also was not true.) But one must forgive a fiery, passionate soul,
+wounded to the quick, some errors of judgment. Her thought was that she
+would first be sure just what it was her beloved was doing, and then
+decide what course to take.  But she knew that she was treading on
+dangerous ground, and mentally she recoiled from the consequences which
+might follow.  He might leave her if she fought him too bitterly.  He
+might treat her as he had treated his first wife, Lillian.
+
+She studied her liege lord curiously these days, wondering if it were
+true that he had deserted her already, as he had deserted his first
+wife thirteen years before, wondering if he could really take up with a
+girl as common as Antoinette Nowak--wondering, wondering,
+wondering--half afraid and yet courageous.  What could be done with
+him? If only he still loved her all would be well yet--but oh!
+
+The detective agency to which she finally applied, after weeks of
+soul-racking suspense, was one of those disturbingly human implements
+which many are not opposed to using on occasion, when it is the only
+means of solving a troublous problem of wounded feelings or jeopardized
+interests.  Aileen, being obviously rich, was forthwith shamefully
+overcharged; but the services agreed upon were well performed.  To her
+amazement, chagrin, and distress, after a few weeks of observation
+Cowperwood was reported to have affairs not only with Antoinette Nowak,
+whom she did suspect, but also with Mrs. Sohlberg.  And these two
+affairs at one and the same time. For the moment it left Aileen
+actually stunned and breathless.
+
+The significance of Rita Sohlberg to her in this hour was greater than
+that of any woman before or after.  Of all living things, women dread
+women most of all, and of all women the clever and beautiful.  Rita
+Sohlberg had been growing on Aileen as a personage, for she had
+obviously been prospering during this past year, and her beauty had
+been amazingly enhanced thereby.  Once Aileen had encountered Rita in a
+light trap on the Avenue, very handsome and very new, and she had
+commented on it to Cowperwood, whose reply had been: "Her father must
+be making some money.  Sohlberg could never earn it for her."
+
+Aileen sympathized with Harold because of his temperament, but she knew
+that what Cowperwood said was true.
+
+Another time, at a box-party at the theater, she had noted the rich
+elaborateness of Mrs. Sohlberg's dainty frock, the endless pleatings of
+pale silk, the startling charm of the needlework and the
+ribbons--countless, rosetted, small--that meant hard work on the part
+of some one.
+
+"How lovely this is," she had commented.
+
+"Yes," Rita had replied, airily; "I thought, don't you know, my
+dressmaker would never get done working on it."
+
+It had cost, all told, two hundred and twenty dollars, and Cowperwood
+had gladly paid the bill.
+
+Aileen went home at the time thinking of Rita's taste and of how well
+she had harmonized her materials to her personality.  She was truly
+charming.
+
+Now, however, when it appeared that the same charm that had appealed to
+her had appealed to Cowperwood, she conceived an angry, animal
+opposition to it all.  Rita Sohlberg! Ha! A lot of satisfaction she'd
+get knowing as she would soon, that Cowperwood was sharing his
+affection for her with Antoinette Nowak--a mere stenographer. And a lot
+of satisfaction Antoinette would get--the cheap upstart--when she
+learned, as she would, that Cowperwood loved her so lightly that he
+would take an apartment for Rita Sohlberg and let a cheap hotel or an
+assignation-house do for her.
+
+But in spite of this savage exultation her thoughts kept coming back to
+herself, to her own predicament, to torture and destroy her.
+Cowperwood, the liar! Cowperwood, the pretender! Cowperwood, the sneak!
+At one moment she conceived a kind of horror of the man because of all
+his protestations to her; at the next a rage--bitter, swelling; at the
+next a pathetic realization of her own altered position.   Say what one
+will, to take the love of a man like Cowperwood away from a woman like
+Aileen was to leave her high and dry on land, as a fish out of its
+native element, to take all the wind out of her sails--almost to kill
+her.  Whatever position she had once thought to hold through him, was
+now jeopardized.  Whatever joy or glory she had had in being Mrs. Frank
+Algernon Cowperwood, it was now tarnished.  She sat in her room, this
+same day after the detectives had given their report, a tired look in
+her eyes, the first set lines her pretty mouth had ever known showing
+about it, her past and her future whirling painfully and nebulously in
+her brain.  Suddenly she got up, and, seeing Cowperwood's picture on
+her dresser, his still impressive eyes contemplating her, she seized it
+and threw it on the floor, stamping on his handsome face with her
+pretty foot, and raging at him in her heart.  The dog! The brute! Her
+brain was full of the thought of Rita's white arms about him, of his
+lips to hers.  The spectacle of Rita's fluffy gowns, her enticing
+costumes, was in her eyes.  Rita should not have him; she should not
+have anything connected with him, nor, for that matter, Antoinette
+Nowak, either--the wretched upstart, the hireling.  To think he should
+stoop to an office stenographer! Once on that thought, she decided that
+he should not be allowed to have a woman as an assistant any more.  He
+owed it to her to love her after all she had done for him, the coward,
+and to let other women alone.  Her brain whirled with strange thoughts.
+She was really not sane in her present state.  She was so wrought up by
+her prospective loss that she could only think of rash, impossible,
+destructive things to do.  She dressed swiftly, feverishly, and,
+calling a closed carriage from the coach-house, ordered herself to be
+driven to the New Arts Building.  She would show this rosy cat of a
+woman, this smiling piece of impertinence, this she-devil, whether she
+would lure Cowperwood away.  She meditated as she rode. She would not
+sit back and be robbed as Mrs. Cowperwood had been by her.  Never! He
+could not treat her that way.  She would die first! She would kill Rita
+Sohlberg and Antoinette Nowak and Cowperwood and herself first.  She
+would prefer to die that way rather than lose his love.  Oh yes, a
+thousand times! Fortunately, Rita Sohlberg was not at the New Arts
+Building, or Sohlberg, either. They had gone to a reception.  Nor was
+she at the apartment on the North Side, where, under the name of
+Jacobs, as Aileen had been informed by the detectives, she and
+Cowperwood kept occasional tryst.  Aileen hesitated for a moment,
+feeling it useless to wait, then she ordered the coachman to drive to
+her husband's office. It was now nearly five o'clock.  Antoinette and
+Cowperwood had both gone, but she did not know it.  She changed her
+mind, however, before she reached the office--for it was Rita Sohlberg
+she wished to reach first--and ordered her coachman to drive back to
+the Sohlberg studio.  But still they had not returned.  In a kind of
+aimless rage she went home, wondering how she should reach Rita
+Sohlberg first and alone.  Then, to her savage delight, the game walked
+into her bag.  The Sohlbergs, returning home at six o'clock from some
+reception farther out Michigan Avenue, had stopped, at the wish of
+Harold, merely to pass the time of day with Mrs. Cowperwood.  Rita was
+exquisite in a pale-blue and lavender concoction, with silver braid
+worked in here and there.   Her gloves and shoes were pungent bits of
+romance, her hat a dream of graceful lines.  At the sight of her,
+Aileen, who was still in the hall and had opened the door herself,
+fairly burned to seize her by the throat and strike her; but she
+restrained herself sufficiently to say, "Come in." She still had sense
+enough and self-possession enough to conceal her wrath and to close the
+door.  Beside his wife Harold was standing, offensively smug and
+inefficient in the fashionable frock-coat and silk hat of the time, a
+restraining influence as yet.  He was bowing and smiling:
+
+"Oh." This sound was neither an "oh" nor an "ah," but a kind of Danish
+inflected "awe," which was usually not unpleasing to hear. "How are
+you, once more, Meeses Cowperwood? It eez sudge a pleasure to see you
+again--awe."
+
+"Won't you two just go in the reception-room a moment," said Aileen,
+almost hoarsely.  "I'll be right in.  I want to get something." Then,
+as an afterthought, she called very sweetly: "Oh, Mrs. Sohlberg, won't
+you come up to my room for a moment? I have something I want to show
+you."
+
+Rita responded promptly.  She always felt it incumbent upon her to be
+very nice to Aileen.
+
+"We have only a moment to stay," she replied, archly and sweetly, and
+coming out in the hall, "but I'll come up."
+
+Aileen stayed to see her go first, then followed up-stairs swiftly,
+surely, entered after Rita, and closed the door.  With a courage and
+rage born of a purely animal despair, she turned and locked it; then
+she wheeled swiftly, her eyes lit with a savage fire, her cheeks pale,
+but later aflame, her hands, her fingers working in a strange,
+unconscious way.
+
+"So," she said, looking at Rita, and coming toward her quickly and
+angrily, "you'll steal my husband, will you? You'll live in a secret
+apartment, will you? You'll come here smiling and lying to me, will
+you? You beast! You cat! You prostitute! I'll show you now! You
+tow-headed beast! I know you now for what you are! I'll teach you once
+for all! Take that, and that, and that!"
+
+Suiting action to word, Aileen had descended upon her whirlwind, animal
+fashion, striking, scratching, choking, tearing her visitor's hat from
+her head, ripping the laces from her neck, beating her in the face, and
+clutching violently at her hair and throat to choke and mar her beauty
+if she could.  For the moment she was really crazy with rage.
+
+By the suddenness of this onslaught Rita Sohlberg was taken back
+completely.  It all came so swiftly, so terribly, she scarcely realized
+what was happening before the storm was upon her.  There was no time
+for arguments, pleas, anything.  Terrified, shamed, nonplussed, she
+went down quite limply under this almost lightning attack.  When Aileen
+began to strike her she attempted in vain to defend herself, uttering
+at the same time piercing screams which could be heard throughout the
+house.  She screamed shrilly, strangely, like a wild dying animal.  On
+the instant all her fine, civilized poise had deserted her.  From the
+sweetness and delicacy of the reception atmosphere--the polite cooings,
+posturings, and mouthings so charming to contemplate, so alluring in
+her--she had dropped on the instant to that native animal condition
+that shows itself in fear.  Her eyes had a look of hunted horror, her
+lips and cheeks were pale and drawn.  She retreated in a staggering,
+ungraceful way; she writhed and squirmed, screaming in the strong
+clutch of the irate and vigorous Aileen.
+
+Cowperwood entered the hall below just before the screams began. He had
+followed the Sohlbergs almost immediately from his office, and,
+chancing to glance in the reception-room, he had observed Sohlberg
+smiling, radiant, an intangible air of self-ingratiating, social, and
+artistic sycophancy about him, his long black frock-coat buttoned
+smoothly around his body, his silk hat still in his hands.
+
+"Awe, how do you do, Meezter Cowperwood," he was beginning to say, his
+curly head shaking in a friendly manner, "I'm soa glad to see you
+again" when--but who can imitate a scream of terror? We have no words,
+no symbols even, for those essential sounds of fright and agony.  They
+filled the hall, the library, the reception-room, the distant kitchen
+even, and basement with a kind of vibrant terror.
+
+Cowperwood, always the man of action as opposed to nervous cogitation,
+braced up on the instant like taut wire.  What, for heaven's sake,
+could that be? What a terrible cry! Sohlberg the artist, responding
+like a chameleon to the various emotional complexions of life, began to
+breathe stertorously, to blanch, to lose control of himself.
+
+"My God!" he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, "that's Rita! She's
+up-stairs in your wife's room! Something must have happened.  Oh--" On
+the instant he was quite beside himself, terrified, shaking, almost
+useless.  Cowperwood, on the contrary, without a moment's hesitation
+had thrown his coat to the floor, dashed up the stairs, followed by
+Sohlberg.  What could it be? Where was Aileen? As he bounded upward a
+clear sense of something untoward came over him; it was sickening,
+terrifying.  Scream! Scream! Scream! came the sounds.  "Oh, my God!
+don't kill me! Help! Help!" SCREAM--this last a long, terrified,
+ear-piercing wail.
+
+Sohlberg was about to drop from heart failure, he was so frightened.
+His face was an ashen gray.  Cowperwood seized the door-knob vigorously
+and, finding the door locked, shook, rattled, and banged at it.
+
+"Aileen!" he called, sharply.  "Aileen! What's the matter in there?
+Open this door, Aileen!"
+
+"Oh, my God! Oh, help! help! Oh, mercy--o-o-o-o-oh!" It was the moaning
+voice of Rita.
+
+"I'll show you, you she-devil!" he heard Aileen calling.  "I'll teach
+you, you beast! You cat, you prostitute! There! there! there!"
+
+"Aileen!" he called, hoarsely.  "Aileen!" Then, getting no response,
+and the screams continuing, he turned angrily.
+
+"Stand back!" he exclaimed to Sohlberg, who was moaning helplessly.
+"Get me a chair, get me a table--anything." The butler ran to obey, but
+before he could return Cowperwood had found an implement. "Here!" he
+said, seizing a long, thin, heavily carved and heavily wrought oak
+chair which stood at the head of the stairs on the landing.  He whirled
+it vigorously over his head.  Smash! The sound rose louder than the
+screams inside.
+
+Smash! The chair creaked and almost broke, but the door did not give.
+
+Smash! The chair broke and the door flew open.  He had knocked the lock
+loose and had leaped in to where Aileen, kneeling over Rita on the
+floor, was choking and beating her into insensibility. Like an animal
+he was upon her.
+
+"Aileen," he shouted, fiercely, in a hoarse, ugly, guttural voice, "you
+fool! You idiot--let go! What the devil's the matter with you? What are
+you trying to do? Have you lost your mind?--you crazy idiot!"
+
+He seized her strong hands and ripped them apart.  He fairly dragged
+her back, half twisting and half throwing her over his knee, loosing
+her clutching hold.  She was so insanely furious that she still
+struggled and cried, saying: "Let me at her! Let me at her! I'll teach
+her! Don't you try to hold me, you dog! I'll show you, too, you
+brute--oh--"
+
+"Pick up that woman," called Cowperwood, firmly, to Sohlberg and the
+butler, who had entered.  "Get her out of here quick! My wife has gone
+crazy.  Get her out of here, I tell you! This woman doesn't know what
+she's doing.  Take her out and get a doctor.  What sort of a hell's
+melee is this, anyway?"
+
+"Oh," moaned Rita, who was torn and fainting, almost unconscious from
+sheer terror.
+
+"I'll kill her!" screamed Aileen.  "I'll murder her! I'll murder you
+too, you dog! Oh"--she began striking at him--"I'll teach you how to
+run around with other women, you dog, you brute!"
+
+Cowperwood merely gripped her hands and shook her vigorously,
+forcefully.
+
+"What the devil has got into you, anyway, you fool?" he said to her,
+bitterly, as they carried Rita out.  "What are you trying to do,
+anyway--murder her? Do you want the police to come in here? Stop your
+screaming and behave yourself, or I'll shove a handkerchief in your
+mouth! Stop, I tell you! Stop! Do you hear me? This is enough, you
+fool!" He clapped his hand over her mouth, pressing it tight and
+forcing her back against him.  He shook her brutally, angrily.  He was
+very strong.  "Now will you stop," he insisted, "or do you want me to
+choke you quiet? I will, if you don't. You're out of your mind.  Stop,
+I tell you! So this is the way you carry on when things don't go to
+suit you?" She was sobbing, struggling, moaning, half screaming, quite
+beside herself.
+
+"Oh, you crazy fool!" he said, swinging her round, and with an effort
+getting out a handkerchief, which he forced over her face and in her
+mouth.  "There," he said, relievedly, "now will you shut up?" holding
+her tight in an iron grip, he let her struggle and turn, quite ready to
+put an end to her breathing if necessary.
+
+Now that he had conquered her, he continued to hold her tightly,
+stooping beside her on one knee, listening and meditating.  Hers was
+surely a terrible passion.  From some points of view he could not blame
+her.  Great was her provocation, great her love.  He knew her
+disposition well enough to have anticipated something of this sort.
+Yet the wretchedness, shame, scandal of the terrible affair upset his
+customary equilibrium.  To think any one should give way to such a
+storm as this! To think that Aileen should do it! To think that Rita
+should have been so mistreated! It was not at all unlikely that she was
+seriously injured, marred for life--possibly even killed.  The horror
+of that! The ensuing storm of public rage! A trial! His whole career
+gone up in one terrific explosion of woe, anger, death! Great God!
+
+He called the butler to him by a nod of his head, when the latter, who
+had gone out with Rita, hurried back.
+
+"How is she?" he asked, desperately.  "Seriously hurt?"
+
+"No, sir; I think not.  I believe she's just fainted.  She'll be all
+right in a little while, sir.  Can I be of any service, sir?"
+
+Ordinarily Cowperwood would have smiled at such a scene.  Now he was
+cold, sober.
+
+"Not now," he replied, with a sigh of relief, still holding Aileen
+firmly.  "Go out and close the door.  Call a doctor.  Wait in the hall.
+When he comes, call me."
+
+Aileen, conscious of things being done for Rita, of sympathy being
+extended to her, tried to get up, to scream again; but she couldn't;
+her lord and master held her in an ugly hold.  When the door was closed
+he said again: "Now, Aileen, will you hush? Will you let me get up and
+talk to you, or must we stay here all night? Do you want me to drop you
+forever after to-night? I understand all about this, but I am in
+control now, and I am going to stay so.  You will come to your senses
+and be reasonable, or I will leave you to-morrow as sure as I am here."
+His voice rang convincingly. "Now, shall we talk sensibly, or will you
+go on making a fool of yourself--disgracing me, disgracing the house,
+making yourself and myself the laughing-stock of the servants, the
+neighborhood, the city? This is a fine showing you've made to-day.
+Good God! A fine showing, indeed! A brawl in this house, a fight! I
+thought you had better sense--more self-respect--really I did.  You
+have seriously jeopardized my chances here in Chicago.  You have
+seriously injured and possibly killed a woman.  You could even be
+hanged for that.  Do you hear me?"
+
+"Oh, let them hang me," groaned Aileen.  "I want to die."
+
+He took away his hand from her mouth, loosened his grip upon her arms,
+and let her get to her feet.  She was still torrential, impetuous,
+ready to upbraid him, but once standing she was confronted by him,
+cold, commanding, fixing her with a fishy eye.  He wore a look now she
+had never seen on his face before--a hard, wintry, dynamic flare, which
+no one but his commercial enemies, and only those occasionally, had
+seen.
+
+"Now stop!" he exclaimed.  "Not one more word! Not one! Do you hear me?"
+
+She wavered, quailed, gave way.  All the fury of her tempestuous soul
+fell, as the sea falls under a lapse of wind.  She had had it in heart,
+on her lips, to cry again, "You dog! you brute!" and a hundred other
+terrible, useless things, but somehow, under the pressure of his gaze,
+the hardness of his heart, the words on her lips died away.  She looked
+at him uncertainly for a moment, then, turning, she threw herself on
+the bed near by, clutched her cheeks and mouth and eyes, and, rocking
+back and forth in an agony of woe, she began to sob:
+
+"Oh, my God! my God! My heart! My life! I want to die! I want to die!"
+
+Standing there watching her, there suddenly came to Cowperwood a keen
+sense of her soul hurt, her heart hurt, and he was moved.
+
+"Aileen," he said, after a moment or two, coming over and touching her
+quite gently, "Aileen! Don't cry so.  I haven't left you yet. Your life
+isn't utterly ruined.  Don't cry.  This is bad business, but perhaps it
+is not without remedy.  Come now, pull yourself together, Aileen!"
+
+For answer she merely rocked and moaned, uncontrolled and
+uncontrollable.
+
+Being anxious about conditions elsewhere, he turned and stepped out
+into the hall.  He must make some show for the benefit of the doctor
+and the servants; he must look after Rita, and offer some sort of
+passing explanation to Sohlherg.
+
+"Here," he called to a passing servant, "shut that door and watch it.
+If Mrs. Cowperwood comes out call me instantly."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+"Hell Hath No Fury--"
+
+
+Rita was not dead by any means--only seriously bruised, scratched, and
+choked.  Her scalp was cut in one place.  Aileen had repeatedly beaten
+her head on the floor, and this might have resulted seriously if
+Cowperwood had not entered as quickly as he had.  Sohlberg for the
+moment--for some little time, in fact--was under the impression that
+Aileen had truly lost her mind, had suddenly gone crazy, and that those
+shameless charges he had heard her making were the emanations of a
+disordered brain.  Nevertheless the things she had said haunted him.
+He was in a bad state himself--almost a subject for the doctor.  His
+lips were bluish, his cheeks blanched.  Rita had been carried into an
+adjoining bedroom and laid upon a bed; cold water, ointments, a bottle
+of arnica had been procured; and when Cowperwood appeared she was
+conscious and somewhat better. But she was still very weak and smarting
+from her wounds, both mental and physical.  When the doctor arrived he
+had been told that a lady, a guest, had fallen down-stairs; when
+Cowperwood came in the physician was dressing her wounds.
+
+As soon as he had gone Cowperwood said to the maid in attendance, "Go
+get me some hot water." As the latter disappeared he bent over and
+kissed Rita's bruised lips, putting his finger to his own in warning
+sign.
+
+"Rita," he asked, softly, "are you fully conscious?"
+
+She nodded weakly.
+
+"Listen, then," he said, bending over and speaking slowly.  "Listen
+carefully.  Pay strict attention to what I'm saying.  You must
+understand every word, and do as I tell you.  You are not seriously
+injured.  You will be all right.  This will blow over.  I have sent for
+another doctor to call on you at your studio.  Your husband has gone
+for some fresh clothes.  He will come back in a little while.  My
+carriage will take you home when you are a little stronger.  You
+mustn't worry.  Everything will be all right, but you must deny
+everything, do you hear? Everything! In so far as you know, Mrs.
+Cowperwood is insane.  I will talk to your husband to-morrow.  I will
+send you a trained nurse.  Meantime you must be careful of what you say
+and how you say it.  Be perfectly calm. Don't worry.  You are perfectly
+safe here, and you will be there. Mrs. Cowperwood will not trouble you
+any more.  I will see to that. I am so sorry; but I love you.  I am
+near you all the while.  You must not let this make any difference.
+You will not see her any more."
+
+Still he knew that it would make a difference.
+
+Reassured as to Rita's condition, he went back to Aileen's room to
+plead with her again--to soothe her if he could.  He found her up and
+dressing, a new thought and determination in her mind. Since she had
+thrown herself on the bed sobbing and groaning, her mood had gradually
+changed; she began to reason that if she could not dominate him, could
+not make him properly sorry, she had better leave.  It was evident, she
+thought, that he did not love her any more, seeing that his anxiety to
+protect Rita had been so great; his brutality in restraining her so
+marked; and yet she did not want to believe that this was so.  He had
+been so wonderful to her in times past.  She had not given up all hope
+of winning a victory over him, and these other women--she loved him too
+much--but only a separation would do it.  That might bring him to his
+senses. She would get up, dress, and go down-town to a hotel.  He
+should not see her any more unless he followed her.  She was satisfied
+that she had broken up the liaison with Rita Sohlberg, anyway for the
+present, and as for Antoinette Nowak, she would attend to her later.
+Her brain and her heart ached.  She was so full of woe and rage,
+alternating, that she could not cry any more now.  She stood before her
+mirror trying with trembling fingers to do over her toilet and adjust a
+street-costume.  Cowperwood was disturbed, nonplussed at this
+unexpected sight.
+
+"Aileen," he said, finally, coming up behind her, "can't you and I talk
+this thing over peacefully now? You don't want to do anything that
+you'll be sorry for.  I don't want you to.  I'm sorry.  You don't
+really believe that I've ceased to love you, do you? I haven't, you
+know.  This thing isn't as bad as it looks.  I should think you would
+have a little more sympathy with me after all we have been through
+together.  You haven't any real evidence of wrong-doing on which to
+base any such outburst as this."
+
+"Oh, haven't I?" she exclaimed, turning from the mirror, where,
+sorrowfully and bitterly, she was smoothing her red-gold hair. Her
+cheeks were flushed, her eyes red.  Just now she seemed as remarkable
+to him as she had seemed that first day, years ago, when in a red cape
+he had seen her, a girl of sixteen, running up the steps of her
+father's house in Philadelphia.  She was so wonderful then.  It
+mellowed his mood toward her.
+
+"That's all you know about it, you liar!" she declared.  "It's little
+you know what I know.  I haven't had detectives on your trail for weeks
+for nothing.  You sneak! You'd like to smooth around now and find out
+what I know.  Well, I know enough, let me tell you that.  You won't
+fool me any longer with your Rita Sohlbergs and your Antoinette Nowaks
+and your apartments and your houses of assignation.  I know what you
+are, you brute! And after all your protestations of love for me! Ugh!"
+
+She turned fiercely to her task while Cowperwood stared at her, touched
+by her passion, moved by her force.  It was fine to see what a dramatic
+animal she was--really worthy of him in many ways.
+
+"Aileen," he said, softly, hoping still to ingratiate himself by
+degrees, "please don't be so bitter toward me.  Haven't you any
+understanding of how life works--any sympathy with it? I thought you
+were more generous, more tender.  I'm not so bad."
+
+He eyed her thoughtfully, tenderly, hoping to move her through her love
+for him.
+
+"Sympathy! Sympathy!" She turned on him blazing.  "A lot you know about
+sympathy! I suppose I didn't give you any sympathy when you were in the
+penitentiary in Philadelphia, did I? A lot of good it did me--didn't
+it? Sympathy! Bah! To have you come out here to Chicago and take up
+with a lot of prostitutes--cheap stenographers and wives of musicians!
+You have given me a lot of sympathy, haven't you?--with that woman
+lying in the next room to prove it!"
+
+She smoothed her lithe waist and shook her shoulders preparatory to
+putting on a hat and adjusting her wrap.  She proposed to go just as
+she was, and send Fadette back for all her belongings.
+
+"Aileen," he pleaded, determined to have his way, "I think you're very
+foolish.  Really I do.  There is no occasion for all this--none in the
+world.  Here you are talking at the top of your voice, scandalizing the
+whole neighborhood, fighting, leaving the house. It's abominable.  I
+don't want you to do it.  You love me yet, don't you? You know you do.
+I know you don't mean all you say. You can't.  You really don't believe
+that I have ceased to love you, do you, Aileen?"
+
+"Love!" fired Aileen.  "A lot you know about love! A lot you have ever
+loved anybody, you brute! I know how you love.  I thought you loved me
+once.  Humph! I see how you loved me--just as you've loved fifty other
+women, as you love that snippy little Rita Sohlberg in the next
+room--the cat!--the dirty little beast!--the way you love Antoinette
+Nowak--a cheap stenographer! Bah! You don't know what the word means."
+And yet her voice trailed off into a kind of sob and her eyes filled
+with tears, hot, angry, aching. Cowperwood saw them and came over,
+hoping in some way to take advantage of them.  He was truly sorry
+now--anxious to make her feel tender toward him once more.
+
+"Aileen," he pleaded, "please don't be so bitter.  You shouldn't be so
+hard on me.  I'm not so bad.  Aren't you going to be reasonable?" He
+put out a smoothing hand, but she jumped away.
+
+"Don't you touch me, you brute!" she exclaimed, angrily.  "Don't you
+lay a hand on me.  I don't want you to come near me.  I'll not live
+with you.  I'll not stay in the same house with you and your
+mistresses.  Go and live with your dear, darling Rita on the North Side
+if you want to.  I don't care.  I suppose you've been in the next room
+comforting her--the beast! I wish I had killed her--Oh, God!" She tore
+at her throat in a violent rage, trying to adjust a button.
+
+Cowperwood was literally astonished.  Never had he seen such an
+outburst as this.  He had not believed Aileen to be capable of it. He
+could not help admiring her.  Nevertheless he resented the brutality of
+her assault on Rita and on his own promiscuous tendency, and this
+feeling vented itself in one last unfortunate remark.
+
+"I wouldn't be so hard on mistresses if I were you, Aileen," he
+ventured, pleadingly.  "I should have thought your own experience would
+have--"
+
+He paused, for he saw on the instant that he was making a grave
+mistake.  This reference to her past as a mistress was crucial. On the
+instant she straightened up, and her eyes filled with a great pain.
+"So that's the way you talk to me, is it?" she asked. "I knew it! I
+knew it! I knew it would come!"
+
+She turned to a tall chest of drawers as high as her breasts, laden
+with silverware, jewel-boxes, brushes and combs, and, putting her arms
+down, she laid her head upon them and began to cry.  This was the last
+straw.  He was throwing up her lawless girlhood love to her as an
+offense.
+
+"Oh!" she sobbed, and shook in a hopeless, wretched paroxysm.
+Cowperwood came over quickly.  He was distressed, pained.  "I didn't
+mean that, Aileen," he explained.  "I didn't mean it in that way--not
+at all.  You rather drew that out of me; but I didn't mean it as a
+reproach.  You were my mistress, but good Lord, I never loved you any
+the less for that--rather more.  You know I did.  I want you to believe
+that; it's true.  These other matters haven't been so important to
+me--they really haven't--"
+
+He looked at her helplessly as she moved away to avoid him; he was
+distressed, nonplussed, immensely sorry.  As he walked to the center of
+the room again she suddenly suffered a great revulsion of feeling, but
+only in the direction of more wrath.  This was too much.
+
+"So this is the way you talk to me," she exclaimed, "after all I have
+done for you! You say that to me after I waited for you and cried over
+you when you were in prison for nearly two years? Your mistress! That's
+my reward, is it? Oh!"
+
+Suddenly she observed her jewel-case, and, resenting all the gifts he
+had given her in Philadelphia, in Paris, in Rome, here in Chicago, she
+suddenly threw open the lid and, grabbing the contents by handfuls,
+began to toss them toward him--to actually throw them in his face.  Out
+they came, handfuls of gauds that he had given her in real affection: a
+jade necklace and bracelet of pale apple-green set in spun gold, with
+clasps of white ivory; a necklace of pearls, assorted as to size and
+matched in color, that shone with a tinted, pearly flame in the evening
+light; a handful of rings and brooches, diamonds, rubies, opals,
+amethysts; a dog-collar of emeralds, and a diamond hair-ornament.  She
+flung them at him excitedly, strewing the floor, striking him on the
+neck, the face, the hands.  "Take that! and that! and that! There they
+are! I don't want anything more of yours.  I don't want anything more
+to do with you.  I don't want anything that belongs to you.  Thank God,
+I have money enough of my own to live on! I hate you--I despise you--I
+never want to see you any more.  Oh--" And, trying to think of
+something more, but failing, she dashed swiftly down the hall and down
+the stairs, while he stood for just one moment overwhelmed. Then he
+hurried after.
+
+"Aileen!" he called.  "Aileen, come back here! Don't go, Aileen!" But
+she only hurried faster; she opened and closed the door, and actually
+ran out in the dark, her eyes wet, her heart bursting. So this was the
+end of that youthful dream that had begun so beautifully.  She was no
+better than the others--just one of his mistresses.  To have her past
+thrown up to her as a defense for the others! To be told that she was
+no better than they! This was the last straw.  She choked and sobbed as
+she walked, vowing never to return, never to see him any more.  But as
+she did so Cowperwood came running after, determined for once, as
+lawless as he was, that this should not be the end of it all.  She had
+loved him, he reflected.  She had laid every gift of passion and
+affection on the altar of her love.  It wasn't fair, really.  She must
+be made to stay.  He caught up at last, reaching her under the dark of
+the November trees.
+
+"Aileen," he said, laying hold of her and putting his arms around her
+waist.  "Aileen, dearest, this is plain madness.  It is insanity.
+You're not in your right mind.  Don't go! Don't leave me! I love you!
+Don't you know I do? Can't you really see that? Don't run away like
+this, and don't cry.  I do love you, and you know it. I always shall.
+Come back now.  Kiss me.  I'll do better.  Really I will.  Give me
+another chance.  Wait and see.  Come now--won't you? That's my girl, my
+Aileen.  Do come.  Please!"
+
+She pulled on, but he held her, smoothing her arms, her neck, her face.
+
+"Aileen!" he entreated.
+
+She tugged so that he was finally compelled to work her about into his
+arms; then, sobbing, she stood there agonized but happy once more, in a
+way.
+
+"But I don't want to," she protested.  "You don't love me any more. Let
+me go."
+
+But he kept hold of her, urging, and finally she said, her head upon
+his shoulder as of old, "Don't make me come back to-night. I don't want
+to.  I can't.  Let me go down-town.  I'll come back later, maybe."
+
+"Then I'll go with you," he said, endearingly.  "It isn't right. There
+are a lot of things I should be doing to stop this scandal, but I'll
+go."
+
+And together they sought a street-car.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+
+"Man and Superman"
+
+
+It is a sad commentary on all save the most chemic unions--those dark
+red flowers of romance that bloom most often only for a tragic
+end--that they cannot endure the storms of disaster that are wont to
+overtake them.  A woman like Rita Sohlberg, with a seemingly urgent
+feeling for Cowperwood, was yet not so charmed by him but that this
+shock to her pride was a marked sedative.  The crushing weight of such
+an exposure as this, the Homeric laughter inherent, if not indicated in
+the faulty planning, the failure to take into account beforehand all
+the possibilities which might lead to such a disaster, was too much for
+her to endure.  She was stung almost to desperation, maddened, at the
+thought of the gay, idle way in which she had walked into Mrs.
+Cowperwood's clutches and been made into a spectacle and a
+laughing-stock by her.  What a brute she was--what a demon! Her own
+physical weakness under the circumstances was no grief to her--rather a
+salve to her superior disposition; but just the same she had been badly
+beaten, her beauty turned into a ragamuffin show, and that was enough.
+This evening, in the Lake Shore Sanitarium, where she had been taken,
+she had but one thought--to get away when it should all be over and
+rest her wearied brain.  She did not want to see Sohlberg any more; she
+did not want to see Cowperwood any more.  Already Harold, suspicious
+and determined to get at the truth, was beginning to question her as to
+the strangeness of Aileen's attack--her probable reason.  When
+Cowperwood was announced, Sohlberg's manner modified somewhat, for
+whatever his suspicions were, he was not prepared to quarrel with this
+singular man as yet.
+
+"I am so sorry about this unfortunate business," said Cowperwood,
+coming in with brisk assurance.  "I never knew my wife to become so
+strangely unbalanced before.  It was most fortunate that I arrived when
+I did.  I certainly owe you both every amend that can be made.  I
+sincerely hope, Mrs. Sohlberg, that you are not seriously injured.  If
+there is anything I can possibly do--anything either of you can
+suggest"--he looked around solicitously at Sohlberg--"I shall only be
+too glad to do it.  How would it do for you to take Mrs. Sohlberg away
+for a little while for a rest? I shall so gladly pay all expenses in
+connection with her recovery."
+
+Sohlberg, brooding and heavy, remained unresponsive, smoldering; Rita,
+cheered by Cowperwood's presence, but not wholly relieved by any means,
+was questioning and disturbed.  She was afraid there was to be a
+terrific scene between them.  She declared she was better and would be
+all right--that she did not need to go away, but that she preferred to
+be alone.
+
+"It's very strange," said Sohlberg, sullenly, after a little while. "I
+daunt onderstand it! I daunt onderstand it at all.  Why should she do
+soach a thing? Why should she say soach things? Here we have been the
+best of friends opp to now.  Then suddenly she attacks my wife and sais
+all these strange things."
+
+"But I have assured you, my dear Mr. Sohlberg, that my wife was not in
+her right mind.  She has been subject to spells of this kind in the
+past, though never to anything so violent as this to-night.  Already
+she has recovered her normal state, and she does not remember.  But,
+perhaps, if we are going to discuss things now we had better go out in
+the hall.  Your wife will need all the rest she can get."
+
+Once outside, Cowperwood continued with brilliant assurance: "Now, my
+dear Sohlberg, what is it I can say? What is it you wish me to do? My
+wife has made a lot of groundless charges, to say nothing of injuring
+your wife most seriously and shamefully.  I cannot tell you, as I have
+said, how sorry I am.  I assure you Mrs. Cowperwood is suffering from a
+gross illusion.  There is absolutely nothing to do, nothing to say, so
+far as I can see, but to let the whole matter drop.  Don't you agree
+with me?"
+
+Harold was twisting mentally in the coils of a trying situation. His
+own position, as he knew, was not formidable.  Rita had reproached him
+over and over for infidelity.  He began to swell and bluster at once.
+
+"That is all very well for you to say, Mr. Cowperwood," he commented,
+defiantly, "but how about me? Where do I come in? I daunt know what to
+theenk yet.  It ees very strange.  Supposing what your wife sais was
+true? Supposing my wife has been going around weeth some one? That ees
+what I want to find out.  Eef she has! Eef eet is what I theenk it ees
+I shall--I shall--I daunt know what I shall do.  I am a very violent
+man."
+
+Cowperwood almost smiled, concerned as he was over avoiding publicity;
+he had no fear of Sohlberg physically.
+
+"See here," he exclaimed, suddenly, looking sharply at the musician and
+deciding to take the bull by the horns, "you are in quite as delicate a
+situation as I am, if you only stop to think.  This affair, if it gets
+out, will involve not only me and Mrs. Cowperwood, but yourself and
+your wife, and if I am not mistaken, I think your own affairs are not
+in any too good shape.  You cannot blacken your wife without blackening
+yourself--that is inevitable.  None of us is exactly perfect.  For
+myself I shall be compelled to prove insanity, and I can do this
+easily.  If there is anything in your past which is not precisely what
+it should be it could not long be kept a secret.  If you are willing to
+let the matter drop I will make handsome provision for you both; if,
+instead, you choose to make trouble, to force this matter into the
+daylight, I shall leave no stone unturned to protect myself, to put as
+good a face on this matter as I can."
+
+"What!" exclaimed Sohlberg.  "You threaten me? You try to frighten me
+after your wife charges that you have been running around weeth my
+wife? You talk about my past! I like that.  Haw! We shall see about
+dis! What is it you knaw about me?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Sohlberg," rejoined Cowperwood, calmly, "I know, for
+instance, that for a long while your wife has not loved you, that you
+have been living on her as any pensioner might, that you have been
+running around with as many as six or seven women in as many years or
+less.  For months I have been acting as your wife's financial adviser,
+and in that time, with the aid of detectives, I have learned of Anna
+Stelmak, Jessie Laska, Bertha Reese, Georgia Du Coin--do I need to say
+any more? As a matter of fact, I have a number of your letters in my
+possession."
+
+"Saw that ees it!" exclaimed Sohlberg, while Cowperwood eyed him
+fixedly.  "You have been running around weeth my wife? Eet ees true,
+then.  A fine situation! And you come here now weeth these threats,
+these lies to booldoze me.  Haw! We weel see about them. We weel see
+what I can do.  Wait teel I can consult a lawyer first. Then we weel
+see!"
+
+Cowperwood surveyed him coldly, angrily.  "What an ass!" he thought.
+
+"See here," he said, urging Sohlberg, for privacy's sake, to come down
+into the lower hall, and then into the street before the sanitarium,
+where two gas-lamps were fluttering fitfully in the dark and wind, "I
+see very plainly that you are bent on making trouble.  It is not enough
+that I have assured you that there is nothing in this--that I have
+given you my word.  You insist on going further.  Very well, then.
+Supposing for argument's sake that Mrs. Cowperwood was not insane; that
+every word she said was true; that I had been misconducting myself with
+your wife? What of it? What will you do?"
+
+He looked at Sohlberg smoothly, ironically, while the latter flared up.
+
+"Haw!" he shouted, melodramatically.  "Why, I would keel you, that's
+what I would do.  I would keel her.  I weel make a terrible scene.
+Just let me knaw that this is so, and then see!"
+
+"Exactly," replied Cowperwood, grimly.  "I thought so.  I believe you.
+For that reason I have come prepared to serve you in just the way you
+wish." He reached in his coat and took out two small revolvers, which
+he had taken from a drawer at home for this very purpose.  They gleamed
+in the dark.  "Do you see these?" he continued.  "I am going to save
+you the trouble of further investigation, Mr. Sohlberg.  Every word
+that Mrs. Cowperwood said to-night--and I am saying this with a full
+understanding of what this means to you and to me--is true.  She is no
+more insane than I am.  Your wife has been living in an apartment with
+me on the North Side for months, though you cannot prove that.  She
+does not love you, but me.  Now if you want to kill me here is a gun."
+He extended his hand.  "Take your choice.  If I am to die you might as
+well die with me."
+
+He said it so coolly, so firmly, that Sohlberg, who was an innate
+coward, and who had no more desire to die than any other healthy
+animal, paled.  The look of cold steel was too much.  The hand that
+pressed them on him was hard and firm.  He took hold of one, but his
+fingers trembled.  The steely, metallic voice in his ear was
+undermining the little courage that he had.  Cowperwood by now had
+taken on the proportions of a dangerous man--the lineaments of a demon.
+He turned away mortally terrified.
+
+"My God!" he exclaimed, shaking like a leaf.  "You want to keel me, do
+you? I weel not have anything to do with you! I weel not talk to you! I
+weel see my lawyer.  I weel talk to my wife first."
+
+"Oh, no you won't," replied Cowperwood, intercepting him as he turned
+to go and seizing him firmly by the arm.  "I am not going to have you
+do anything of the sort.  I am not going to kill you if you are not
+going to kill me; but I am going to make you listen to reason for once.
+Now here is what else I have to say, and then I am through.  I am not
+unfriendly to you.  I want to do you a good turn, little as I care for
+you.  To begin with, there is nothing in those charges my wife made,
+not a thing.  I merely said what I did just now to see if you were in
+earnest.  You do not love your wife any more.  She doesn't love you.
+You are no good to her.  Now, I have a very friendly proposition to
+make to you. If you want to leave Chicago and stay away three years or
+more, I will see that you are paid five thousand dollars every year on
+January first--on the nail--five thousand dollars! Do you hear? Or you
+can stay here in Chicago and hold your tongue and I will make it three
+thousand--monthly or yearly, just as you please. But--and this is what
+I want you to remember--if you don't get out of town or hold your
+tongue, if you make one single rash move against me, I will kill you,
+and I will kill you on sight.  Now, I want you to go away from here and
+behave yourself.  Leave your wife alone.  Come and see me in a day or
+two--the money is ready for you any time."  He paused while Sohlberg
+stared--his eyes round and glassy.  This was the most astonishing
+experience of his life. This man was either devil or prince, or both.
+"Good God!" he thought.  "He will do that, too.  He will really kill
+me." Then the astounding alternative--five thousand dollars a
+year--came to his mind.  Well, why not? His silence gave consent.
+
+"If I were you I wouldn't go up-stairs again to-night," continued
+Cowperwood, sternly.  "Don't disturb her.  She needs rest.  Go on
+down-town and come and see me to-morrow--or if you want to go back I
+will go with you.  I want to say to Mrs. Sohlberg what I have said to
+you.  But remember what I've told you."
+
+"Nau, thank you," replied Sohlberg, feebly.  "I will go down-town. Good
+night." And he hurried away.
+
+"I'm sorry," said Cowperwood to himself, defensively.  "It is too bad,
+but it was the only way."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+A Matter of Tunnels
+
+
+The question of Sohlberg adjusted thus simply, if brutally, Cowperwood
+turned his attention to Mrs. Sohlberg.  But there was nothing much to
+be done.  He explained that he had now completely subdued Aileen and
+Sohlberg, that the latter would make no more trouble, that he was going
+to pension him, that Aileen would remain permanently quiescent.  He
+expressed the greatest solicitude for her, but Rita was now sickened of
+this tangle.  She had loved him, as she thought, but through the rage
+of Aileen she saw him in a different light, and she wanted to get away.
+His money, plentiful as it was, did not mean as much to her as it might
+have meant to some women; it simply spelled luxuries, without which she
+could exist if she must.  His charm for her had, perhaps, consisted
+mostly in the atmosphere of flawless security, which seemed to surround
+him--a glittering bubble of romance.  That, by one fell attack, was now
+burst.  He was seen to be quite as other men, subject to the same
+storms, the same danger of shipwreck.  Only he was a better sailor than
+most.  She recuperated gradually; left for home; left for Europe;
+details too long to be narrated. Sohlberg, after much meditating and
+fuming, finally accepted the offer of Cowperwood and returned to
+Denmark.  Aileen, after a few days of quarreling, in which he agreed to
+dispense with Antoinette Nowak, returned home.
+
+Cowperwood was in no wise pleased by this rough denouement.  Aileen had
+not raised her own attractions in his estimation, and yet, strange to
+relate, he was not unsympathetic with her.  He had no desire to desert
+her as yet, though for some time he had been growing in the feeling
+that Rita would have been a much better type of wife for him.  But what
+he could not have, he could not have.  He turned his attention with
+renewed force to his business; but it was with many a backward glance
+at those radiant hours when, with Rita in his presence or enfolded by
+his arms, he had seen life from a new and poetic angle.  She was so
+charming, so naive--but what could he do?
+
+For several years thereafter Cowperwood was busy following the Chicago
+street-railway situation with increasing interest.  He knew it was
+useless to brood over Rita Sohlberg--she would not return--and yet he
+could not help it; but he could work hard, and that was something.  His
+natural aptitude and affection for street-railway work had long since
+been demonstrated, and it was now making him restless.  One might have
+said of him quite truly that the tinkle of car-bells and the plop of
+plodding horses' feet was in his blood.  He surveyed these extending
+lines, with their jingling cars, as he went about the city, with an
+almost hungry eye.  Chicago was growing fast, and these little
+horse-cars on certain streets were crowded night and morning--fairly
+bulging with people at the rush-hours.  If he could only secure an
+octopus-grip on one or all of them; if he could combine and control
+them all! What a fortune! That, if nothing else, might salve him for
+some of his woes--a tremendous fortune--nothing less.  He forever
+busied himself with various aspects of the scene quite as a poet might
+have concerned himself with rocks and rills.  To own these
+street-railways! To own these street-railways! So rang the song of his
+mind.
+
+Like the gas situation, the Chicago street-railway situation was
+divided into three parts--three companies representing and
+corresponding with the three different sides or divisions of the city.
+The Chicago City Railway Company, occupying the South Side and
+extending as far south as Thirty-ninth Street, had been organized in
+1859, and represented in itself a mine of wealth.  Already it
+controlled some seventy miles of track, and was annually being added to
+on Indiana Avenue, on Wabash Avenue, on State Street, and on Archer
+Avenue.  It owned over one hundred and fifty cars of the old-fashioned,
+straw-strewn, no-stove type, and over one thousand horses; it employed
+one hundred and seventy conductors, one hundred and sixty drivers, a
+hundred stablemen, and blacksmiths, harness-makers, and repairers in
+interesting numbers.  Its snow-plows were busy on the street in winter,
+its sprinkling-cars in summer.  Cowperwood calculated its shares,
+bonds, rolling-stock, and other physical properties as totaling in the
+vicinity of over two million dollars. The trouble with this company was
+that its outstanding stock was principally controlled by Norman
+Schryhart, who was now decidedly inimical to Cowperwood, or anything he
+might wish to do, and by Anson Merrill, who had never manifested any
+signs of friendship. He did not see how he was to get control of this
+property.  Its shares were selling around two hundred and fifty dollars.
+
+The North Chicago City Railway was a corporation which had been
+organized at the same time as the South Side company, but by a
+different group of men.  Its management was old, indifferent, and
+incompetent, its equipment about the same.  The Chicago West Division
+Railway had originally been owned by the Chicago City or South Side
+Railway, but was now a separate corporation.  It was not yet so
+profitable as the other divisions of the city, but all sections of the
+city were growing.  The horse-bell was heard everywhere tinkling gaily.
+
+Standing on the outside of this scene, contemplating its promise,
+Cowperwood much more than any one else connected financially with the
+future of these railways at this time was impressed with their enormous
+possibilities--their enormous future if Chicago continued to grow, and
+was concerned with the various factors which might further or impede
+their progress.
+
+Not long before he had discovered that one of the chief handicaps to
+street-railway development, on the North and West Sides, lay in the
+congestion of traffic at the bridges spanning the Chicago River.
+Between the street ends that abutted on it and connected the two sides
+of the city ran this amazing stream--dirty, odorous, picturesque,
+compact of a heavy, delightful, constantly crowding and moving boat
+traffic, which kept the various bridges momentarily turning, and tied
+up the street traffic on either side of the river until it seemed at
+times as though the tangle of teams and boats would never any more be
+straightened out.  It was lovely, human, natural, Dickensesque--a fit
+subject for a Daumier, a Turner, or a Whistler.  The idlest of
+bridge-tenders judged for himself when the boats and when the teams
+should be made to wait, and how long, while in addition to the regular
+pedestrians a group of idlers stood at gaze fascinated by the crowd of
+masts, the crush of wagons, and the picturesque tugs in the foreground
+below. Cowperwood, as he sat in his light runabout, annoyed by a delay,
+or dashed swiftly forward to get over before a bridge turned, had long
+since noted that the street-car service in the North and West Sides was
+badly hampered.  The unbroken South Side, unthreaded by a river, had no
+such problem, and was growing rapidly.
+
+Because of this he was naturally interested to observe one day, in the
+course of his peregrinations, that there existed in two places under
+the Chicago River--in the first place at La Salle Street, running north
+and south, and in the second at Washington Street, running east and
+west--two now soggy and rat-infested tunnels which were never used by
+anybody--dark, dank, dripping affairs only vaguely lighted with
+oil-lamp, and oozing with water. Upon investigation he learned that
+they had been built years before to accommodate this same tide of wagon
+traffic, which now congested at the bridges, and which even then had
+been rapidly rising.  Being forced to pay a toll in time to which a
+slight toll in cash, exacted for the privilege of using a tunnel, had
+seemed to the investors and public infinitely to be preferred, this
+traffic had been offered this opportunity of avoiding the delay.
+However, like many another handsome commercial scheme on paper or
+bubbling in the human brain, the plan did not work exactly.  These
+tunnels might have proved profitable if they had been properly built
+with long, low-per-cent. grades, wide roadways, and a sufficiency of
+light and air; but, as a matter of fact, they had not been judiciously
+adapted to public convenience.  Norman Schryhart's father had been an
+investor in these tunnels, and Anson Merrill.  When they had proved
+unprofitable, after a long period of pointless manipulation--cost, one
+million dollars--they had been sold to the city for exactly that sum
+each, it being poetically deemed that a growing city could better
+afford to lose so disturbing an amount than any of its humble,
+ambitious, and respectable citizens.  That was a little affair by which
+members of council had profited years before; but that also is another
+story.
+
+After discovering these tunnels Cowperwood walked through them several
+times--for though they were now boarded up, there was still an
+uninterrupted footpath--and wondered why they could not be utilized.
+It seemed to him that if the street-car traffic were heavy enough,
+profitable enough, and these tunnels, for a reasonable sum, could be
+made into a lower grade, one of the problems which now hampered the
+growth of the North and West Sides would be obviated.  But how? He did
+not own the tunnels.  He did not own the street-railways.  The cost of
+leasing and rebuilding the tunnels would be enormous.  Helpers and
+horses and extra drivers on any grade, however slight, would have to be
+used, and that meant an extra expense.  With street-car horses as the
+only means of traction, and with the long, expensive grades, he was not
+so sure that this venture would be a profitable one.
+
+However, in the fall of 1880, or a little earlier (when he was still
+very much entangled with the preliminary sex affairs that led
+eventually to Rita Sohlberg), he became aware of a new system of
+traction relating to street-cars which, together with the arrival of
+the arc-light, the telephone, and other inventions, seemed destined to
+change the character of city life entirely.
+
+Recently in San Francisco, where the presence of hills made the
+movement of crowded street-railway cars exceedingly difficult, a new
+type of traction had been introduced--that of the cable, which was
+nothing more than a traveling rope of wire running over guttered wheels
+in a conduit, and driven by immense engines, conveniently located in
+adjacent stations or "power-houses." The cars carried a readily
+manipulated "grip-lever," or steel hand, which reached down through a
+slot into a conduit and "gripped" the moving cable. This invention
+solved the problem of hauling heavily laden street-cars up and down
+steep grades.  About the same time he also heard, in a roundabout way,
+that the Chicago City Railway, of which Schryhart and Merrill were the
+principal owners, was about to introduce this mode of traction on its
+lines--to cable State Street, and attach the cars of other lines
+running farther out into unprofitable districts as "trailers." At once
+the solution of the North and West Side problems flashed upon
+him--cables.
+
+Outside of the bridge crush and the tunnels above mentioned, there was
+one other special condition which had been for some time past
+attracting Cowperwood's attention.  This was the waning energy of the
+North Chicago City Railway Company--the lack of foresight on the part
+of its directors which prevented them from perceiving the proper
+solution of their difficulties.  The road was in a rather
+unsatisfactory state financially--really open to a coup of some sort.
+In the beginning it had been considered unprofitable, so thinly
+populated was the territory they served, and so short the distance from
+the business heart.  Later, however, as the territory filled up, they
+did better; only then the long waits at the bridges occurred.  The
+management, feeling that the lines were likely to be poorly patronized,
+had put down poor, little, light-weight rails, and run slimpsy cars
+which were as cold as ice in winter and as hot as stove-ovens in
+summer.  No attempt had been made to extend the down-town terminus of
+the several lines into the business center--they stopped just over the
+river which bordered it at the north.  (On the South Side Mr. Schryhart
+had done much better for his patrons.  He had already installed a loop
+for his cable about Merrill's store.) As on the West Side, straw was
+strewn in the bottom of all the cars in winter to keep the feet of the
+passengers warm, and but few open cars were used in summer.  The
+directors were averse to introducing them because of the expense.  So
+they had gone on and on, adding lines only where they were sure they
+would make a good profit from the start, putting down the same style of
+cheap rail that had been used in the beginning, and employing the same
+antique type of car which rattled and trembled as it ran, until the
+patrons were enraged to the point of anarchy. Only recently, because of
+various suits and complaints inaugurated, the company had been greatly
+annoyed, but they scarcely knew what to do, how to meet the onslaught.
+Though there was here and there a man of sense--such as Terrence
+Mulgannon, the general superintendent; Edwin Kaffrath, a director;
+William Johnson, the constructing engineer of the company--yet such
+other men as Onias C. Skinner, the president, and Walter Parker, the
+vice-president, were reactionaries of an elderly character,
+conservative, meditative, stingy, and, worst of all, fearful or without
+courage for great adventure.  It is a sad commentary that age almost
+invariably takes away the incentive to new achievement and makes "Let
+well enough alone" the most appealing motto.
+
+Mindful of this, Cowperwood, with a now splendid scheme in his mind,
+one day invited John J. McKenty over to his house to dinner on a social
+pretext.  When the latter, accompanied by his wife, had arrived, and
+Aileen had smiled on them both sweetly, and was doing her best to be
+nice to Mrs. McKenty, Cowperwood remarked:
+
+"McKenty, do you know anything about these two tunnels that the city
+owns under the river at Washington and La Salle streets?"
+
+"I know that the city took them over when it didn't need them, and that
+they're no good for anything.  That was before my time, though,"
+explained McKenty, cautiously.  "I think the city paid a million for
+them.  Why?"
+
+"Oh, nothing much," replied Cowperwood, evading the matter for the
+present.  "I was wondering whether they were in such condition that
+they couldn't be used for anything.  I see occasional references in the
+papers to their uselessness."
+
+"They're in pretty bad shape, I'm afraid," replied McKenty.  "I haven't
+been through either of them in years and years.  The idea was
+originally to let the wagons go through them and break up the crowding
+at the bridges.  But it didn't work.  They made the grade too steep and
+the tolls too high, and so the drivers preferred to wait for the
+bridges.  They were pretty hard on horses.  I can testify to that
+myself.  I've driven a wagon-load through them more than once.  The
+city should never have taken them over at all by rights.  It was a
+deal.  I don't know who all was in it.  Carmody was mayor then, and
+Aldrich was in charge of public works."
+
+He relapsed into silence, and Cowperwood allowed the matter of the
+tunnels to rest until after dinner when they had adjourned to the
+library.  There he placed a friendly hand on McKenty's arm, an act of
+familiarity which the politician rather liked.
+
+"You felt pretty well satisfied with the way that gas business came out
+last year, didn't you?" he inquired.
+
+"I did," replied McKenty, warmly.  "Never more so.  I told you that at
+the time." The Irishman liked Cowperwood, and was grateful for the
+swift manner in which he had been made richer by the sum of several
+hundred thousand dollars.
+
+"Well, now, McKenty," continued Cowperwood, abruptly, and with a
+seeming lack of connection, "has it ever occurred to you that things
+are shaping up for a big change in the street-railway situation here? I
+can see it coming.  There's going to be a new motor power introduced on
+the South Side within a year or two. You've heard of it?"
+
+"I read something of it," replied McKenty, surprised and a little
+questioning.  He took a cigar and prepared to listen.  Cowperwood,
+never smoking, drew up a chair.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what that means," he explained.  "It means that
+eventually every mile of street-railway track in this city--to say
+nothing of all the additional miles that will be built before this
+change takes place--will have to be done over on an entirely new basis.
+I mean this cable-conduit system.  These old companies that are
+hobbling along now with an old equipment will have to make the change.
+They'll have to spend millions and millions before they can bring their
+equipment up to date.  If you've paid any attention to the matter you
+must have seen what a condition these North and West Side lines are in."
+
+"It's pretty bad; I know that," commented McKenty.
+
+"Just so," replied Cowperwood, emphatically.  "Well, now, if I know
+anything about these old managements from studying them, they're going
+to have a hard time bringing themselves to do this. Two to three
+million are two to three million, and it isn't going to be an easy
+matter for them to raise the money--not as easy, perhaps, as it would
+be for some of the rest of us, supposing we wanted to go into the
+street-railway business."
+
+"Yes, supposing," replied McKenty, jovially.  "But how are you to get
+in it? There's no stock for sale that I know of."
+
+"Just the same," said Cowperwood, "we can if we want to, and I'll show
+you how.  But at present there's just one thing in particular I'd like
+you to do for me.  I want to know if there is any way that we can get
+control of either of those two old tunnels that I was talking to you
+about a little while ago.  I'd like both if I might.  Do you suppose
+that is possible?"
+
+"Why, yes," replied McKenty, wondering; "but what have they got to do
+with it? They're not worth anything.  Some of the boys were talking
+about filling them in some time ago--blowing them up.  The police think
+crooks hide in them."
+
+"Just the same, don't let any one touch them--don't lease them or
+anything," replied Cowperwood, forcefully.  "I'll tell you frankly what
+I want to do.  I want to get control, just as soon as possible, of all
+the street-railway lines I can on the North and West Sides--new or old
+franchises.  Then you'll see where the tunnels come in."
+
+He paused to see whether McKenty caught the point of all he meant, but
+the latter failed.
+
+"You don't want much, do you?" he said, cheerfully.  "But I don't see
+how you can use the tunnels.  However, that's no reason why I shouldn't
+take care of them for you, if you think that's important."
+
+"It's this way," said Cowperwood, thoughtfully.  "I'll make you a
+preferred partner in all the ventures that I control if you do as I
+suggest.  The street-railways, as they stand now, will have to be taken
+up lock, stock, and barrel, and thrown into the scrap heap within eight
+or nine years at the latest.  You see what the South Side company is
+beginning to do now.  When it comes to the West and North Side
+companies they won't find it so easy.  They aren't earning as much as
+the South Side, and besides they have those bridges to cross.  That
+means a severe inconvenience to a cable line.  In the first place, the
+bridges will have to be rebuilt to stand the extra weight and strain.
+Now the question arises at once--at whose expense? The city's?"
+
+"That depends on who's asking for it," replied Mr. McKenty, amiably.
+
+"Quite so," assented Cowperwood.  "In the next place, this river
+traffic is becoming impossible from the point of view of a decent
+street-car service.  There are waits now of from eight to fifteen
+minutes while these tows and vessels get through.  Chicago has five
+hundred thousand population to-day.  How much will it have in 1890? In
+1900? How will it be when it has eight hundred thousand or a million?"
+
+"You're quite right," interpolated McKenty.  "It will be pretty bad."
+
+"Exactly.  But what is worse, the cable lines will carry trailers, or
+single cars, from feeder lines.  There won't be single cars waiting at
+these draws--there will be trains, crowded trains.  It won't be
+advisable to delay a cable-train from eight to fifteen minutes while
+boats are making their way through a draw.  The public won't stand for
+that very long, will it, do you think?"
+
+"Not without making a row, probably," replied McKenty.
+
+"Well, that means what, then?" asked Cowperwood.  "Is the traffic going
+to get any lighter? Is the river going to dry up?"
+
+Mr. McKenty stared.  Suddenly his face lighted.  "Oh, I see," he said,
+shrewdly.  "It's those tunnels you're thinking about.  Are they in any
+shape to be used?"
+
+"They can be made over cheaper than new ones can be built."
+
+"True for you," replied McKenty, "and if they're in any sort of repair
+they'd be just what you'd want." He was emphatic, almost triumphant.
+"They belong to the city.  They cost pretty near a million apiece,
+those things."
+
+"I know it," said Cowperwood.  "Now, do you see what I'm driving at?"
+
+"Do I see!" smiled McKenty.  "That's a real idea you have, Cowperwood.
+I take off my hat to you.  Say what you want."
+
+"Well, then, in the first place," replied Cowperwood, genially, "it is
+agreed that the city won't part with those two tunnels under any
+circumstances until we can see what can be done about this other
+matter?"
+
+"It will not."
+
+"In the next place, it is understood, is it, that you won't make it any
+easier than you can possibly help for the North and West Side companies
+to get ordinances extending their lines, or anything else, from now on?
+I shall want to introduce some franchises for feeders and outlying
+lines myself."
+
+"Bring in your ordinances," replied McKenty, "and I'll do whatever you
+say.  I've worked with you before.  I know that you keep your word."
+
+"Thanks," said Cowperwood, warmly.  "I know the value of keeping it.
+In the mean while I'll go ahead and see what can be done about the
+other matter.  I don't know just how many men I will need to let in on
+this, or just what form the organization will take.  But you may depend
+upon it that your interests will be properly taken care of, and that
+whatever is done will be done with your full knowledge and consent."
+
+"All very good," answered McKenty, thinking of the new field of
+activity before them.  A combination between himself and Cowperwood in
+a matter like this must prove very beneficial to both.  And he was
+satisfied, because of their previous relations, that his own interests
+would not be neglected.
+
+"Shall we go and see if we can find the ladies?" asked Cowperwood,
+jauntily, laying hold of the politician's arm.
+
+"To be sure," assented McKenty, gaily.  "It's a fine house you have
+here--beautiful.  And your wife is as pretty a woman as I ever saw, if
+you'll pardon the familiarity."
+
+"I have always thought she was rather attractive myself," replied
+Cowperwood, innocently.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+Street-railways at Last
+
+
+Among the directors of the North Chicago City company there was one
+man, Edwin L. Kaffrath, who was young and of a forward-looking
+temperament.  His father, a former heavy stockholder of this company,
+had recently died and left all his holdings and practically his
+directorship to his only son.  Young Kaffrath was by no means a
+practical street-railway man, though he fancied he could do very well
+at it if given a chance.  He was the holder of nearly eight hundred of
+the five thousand shares of stock; but the rest of it was so divided
+that he could only exercise a minor influence. Nevertheless, from the
+day of his entrance into the company--which was months before
+Cowperwood began seriously to think over the situation--he had been
+strong for improvements--extensions, more franchises, better cars,
+better horses, stoves in the cars in winter, and the like, all of which
+suggestions sounded to his fellow-directors like mere manifestations of
+the reckless impetuosity of youth, and were almost uniformly opposed.
+
+"What's the matter with them cars?" asked Albert Thorsen, one of the
+elder directors, at one of the meetings at which Kaffrath was present
+and offering his usual protest.  "I don't see anything the matter with
+'em.  I ride in em."
+
+Thorsen was a heavy, dusty, tobacco-bestrewn individual of sixty-six,
+who was a little dull but genial.  He was in the paint business, and
+always wore a very light steel-gray suit much crinkled in the seat and
+arms.
+
+"Perhaps that's what's the matter with them, Albert," chirped up Solon
+Kaempfaert, one of his cronies on the board.
+
+The sally drew a laugh.
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  I see the rest of you on board often enough."
+
+"Why, I tell you what's the matter with them," replied Kaffrath.
+"They're dirty, and they're flimsy, and the windows rattle so you can't
+hear yourself think.  The track is no good, and the filthy straw we
+keep in them in winter is enough to make a person sick. We don't keep
+the track in good repair.  I don't wonder people complain.  I'd
+complain myself."
+
+"Oh, I don't think things are as bad as all that," put in Onias C.
+Skinner, the president, who had a face which with its very short
+side-whiskers was as bland as a Chinese god.  He was sixty-eight years
+of age.  "They're not the best cars in the world, but they're good
+cars.  They need painting and varnishing pretty badly, some of them,
+but outside of that there's many a good year's wear in them yet.  I'd
+be very glad if we could put in new rolling-stock, but the item of
+expense will be considerable.  It's these extensions that we have to
+keep building and the long hauls for five cents which eat up the
+profits." The so-called "long hauls" were only two or three miles at
+the outside, but they seemed long to Mr. Skinner.
+
+"Well, look at the South Side," persisted Kaffrath.  "I don't know what
+you people are thinking of.  Here's a cable system introduced in
+Philadelphia.  There's another in San Francisco.  Some one has invented
+a car, as I understand it, that's going to run by electricity, and here
+we are running cars--barns, I call them--with straw in them.  Good
+Lord, I should think it was about time that some of us took a tumble to
+ourselves!"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," commented Mr. Skinner.  "It seems to me we have
+done pretty well by the North Side.  We have done a good deal."
+
+Directors Solon Kaempfaert, Albert Thorsen, Isaac White, Anthony Ewer,
+Arnold C. Benjamin, and Otto Matjes, being solemn gentlemen all, merely
+sat and stared.
+
+The vigorous Kaffrath was not to be so easily repressed, however. He
+repeated his complaints on other occasions.  The fact that there was
+also considerable complaint in the newspapers from time to time in
+regard to this same North Side service pleased him in a way.  Perhaps
+this would be the proverbial fire under the terrapin which would cause
+it to move along.
+
+By this time, owing to Cowperwood's understanding with McKenty, all
+possibility of the North Side company's securing additional franchises
+for unoccupied streets, or even the use of the La Salle Street tunnel,
+had ended.  Kaffrath did not know this.  Neither did the directors or
+officers of the company, but it was true. In addition, McKenty, through
+the aldermen, who were at his beck and call on the North Side, was
+beginning to stir up additional murmurs and complaints in order to
+discredit the present management. There was a great to-do in council
+over a motion on the part of somebody to compel the North Side company
+to throw out its old cars and lay better and heavier tracks.
+Curiously, this did not apply so much to the West and South Sides,
+which were in the same condition.  The rank and file of the city,
+ignorant of the tricks which were constantly being employed in politics
+to effect one end or another, were greatly cheered by this so-called
+"public uprising." They little knew the pawns they were in the game, or
+how little sincerity constituted the primal impulse.
+
+Quite by accident, apparently, one day Addison, thinking of the
+different men in the North Side company who might be of service to
+Cowperwood, and having finally picked young Kaffrath as the ideal
+agent, introduced himself to the latter at the Union League.
+
+"That's a pretty heavy load of expense that's staring you North and
+West Side street-railway people in the face," he took occasion to
+observe.
+
+"How's that?" asked Kaffrath, curiously, anxious to hear anything which
+concerned the development of the business.
+
+"Well, unless I'm greatly mistaken, you, all of you, are going to be
+put to the expense of doing over your lines completely in a very little
+while--so I hear--introducing this new motor or cable system that they
+are getting on the South Side." Addison wanted to convey the impression
+that the city council or public sentiment or something was going to
+force the North Chicago company to indulge in this great and expensive
+series of improvements.
+
+Kaffrath pricked up his ears.  What was the city Council going to do?
+He wanted to know all about it.  They discussed the whole
+situation--the nature of the cable-conduits, the cost of the
+power-houses, the need of new rails, and the necessity of heavier
+bridges, or some other means of getting over or under the river.
+Addison took very good care to point out that the Chicago City or South
+Side Railway was in a much more fortunate position than either of the
+other two by reason of its freedom from the river-crossing problem.
+Then he again commiserated the North Side company on its rather
+difficult position.  "Your company will have a very great deal to do, I
+fancy," he reiterated.
+
+Kaffrath was duly impressed and appropriately depressed, for his eight
+hundred shares would be depressed in value by the necessity of heavy
+expenditures for tunnels and other improvements. Nevertheless, there
+was some consolation in the thought that such betterment, as Addison
+now described, would in the long run make the lines more profitable.
+But in the mean time there might be rough sailing.  The old directors
+ought to act soon now, he thought. With the South Side company being
+done over, they would have to follow suit.  But would they? How could
+he get them to see that, even though it were necessary to mortgage the
+lines for years to come, it would pay in the long run? He was sick of
+old, conservative, cautious methods.
+
+After the lapse of a few weeks Addison, still acting for Cowperwood,
+had a second and private conference with Kaffrath.  He said, after
+exacting a promise of secrecy for the present, that since their
+previous conversation he had become aware of new developments. In the
+interval he had been visited by several men of long connection with
+street-railways in other localities.  They had been visiting various
+cities, looking for a convenient outlet for their capital, and had
+finally picked on Chicago.  They had looked over the various lines
+here, and had decided that the North Chicago City Railway was as good a
+field as any.  He then elaborated with exceeding care the idea which
+Cowperwood had outlined to him.  Kaffrath, dubious at first, was
+finally won over.  He had too long chafed under the dusty, poky
+attitude of the old regime.  He did not know who these new men were,
+but this scheme was in line with his own ideas.  It would require, as
+Addison pointed out, the expenditure of several millions of dollars,
+and he did not see how the money could be raised without outside
+assistance, unless the lines were heavily mortgaged.  If these new men
+were willing to pay a high rate for fifty-one per cent. of this stock
+for ninety-nine years and would guarantee a satisfactory rate of
+interest on all the stock as it stood, besides inaugurating a forward
+policy, why not let them? It would be just as good as mortgaging the
+soul out of the old property, and the management was of no value,
+anyhow.  Kaffrath could not see how fortunes were to be made for these
+new investors out of subsidiary construction and equipment companies,
+in which Cowperwood would be interested, how by issuing watered stock
+on the old and new lines the latter need scarcely lay down a dollar
+once he had the necessary opening capital (the "talking capital," as he
+was fond of calling it) guaranteed.  Cowperwood and Addison had by now
+agreed, if this went through, to organize the Chicago Trust Company
+with millions back of it to manipulate all their deals.  Kaffrath only
+saw a better return on his stock, possibly a chance to get in on the
+"ground plan," as a new phrase expressed it, of the new company.
+
+"That's what I've been telling these fellows for the past three years,"
+he finally exclaimed to Addison, flattered by the latter's personal
+attention and awed by his great influence; "but they never have been
+willing to listen to me.  The way this North Side system has been
+managed is a crime.  Why, a child could do better than we have done.
+They've saved on track and rolling-stock, and lost on population.
+People are what we want up there, and there is only one way that I know
+of to get them, and that is to give them decent car service.  I'll tell
+you frankly we've never done it."
+
+Not long after this Cowperwood had a short talk with Kaffrath, in which
+he promised the latter not only six hundred dollars a share for all the
+stock he possessed or would part with on lease, but a bonus of new
+company stock for his influence.  Kaffrath returned to the North Side
+jubilant for himself and for his company.  He decided after due thought
+that a roundabout way would best serve Cowperwood's ends, a line of
+subtle suggestion from some seemingly disinterested party.
+Consequently he caused William Johnson, the directing engineer, to
+approach Albert Thorsen, one of the most vulnerable of the directors,
+declaring he had heard privately that Isaac White, Arnold C. Benjamin,
+and Otto Matjes, three other directors and the heaviest owners, had
+been offered a very remarkable price for their stock, and that they
+were going to sell, leaving the others out in the cold.
+
+Thorsen was beside himself with grief.  "When did you hear that?" he
+asked.
+
+Johnson told him, but for the time being kept the source of his
+information secret.  Thorsen at once hurried to his friend, Solon
+Kaempfaert, who in turn went to Kaffrath for information.
+
+"I have heard something to that effect," was Kaffrath's only comment,
+"but really I do not know."
+
+Thereupon Thorsen and Kaempfaert imagined that Kaffrath was in the
+conspiracy to sell out and leave them with no particularly valuable
+pickings.  It was very sad.
+
+Meanwhile, Cowperwood, on the advice of Kaffrath, was approaching Isaac
+White, Arnold C. Benjamin, and Otto Matjes direct--talking with them as
+if they were the only three he desired to deal with. A little later
+Thorsen and Kaempfaert were visited in the same spirit, and agreed in
+secret fear to sell out, or rather lease at the very advantageous terms
+Cowperwood offered, providing he could get the others to do likewise.
+This gave the latter a strong backing of sentiment on the board.
+Finally Isaac White stated at one of the meetings that he had been
+approached with an interesting proposition, which he then and there
+outlined.  He was not sure what to think, he said, but the board might
+like to consider it. At once Thorsen and Kaempfaert were convinced that
+all Johnson had suggested was true.  It was decided to have Cowperwood
+come and explain to the full board just what his plan was, and this he
+did in a long, bland, smiling talk.  It was made plain that the road
+would have to be put in shape in the near future, and that this
+proposed plan relieved all of them of work, worry, and care. Moreover,
+they were guaranteed more interest at once than they had expected to
+earn in the next twenty or thirty years.  Thereupon it was agreed that
+Cowperwood and his plan should be given a trial. Seeing that if he did
+not succeed in paying the proposed interest promptly the property once
+more became theirs, so they thought, and that he assumed all
+obligations--taxes, water rents, old claims, a few pensions--it
+appeared in the light of a rather idyllic scheme.
+
+"Well, boys, I think this is a pretty good day's work myself," observed
+Anthony Ewer, laying a friendly hand on the shoulder of Mr. Albert
+Thorsen.  "I'm sure we can all unite in wishing Mr. Cowperwood luck
+with his adventure." Mr. Ewer's seven hundred and fifteen shares, worth
+seventy-one thousand five hundred dollars, having risen to a valuation
+of four hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars, he was naturally
+jubilant.
+
+"You're right," replied Thorsen, who was parting with four hundred and
+eighty shares out of a total of seven hundred and ninety, and seeing
+them all bounce in value from two hundred to six hundred dollars.
+"He's an interesting man.  I hope he succeeds."
+
+Cowperwood, waking the next morning in Aileen's room--he had been out
+late the night before with McKenty, Addison, Videra, and others--turned
+and, patting her neck where she was dozing, said: "Well, pet, yesterday
+afternoon I wound up that North Chicago Street Railway deal.  I'm
+president of the new North Side company just as soon as I get my board
+of directors organized.  We're going to be of some real consequence in
+this village, after all, in a year or two."
+
+He was hoping that this fact, among other things, would end in
+mollifying Aileen toward him.  She had been so gloomy, remote, weary
+these many days--ever since the terrific assault on Rita.
+
+"Yes?" she replied, with a half-hearted smile, rubbing her waking eyes.
+She was clad in a foamy nightgown of white and pink.  "That's nice,
+isn't it?"
+
+Cowperwood brought himself up on one elbow and looked at her, smoothing
+her round, bare arms, which he always admired.  The luminous richness
+of her hair had never lost its charm completely.
+
+"That means that I can do the same thing with the Chicago West Division
+Company in a year or so," he went on.  "But there's going to be a lot
+of talk about this, I'm afraid, and I don't want that just now.  It
+will work out all right.  I can see Schryhart and Merrill and some of
+these other people taking notice pretty soon. They've missed out on two
+of the biggest things Chicago ever had--gas and railways."
+
+"Oh yes, Frank, I'm glad for you," commented Aileen, rather drearily,
+who, in spite of her sorrow over his defection, was still glad that he
+was going on and forward.  "You'll always do all right."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't feel so badly, Aileen," he said, with a kind of
+affectional protest.  "Aren't you going to try and be happy with me?
+This is as much for you as for me.  You will be able to pay up old
+scores even better than I will."
+
+He smiled winningly.
+
+"Yes," she replied, reproachfully but tenderly at that, a little
+sorrowfully, "a lot of good money does me.  It was your love I wanted."
+
+"But you have that," he insisted.  "I've told you that over and over.
+I never ceased to care for you really.  You know I didn't."
+
+"Yes, I know," she replied, even as he gathered her close in his arms.
+"I know how you care." But that did not prevent her from responding to
+him warmly, for back of all her fuming protest was heartache, the wish
+to have his love intact, to restore that pristine affection which she
+had once assumed would endure forever.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+
+The Power of the Press
+
+
+The morning papers, in spite of the efforts of Cowperwood and his
+friends to keep this transfer secret, shortly thereafter were full of
+rumors of a change in "North Chicago." Frank Algernon Cowperwood,
+hitherto unmentioned in connection with Chicago street-railways, was
+pointed to as the probable successor to Onias C. Skinner, and Edwin L.
+Kaffrath, one of the old directors, as future vice-president. The men
+back of the deal were referred to as "in all likelihood Eastern
+capitalists." Cowperwood, as he sat in Aileen's room examining the
+various morning papers, saw that before the day was over he would be
+sought out for an expression of opinion and further details.  He
+proposed to ask the newspaper men to wait a few days until he could
+talk to the publishers of the papers themselves--win their
+confidence--and then announce a general policy; it would be something
+that would please the city, and the residents of the North Side in
+particular.  At the same time he did not care to promise anything which
+he could not easily and profitably perform. He wanted fame and
+reputation, but he wanted money even more; he intended to get both.
+
+To one who had been working thus long in the minor realms of finance,
+as Cowperwood considered that he had so far been doing, this sudden
+upward step into the more conspicuous regions of high finance and
+control was an all-inspiring thing.  So long had he been stirring about
+in a lesser region, paving the way by hours and hours of private
+thought and conference and scheming, that now when he actually had
+achieved his end he could scarcely believe for the time being that it
+was true.  Chicago was such a splendid city.  It was growing so fast.
+Its opportunities were so wonderful. These men who had thus foolishly
+parted with an indefinite lease of their holdings had not really
+considered what they were doing. This matter of Chicago
+street-railways, once he had them well in hand, could be made to yield
+such splendid profits! He could incorporate and overcapitalize.  Many
+subsidiary lines, which McKenty would secure for him for a song, would
+be worth millions in the future, and they should be his entirely; he
+would not be indebted to the directors of the old North Chicago company
+for any interest on those.  By degrees, year by year, as the city grew,
+the lines which were still controlled by this old company, but were
+practically his, would become a mere item, a central core, in the so
+very much larger system of new lines which he would build up about it.
+Then the West Side, and even the South Side sections--but why dream? He
+might readily become the sole master of street-railway traffic in
+Chicago! He might readily become the most princely financial figure in
+the city--and one of the few great financial magnates of the nation.
+
+In any public enterprise of any kind, as he knew, where the suffrages
+of the people or the privileges in their possessions are desired, the
+newspapers must always be considered.  As Cowperwood even now was
+casting hungry eyes in the direction of the two tunnels--one to be held
+in view of an eventual assumption of the Chicago West Division Company,
+the other to be given to the North Chicago Street Railway, which he had
+now organized, it was necessary to make friends with the various
+publishers.  How to go about it?
+
+Recently, because of the influx of a heavy native and foreign-born
+population (thousands and thousands of men of all sorts and conditions
+looking for the work which the growth of the city seemed to promise),
+and because of the dissemination of stirring ideas through radical
+individuals of foreign groups concerning anarchism, socialism,
+communism, and the like, the civic idea in Chicago had become most
+acute.  This very May, in which Cowperwood had been going about
+attempting to adjust matters in his favor, there had been a tremendous
+national flare-up, when in a great public place on the West Side known
+as the Haymarket, at one of a number of labor meetings, dubbed
+anarchistic because of the principles of some of the speakers, a bomb
+had been hurled by some excited fanatic, which had exploded and maimed
+or killed a number of policemen, injuring slightly several others.
+This had brought to the fore, once and for all, as by a flash of
+lightning, the whole problem of mass against class, and had given it
+such an airing as in view of the cheerful, optimistic, almost
+inconsequential American mind had not previously been possible.  It
+changed, quite as an eruption might, the whole face of the commercial
+landscape.  Man thought thereafter somewhat more accurately of national
+and civic things.  What was anarchism? What socialism? What rights had
+the rank and file, anyhow, in economic and governmental development?
+Such were interesting questions, and following the bomb--which acted as
+a great stone cast in the water--these ripple-rings of thought were
+still widening and emanating until they took in such supposedly remote
+and impregnable quarters as editorial offices, banks and financial
+institutions generally, and the haunts of political dignitaries and
+their jobs.
+
+In the face of this, however, Cowperwood was not disturbed.  He did not
+believe in either the strength of the masses or their ultimate rights,
+though he sympathized with the condition of individuals, and did
+believe that men like himself were sent into the world to better
+perfect its mechanism and habitable order. Often now, in these
+preliminary days, he looked at the large companies of men with their
+horses gathered in and about the several carbarns of the company, and
+wondered at their state.  So many of them were so dull.  They were
+rather like animals, patient, inartistic, hopeless.  He thought of
+their shabby homes, their long hours, their poor pay, and then
+concluded that if anything at all could be done for them it would be
+pay them decent living wages, which he proposed to do--nothing more.
+They could not be expected to understand his dreams or his visions, or
+to share in the magnificence and social dominance which he craved.  He
+finally decided that it would be as well for him to personally visit
+the various newspaper publishers and talk the situation over with them.
+Addison, when consulted as to this project, was somewhat dubious. He
+had small faith in the newspapers.
+
+He had seen them play petty politics, follow up enmities and personal
+grudges, and even sell out, in certain cases, for pathetically small
+rewards.
+
+"I tell you how it is, Frank," remarked Addison, on one occasion. "You
+will have to do all this business on cotton heels, practically. You
+know that old gas crowd are still down on you, in spite of the fact
+that you are one of their largest stockholders.  Schryhart isn't at all
+friendly, and he practically owns the Chronicle. Ricketts will just
+about say what he wants him to say.  Hyssop, of the Mail and the
+Transcript, is an independent man, but he's a Presbyterian and a cold,
+self-righteous moralist.  Braxton's paper, the Globe, practically
+belongs to Merrill, but Braxton's a nice fellow, at that.  Old General
+MacDonald, of the Inquirer, is old General MacDonald.  It's all
+according to how he feels when he gets up in the morning.  If he should
+chance to like your looks he might support you forever and forever
+until you crossed his conscience in some way.  He's a fine old walrus.
+I like him. Neither Schryhart nor Merrill nor any one else can get
+anything out of him unless he wants to give it.  He may not live so
+many years, however, and I don't trust that son of his.  Haguenin, of
+the Press, is all right and friendly to you, as I understand. Other
+things being equal, I think he'd naturally support you in anything he
+thought was fair and reasonable.  Well, there you have them.  Get them
+all on your side if you can.  Don't ask for the LaSalle Street tunnel
+right away.  Let it come as an afterthought--a great public need.  The
+main thing will be to avoid having the other companies stirring up a
+real fight against you.  Depend on it, Schryhart will be thinking
+pretty hard about this whole business from now on.  As for
+Merrill--well, if you can show him where he can get something out of it
+for his store, I guess he'll be for you."
+
+It is one of the splendid yet sinister fascinations of life that there
+is no tracing to their ultimate sources all the winds of influence that
+play upon a given barque--all the breaths of chance that fill or desert
+our bellied or our sagging sails.  We plan and plan, but who by taking
+thought can add a cubit to his stature? Who can overcome or even assist
+the Providence that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may.
+Cowperwood was now entering upon a great public career, and the various
+editors and public personalities of the city were watching him with
+interest.  Augustus M. Haguenin, a free agent with his organ, the
+Press, and yet not free, either, because he was harnessed to the
+necessity of making his paper pay, was most interested.  Lacking the
+commanding magnetism of a man like MacDonald, he was nevertheless an
+honest man, well-intentioned, thoughtful, careful.  Haguenin, ever
+since the outcome of Cowperwood's gas transaction, had been intensely
+interested in the latter's career.  It seemed to him that Cowperwood
+was probably destined to become a significant figure.  Raw, glittering
+force, however, compounded of the cruel Machiavellianism of nature, if
+it be but Machiavellian, seems to exercise a profound attraction for
+the conventionally rooted.  Your cautious citizen of average means,
+looking out through the eye of his dull world of seeming fact, is often
+the first to forgive or condone the grim butcheries of theory by which
+the strong rise.  Haguenin, observing Cowperwood, conceived of him as a
+man perhaps as much sinned against as sinning, a man who would be
+faithful to friends, one who could be relied upon in hours of great
+stress.  As it happened, the Haguenins were neighbors of the
+Cowperwoods, and since those days when the latter had attempted
+unsuccessfully to enter Chicago society this family had been as
+acceptable as any of those who had remained friendly.
+
+And so, when Cowperwood arrived one day at the office of the Press in a
+blowing snow-storm--it was just before the Christmas holidays--Haguenin
+was glad to see him.  "It's certainly real winter weather we're having
+now, isn't it?" he observed, cheerfully.  "How goes the North Chicago
+Street Railway business?" For months he, with the other publishers, had
+been aware that the whole North Side was to be made over by fine
+cable-tracks, power-houses, and handsome cars; and there already was
+talk that some better arrangement was to be made to bring the
+passengers into the down-town section.
+
+"Mr. Haguenin," said Cowperwood, smilingly--he was arrayed in a heavy
+fur coat, with a collar of beaver and driving-gauntlets of dogskin--"we
+have reached the place in this street-railway problem on the North Side
+where we are going to require the assistance of the newspapers, or at
+least their friendly support.  At present our principal difficulty is
+that all our lines, when they come down-town, stop at Lake Street--just
+this side of the bridges. That means a long walk for everybody to all
+the streets south of it, and, as you probably know, there has been
+considerable complaint. Besides that, this river traffic is becoming
+more and more what I may say it has been for years--an intolerable
+nuisance.  We have all suffered from it.  No effort has ever been made
+to regulate it, and because it is so heavy I doubt whether it ever can
+be systematized in any satisfactory way.  The best thing in the long
+run would be to tunnel under the river; but that is such an expensive
+proposition that, as things are now, we are in no position to undertake
+it.  The traffic on the North Side does not warrant it.  It really does
+not warrant the reconstruction of the three bridges which we now use at
+State, Dearborn, and Clark; yet, if we introduce the cable system,
+which we now propose, these bridges will have to be done over.  It
+seems to me, seeing that this is an enterprise in which the public is
+as much interested almost as we are, that it would only be fair if the
+city should help pay for this reconstruction work.  All the land
+adjacent to these lines, and the property served by them, will be
+greatly enhanced in value. The city's taxing power will rise
+tremendously.  I have talked to several financiers here in Chicago, and
+they agree with me; but, as is usual in all such cases, I find that
+some of the politicians are against me.  Since I have taken charge of
+the North Chicago company the attitude of one or two papers has not
+been any too friendly." (In the Chronicle, controlled by Schryhart,
+there had already been a number of references to the probability that
+now, since Cowperwood and his friends were in charge, the sky-rocketing
+tactics of the old Lake View, Hyde Park, and other gas organizations
+would be repeated.  Braxton's Globe, owned by Merrill, being
+semi-neutral, had merely suggested that it hoped that no such methods
+would be repeated here.) "Perhaps you may know," Cowperwood continued,
+"that we have a very sweeping programme of improvement in mind, if we
+can obtain proper public consideration and assistance."
+
+At this point he reached down in one of his pockets and drew forth
+astutely drafted maps and blue-prints, especially prepared for this
+occasion.  They showed main cable lines on North Clark, La Salle, and
+Wells streets.  These lines coming down-town converged at Illinois and
+La Salle streets on the North Side--and though Cowperwood made no
+reference to it at the moment, they were indicated on the map in red as
+running over or under the river at La Salle Street, where was no
+bridge, and emerging therefrom, following a loop along La Salle to
+Munroe, to Dearborn, to Randolph, and thence into the tunnel again.
+Cowperwood allowed Haguenin to gather the very interesting traffic
+significance of it all before he proceeded.
+
+"On the map, Mr. Haguenin, I have indicated a plan which, if we can
+gain the consent of the city, will obviate any quarrel as to the great
+expense of reconstructing the bridges, and will make use of a piece of
+property which is absolutely without value to the city at present, but
+which can be made into something of vast convenience to the public.  I
+am referring, as you see"--he laid an indicative finger on the map in
+Mr. Haguenin's hands--"to the old La Salle Street tunnel, which is now
+boarded up and absolutely of no use to any one.  It was built
+apparently under a misapprehension as to the grade the average loaded
+wagon could negotiate.  When it was found to be unprofitable it was
+sold to the city and locked up.  If you have ever been through it you
+know what condition it is in.  My engineers tell me the walls are
+leaking, and that there is great danger of a cave-in unless it is very
+speedily repaired. I am also told that it will require about four
+hundred thousand dollars to put it in suitable condition for use.  My
+theory is that if the North Chicago Street Railway is willing to go to
+this expense for the sake of solving this bridge-crush problem, and
+giving the residents of the North Side a sensible and uninterrupted
+service into the business heart, the city ought to be willing to make
+us a present of this tunnel for the time being, or at least a long
+lease at a purely nominal rental."
+
+Cowperwood paused to see what Haguenin would say.
+
+The latter was looking at the map gravely, wondering whether it was
+fair for Cowperwood to make this demand, wondering whether the city
+should grant it to him without compensation, wondering whether the
+bridge-traffic problem was as serious as he pointed out, wondering,
+indeed, whether this whole move was not a clever ruse to obtain
+something for nothing.
+
+"And what is this?" he asked, laying a finger on the aforementioned
+loop.
+
+"That," replied Cowperwood, "is the only method we have been able to
+figure out of serving the down-town business section and the North
+Side, and of solving this bridge problem.  If we obtain the tunnel, as
+I hope we shall, all the cars of these North Side lines will emerge
+here"--he pointed to La Salle and Randolph--"and swing around--that is,
+they will if the city council give us the right of way.  I think, of
+course, there can be no reasonable objection to that.  There is no
+reason why the citizens of the North Side shouldn't have as comfortable
+an access to the business heart as those of the West or South Side."
+
+"None in the world," Mr. Haguenin was compelled to admit.  "Are you
+satisfied, however, that the council and the city should sanction the
+gift of a loop of this kind without some form of compensation?"
+
+"I see no reason why they shouldn't," replied Cowperwood, in a somewhat
+injured tone.  "There has never been any question of compensation where
+other improvements have been suggested for the city in the past.  The
+South Side company has been allowed to turn in a loop around State and
+Wabash.  The Chicago City Passenger Railway has a loop in Adams and
+Washington streets."
+
+"Quite so," said Mr. Haguenin, vaguely.  "That is true.  But this
+tunnel, now--do you think that should fall in the same category of
+public beneficences?"
+
+At the same time he could not help thinking, as he looked at the
+proposed loop indicated on the map, that the new cable line, with its
+string of trailers, would give down-town Chicago a truly metropolitan
+air and would provide a splendid outlet for the North Side.  The
+streets in question were magnificent commercial thoroughfares, crowded
+even at this date with structures five, six, seven, and even eight
+stories high, and brimming with heavy streams of eager life--young,
+fresh, optimistic.  Because of the narrow area into which the
+commercial life of the city tended to congest itself, this property and
+these streets were immensely valuable--among the most valuable in the
+whole city.  Also he observed that if this loop did come here its cars,
+on their return trip along Dearborn Street, would pass by his very
+door--the office of the Press--thereby enhancing the value of that
+property of which he was the owner.
+
+"I certainly do, Mr. Haguenin," returned Cowperwood, emphatically, in
+answer to his query.  "Personally, I should think Chicago would be glad
+to pay a bonus to get its street-railway service straightened out,
+especially where a corporation comes forward with a liberal,
+conservative programme such as this.  It means millions in growth of
+property values on the North Side.  It means millions to the business
+heart to have this loop system laid down just as I suggest."
+
+He put his finger firmly on the map which he had brought, and Haguenin
+agreed with him that the plan was undoubtedly a sound business
+proposition.  "Personally, I should be the last to complain," he added,
+"for the line passes my door.  At the same time this tunnel, as I
+understand it, cost in the neighborhood of eight hundred thousand or a
+million dollars.  It is a delicate problem.  I should like to know what
+the other editors think of it, and how the city council itself would
+feel toward it."
+
+Cowperwood nodded.  "Certainly, certainly," he said.  "With pleasure. I
+would not come here at all if I did not feel that I had a perfectly
+legitimate proposition--one that the press of the city should unite in
+supporting.  Where a corporation such as ours is facing large
+expenditures, which have to be financed by outside capital, it is only
+natural that we should wish to allay useless, groundless opposition in
+advance.  I hope we may command your support."
+
+"I hope you may," smiled Mr. Haguenin.  They parted the best of friends.
+
+The other publishers, guardians of the city's privileges, were not
+quite so genial as Haguenin in their approval of Cowperwood's
+proposition.  The use of a tunnel and several of the most important
+down-town streets might readily be essential to the development of
+Cowperwood's North Side schemes, but the gift of them was a different
+matter.  Already, as a matter of fact, the various publishers and
+editors had been consulted by Schryhart, Merrill, and others with a
+view to discovering how they felt as to this new venture, and whether
+Cowperwood would be cheerfully indorsed or not.  Schryhart, smarting
+from the wounds he had received in the gas war, viewed this new
+activity on Cowperwood's part with a suspicious and envious eye.  To
+him much more than to the others it spelled a new and dangerous foe in
+the street-railway field, although all the leading citizens of Chicago
+were interested.
+
+"I suppose now," he said one evening to the Hon. Walter Melville
+Hyssop, editor and publisher of the Transcript and the Evening Mail,
+whom he met at the Union League, "that this fellow Cowperwood will
+attempt some disturbing coup in connection with street-railway affairs.
+He is just the sort.  I think, from an editorial point of view, his
+political connections will bear watching." Already there were rumors
+abroad that McKenty might have something to do with the new company.
+
+Hyssop, a medium-sized, ornate, conservative person, was not so sure.
+"We shall find out soon enough, no doubt, what propositions Mr.
+Cowperwood has in hand," he remarked.  "He is very energetic and
+capable, as I understand it."
+
+Hyssop and Schryhart, as well as the latter and Merrill, had been
+social friends for years and years.
+
+After his call on Mr. Haguenin, Cowperwood's naturally selective and
+self-protective judgment led him next to the office of the Inquirer,
+old General MacDonald's paper, where he found that because of
+rhuematism and the severe, inclement weather of Chicago, the old
+General had sailed only a few days before for Italy.  His son, an
+aggressive, mercantile type of youth of thirty-two, and a managing
+editor by the name of Du Bois were acting in his stead. In the son,
+Truman Leslie MacDonald, an intense, calm, and penetrating young man,
+Cowperwood encountered some one who, like himself, saw life only from
+the point of view of sharp, self-centered, personal advantage.  What
+was he, Truman Leslie MacDonald, to derive from any given situation,
+and how was he to make the Inquirer an even greater property than it
+had been under his father before him? He did not propose to be
+overwhelmed by the old General's rather flowery reputation.  At the
+same time he meant to become imposingly rich.  An active member of a
+young and very smart set which had been growing up on the North Side,
+he rode, drove, was instrumental in organizing a new and exclusive
+country club, and despised the rank and file as unsuited to the fine
+atmosphere to which he aspired.  Mr. Clifford Du Bois, the managing
+editor, was a cool reprobate of forty, masquerading as a gentleman, and
+using the Inquirer in subtle ways for furthering his personal ends, and
+that under the old General's very nose.  He was osseous, sandy-haired,
+blue-eyed, with a keen, formidable nose and a solid chin.  Clifford Du
+Bois was always careful never to let his left hand know what his right
+hand did.
+
+It was this sapient pair that received Cowperwood in the old General's
+absence, first in Mr. Du Bois's room and then in that of Mr. MacDonald.
+The latter had already heard much of Cowperwood's doings.  Men who had
+been connected with the old gas war--Jordan Jules, for instance,
+president of the old North Chicago Gas Company, and Hudson Baker,
+president of the old West Chicago Gas Company--had denounced him long
+before as a bucaneer who had pirated them out of very comfortable
+sinecures.  Here he was now invading the North Chicago street-railway
+field and coming with startling schemes for the reorganization of the
+down-town business heart.  Why shouldn't the city have something in
+return; or, better yet, those who helped to formulate the public
+opinion, so influential in the success of Cowperwood's plans? Truman
+Leslie MacDonald, as has been said, did not see life from his father's
+point of view at all.  He had in mind a sharp bargain, which he could
+drive with Cowperwood during the old gentleman's absence.  The General
+need never know.
+
+"I understand your point of view, Mr. Cowperwood," he commented,
+loftily, "but where does the city come in? I see very clearly how
+important this is to the people of the North Side, and even to the
+merchants and real-estate owners in the down-town section; but that
+simply means that it is ten times as important to you. Undoubtedly, it
+will help the city, but the city is growing, anyhow, and that will help
+you.  I've said all along that these public franchises were worth more
+than they used to be worth.  Nobody seems to see it very clearly as
+yet, but it's true just the same. That tunnel is worth more now than
+the day it was built.  Even if the city can't use it, somebody can."
+
+He was meaning to indicate a rival car line.
+
+Cowperwood bristled internally.
+
+"That's all very well," he said, preserving his surface composure, "but
+why make fish of one and flesh of another? The South Side company has a
+loop for which it never paid a dollar.  So has the Chicago City
+Passenger Railway.  The North Side company is planning more extensive
+improvements than were ever undertaken by any single company before.  I
+hardly think it is fair to raise the question of compensation and a
+franchise tax at this time, and in connection with this one company
+only."
+
+"Um--well, that may be true of the other companies.  The South Side
+company had those streets long ago.  They merely connected them up.
+But this tunnel, now--that's a different matter, isn't it? The city
+bought and paid for that, didn't it?"
+
+"Quite true--to help out men who saw that they couldn't make another
+dollar out of it," said Cowperwood, acidly.  "But it's of no use to the
+city.  It will cave in pretty soon if it isn't repaired. Why, the
+consent of property-owners alone, along the line of this loop, is going
+to aggregate a considerable sum.  It seems to me instead of hampering a
+great work of this kind the public ought to do everything in its power
+to assist it.  It means giving a new metropolitan flavor to this
+down-town section.  It is time Chicago was getting out of its swaddling
+clothes."
+
+Mr. MacDonald, the younger, shook his head.  He saw clearly enough the
+significance of the points made, but he was jealous of Cowperwood and
+of his success.  This loop franchise and tunnel gift meant millions for
+some one.  Why shouldn't there be something in it for him? He called in
+Mr. Du Bois and went over the proposition with him.  Quite without
+effort the latter sensed the drift of the situation.
+
+"It's an excellent proposition," he said.  "I don't see but that the
+city should have something, though.  Public sentiment is rather against
+gifts to corporations just at present."
+
+Cowperwood caught the drift of what was in young MacDonald's mind.
+
+"Well, what would you suggest as a fair rate of compensation to the
+city?" he asked, cautiously, wondering whether this aggressive youth
+would go so far as to commit himself in any way.
+
+"Oh, well, as to that," MacDonald replied, with a deprecatory wave of
+his hand, "I couldn't say.  It ought to bear a reasonable relationship
+to the value of the utility as it now stands.  I should want to think
+that over.  I shouldn't want to see the city demand anything
+unreasonable.  Certainly, though, there is a privilege here that is
+worth something."
+
+Cowperwood flared inwardly.  His greatest weakness, if he had one, was
+that he could but ill brook opposition of any kind.  This young
+upstart, with his thin, cool face and sharp, hard eyes! He would have
+liked to tell him and his paper to go to the devil.  He went away,
+hoping that he could influence the Inquirer in some other way upon the
+old General's return.
+
+As he was sitting next morning in his office in North Clark Street he
+was aroused by the still novel-sounding bell of the telephone--one of
+the earliest in use--on the wall back of him.  After a parley with his
+secretary, he was informed that a gentleman connected with the Inquirer
+wished to speak with him.
+
+"This is the Inquirer," said a voice which Cowperwood, his ear to the
+receiver, thought he recognized as that of young Truman MacDonald, the
+General's son.  "You wanted to know," continued the voice, "what would
+be considered adequate compensation so far as that tunnel matter is
+concerned.  Can you hear me?"
+
+"Yes," replied Cowperwood.
+
+"Well, I should not care to influence your judgment one way or the
+other; but if my opinion were asked I should say about fifty thousand
+dollars' worth of North Chicago Street Railway stock would be
+satisfactory."
+
+The voice was young, clear, steely.
+
+"To whom would you suggest that it might be paid?" Cowperwood asked,
+softly, quite genially.
+
+"That, also, I would suggest, might be left to your very sound
+judgment."
+
+The voice ceased.  The receiver was hung up.
+
+"Well, I'll be damned!" Cowperwood said, looking at the floor
+reflectively.  A smile spread over his face.  "I'm not going to be held
+up like that.  I don't need to be.  It isn't worth it. Not at present,
+anyhow." His teeth set.
+
+He was underestimating Mr. Truman Leslie MacDonald, principally because
+he did not like him.  He thought his father might return and oust him.
+It was one of the most vital mistakes he ever made in his life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+
+The Coming of Stephanie Platow
+
+
+During this period of what might have been called financial and
+commercial progress, the affairs of Aileen and Cowperwood had been to a
+certain extent smoothed over.  Each summer now, partly to take Aileen's
+mind off herself and partly to satisfy his own desire to see the world
+and collect objects of art, in which he was becoming more and more
+interested, it was Cowperwood's custom to make with his wife a short
+trip abroad or to foreign American lands, visiting in these two years
+Russia, Scandinavia, Argentine, Chili, and Mexico.  Their plan was to
+leave in May or June with the outward rush of traffic, and return in
+September or early October.  His idea was to soothe Aileen as much as
+possible, to fill her mind with pleasing anticipations as to her
+eventual social triumph somewhere--in New York or London, if not
+Chicago--to make her feel that in spite of his physical desertion he
+was still spiritually loyal.
+
+By now also Cowperwood was so shrewd that he had the ability to
+simulate an affection and practise a gallantry which he did not feel,
+or, rather, that was not backed by real passion.  He was the soul of
+attention; he would buy her flowers, jewels, knickknacks, and
+ornaments; he would see that her comfort was looked after to the last
+detail; and yet, at the very same moment, perhaps, he would be looking
+cautiously about to see what life might offer in the way of illicit
+entertainment.  Aileen knew this, although she could not prove it to be
+true.  At the same time she had an affection and an admiration for the
+man which gripped her in spite of herself.
+
+You have, perhaps, pictured to yourself the mood of some general who
+has perhaps suffered a great defeat; the employee who after years of
+faithful service finds himself discharged.  What shall life say to the
+loving when their love is no longer of any value, when all that has
+been placed upon the altar of affection has been found to be a vain
+sacrifice? Philosophy? Give that to dolls to play with.  Religion? Seek
+first the metaphysical-minded.  Aileen was no longer the lithe,
+forceful, dynamic girl of 1865, when Cowperwood first met her.  She was
+still beautiful, it is true, a fair, full-blown, matronly creature not
+more than thirty-five, looking perhaps thirty, feeling, alas, that she
+was a girl and still as attractive as ever.  It is a grim thing to a
+woman, however fortunately placed, to realize that age is creeping on,
+and that love, that singing will-o'-the-wisp, is fading into the
+ultimate dark.  Aileen, within the hour of her greatest triumph, had
+seen love die.  It was useless to tell herself, as she did sometimes,
+that it might come back, revive.  Her ultimately realistic temperament
+told her this could never be.  Though she had routed Rita Sohlberg, she
+was fully aware that Cowperwood's original constancy was gone. She was
+no longer happy.  Love was dead.  That sweet illusion, with its pearly
+pink for heart and borders, that laughing cherub that lures with
+Cupid's mouth and misty eye, that young tendril of the vine of life
+that whispers of eternal spring-time, that calls and calls where
+aching, wearied feet by legion follow, was no longer in existence.
+
+In vain the tears, the storms, the self-tortures; in vain the looks in
+the mirror, the studied examination of plump, sweet features still
+fresh and inviting.  One day, at the sight of tired circles under her
+eyes, she ripped from her neck a lovely ruche that she was adjusting
+and, throwing herself on her bed, cried as though her heart would
+break.  Why primp? Why ornament? Her Frank did not love her.  What to
+her now was a handsome residence in Michigan Avenue, the refinements of
+a French boudoir, or clothing that ran the gamut of the dressmaker's
+art, hats that were like orchids blooming in serried rows? In vain, in
+vain! Like the raven that perched above the lintel of the door, sad
+memory was here, grave in her widow weeds, crying "never more." Aileen
+knew that the sweet illusion which had bound Cowperwood to her for a
+time had gone and would never come again.  He was here.  His step was
+in the room mornings and evenings; at night for long prosaic,
+uninterrupted periods she could hear him breathing by her side, his
+hand on her body.  There were other nights when he was not there--when
+he was "out of the city"--and she resigned herself to accept his
+excuses at their face value.  Why quarrel? she asked herself.  What
+could she do? She was waiting, waiting, but for what?
+
+And Cowperwood, noting the strange, unalterable changes which time
+works in us all, the inward lap of the marks of age, the fluted
+recession of that splendor and radiance which is youth, sighed at times
+perhaps, but turned his face to that dawn which is forever breaking
+where youth is.  Not for him that poetic loyalty which substitutes for
+the perfection of young love its memories, or takes for the glitter of
+passion and desire that once was the happy thoughts of
+companionship--the crystal memories that like early dews congealed
+remain beaded recollections to comfort or torture for the end of former
+joys.  On the contrary, after the vanishing of Rita Sohlberg, with all
+that she meant in the way of a delicate insouciance which Aileen had
+never known, his temperament ached, for he must have something like
+that.  Truth to say, he must always have youth, the illusion of beauty,
+vanity in womanhood, the novelty of a new, untested temperament, quite
+as he must have pictures, old porcelain, music, a mansion, illuminated
+missals, power, the applause of the great, unthinking world.
+
+As has been said, this promiscuous attitude on Cowperwood's part was
+the natural flowering out of a temperament that was chronically
+promiscuous, intellectually uncertain, and philosophically anarchistic.
+From one point of view it might have been said of him that he was
+seeking the realization of an ideal, yet to one's amazement our very
+ideals change at times and leave us floundering in the dark.  What is
+an ideal, anyhow? A wraith, a mist, a perfume in the wind, a dream of
+fair water.  The soul-yearning of a girl like Antoinette Nowak was a
+little too strained for him.  It was too ardent, too clinging, and he
+had gradually extricated himself, not without difficulty, from that
+particular entanglement.  Since then he had been intimate with other
+women for brief periods, but to no great satisfaction--Dorothy Ormsby,
+Jessie Belle Hinsdale, Toma Lewis, Hilda Jewell; but they shall be
+names merely.  One was an actress, one a stenographer, one the daughter
+of one of his stock patrons, one a church-worker, a solicitor for
+charity coming to him to seek help for an orphan's home.  It was a
+pathetic mess at times, but so are all defiant variations from the
+accustomed drift of things.  In the hardy language of Napoleon, one
+cannot make an omelette without cracking a number of eggs.
+
+The coming of Stephanie Platow, Russian Jewess on one side of her
+family, Southwestern American on the other, was an event in
+Cowperwood's life.  She was tall, graceful, brilliant, young, with much
+of the optimism of Rita Sohlberg, and yet endowed with a strange
+fatalism which, once he knew her better, touched and moved him.  He met
+her on shipboard on the way to Goteborg.  Her father, Isadore Platow,
+was a wealthy furrier of Chicago.  He was a large, meaty, oily type of
+man--a kind of ambling, gelatinous formula of the male, with the usual
+sound commercial instincts of the Jew, but with an errant philosophy
+which led him to believe first one thing and then another so long as
+neither interfered definitely with his business.  He was an admirer of
+Henry George and of so altruistic a programme as that of Robert Owen,
+and, also, in his way, a social snob.  And yet he had married Susetta
+Osborn, a Texas girl who was once his bookkeeper.  Mrs. Platow was
+lithe, amiable, subtle, with an eye always to the main social
+chance--in other words, a climber.  She was shrewd enough to realize
+that a knowledge of books and art and current events was essential, and
+so she "went in" for these things.
+
+It is curious how the temperaments of parents blend and revivify in
+their children.  As Stephanie grew up she had repeated in her very
+differing body some of her father's and mother's characteristics--an
+interesting variability of soul.  She was tall, dark, sallow, lithe,
+with a strange moodiness of heart and a recessive, fulgurous gleam in
+her chestnut-brown, almost brownish-black eyes.  She had a full,
+sensuous, Cupid's mouth, a dreamy and even languishing expression, a
+graceful neck, and a heavy, dark, and yet pleasingly modeled face.
+From both her father and mother she had inherited a penchant for art,
+literature, philosophy, and music.  Already at eighteen she was
+dreaming of painting, singing, writing poetry, writing books,
+acting--anything and everything.  Serene in her own judgment of what
+was worth while, she was like to lay stress on any silly mood or fad,
+thinking it exquisite--the last word. Finally, she was a rank
+voluptuary, dreaming dreams of passionate union with first one and then
+another type of artist, poet, musician--the whole gamut of the artistic
+and emotional world.
+
+Cowperwood first saw her on board the Centurion one June morning, as
+the ship lay at dock in New York.  He and Aileen were en route for
+Norway, she and her father and mother for Denmark and Switzerland. She
+was hanging over the starboard rail looking at a flock of wide-winged
+gulls which were besieging the port of the cook's galley.  She was
+musing soulfully--conscious (fully) that she was musing soulfully.  He
+paid very little attention to her, except to note that she was tall,
+rhythmic, and that a dark-gray plaid dress, and an immense veil of gray
+silk wound about her shoulders and waist and over one arm, after the
+manner of a Hindu shawl, appeared to become her much.  Her face seemed
+very sallow, and her eyes ringed as if indicating dyspepsia.  Her black
+hair under a chic hat did not escape his critical eye.  Later she and
+her father appeared at the captain's table, to which the Cowperwoods
+had also been invited.
+
+Cowperwood and Aileen did not know how to take this girl, though she
+interested them both.  They little suspected the chameleon character of
+her soul.  She was an artist, and as formless and unstable as water.
+It was a mere passing gloom that possessed her.  Cowperwood liked the
+semi-Jewish cast of her face, a certain fullness of the neck, her dark,
+sleepy eyes.  But she was much too young and nebulous, he thought, and
+he let her pass.  On this trip, which endured for ten days, he saw much
+of her, in different moods, walking with a young Jew in whom she seemed
+greatly interested, playing at shuffleboard, reading solemnly in a
+corner out of the reach of the wind or spray, and usually looking
+naive, preternaturally innocent, remote, dreamy.  At other times she
+seemed possessed of a wild animation, her eyes alight, her expression
+vigorous, an intense glow in her soul.  Once he saw her bent over a
+small wood block, cutting a book-plate with a thin steel graving tool.
+
+Because of Stephanie's youth and seeming unimportance, her lack of what
+might be called compelling rosy charm, Aileen had become reasonably
+friendly with the girl.  Far subtler, even at her years, than Aileen,
+Stephanie gathered a very good impression of the former, of her mental
+girth, and how to take her.  She made friends with her, made a
+book-plate for her, made a sketch of her.  She confided to Aileen that
+in her own mind she was destined for the stage, if her parents would
+permit; and Aileen invited her to see her husband's pictures on their
+return.  She little knew how much of a part Stephanie would play in
+Cowperwood's life.
+
+The Cowperwoods, having been put down at Goteborg, saw no more of the
+Platows until late October.  Then Aileen, being lonely, called to see
+Stephanie, and occasionally thereafter Stephanie came over to the South
+Side to see the Cowperwoods.  She liked to roam about their house, to
+dream meditatively in some nook of the rich interior, with a book for
+company.  She liked Cowperwood's pictures, his jades, his missals, his
+ancient radiant glass.  From talking with Aileen she realized that the
+latter had no real love for these things, that her expressions of
+interest and pleasure were pure make-believe, based on their value as
+possessions.  For Stephanie herself certain of the illuminated books
+and bits of glass had a heavy, sensuous appeal, which only the truly
+artistic can understand. They unlocked dark dream moods and pageants
+for her.  She responded to them, lingered over them, experienced
+strange moods from them as from the orchestrated richness of music.
+
+And in doing so she thought of Cowperwood often.  Did he really like
+these things, or was he just buying them to be buying them? She had
+heard much of the pseudo artistic--the people who made a show of art.
+She recalled Cowperwood as he walked the deck of the Centurion.  She
+remembered his large, comprehensive, embracing blue-gray eyes that
+seemed to blaze with intelligence.  He seemed to her quite obviously a
+more forceful and significant man than her father, and yet she could
+not have said why.  He always seemed so trigly dressed, so well put
+together.  There was a friendly warmth about all that he said or did,
+though he said or did little. She felt that his eyes were mocking, that
+back in his soul there was some kind of humor over something which she
+did not understand quite.
+
+After Stephanie had been back in Chicago six months, during which time
+she saw very little of Cowperwood, who was busy with his street-railway
+programme, she was swept into the net of another interest which carried
+her away from him and Aileen for the time being.  On the West Side,
+among a circle of her mother's friends, had been organized an Amateur
+Dramatic League, with no less object than to elevate the stage.  That
+world-old problem never fails to interest the new and the
+inexperienced.  It all began in the home of one of the new rich of the
+West Side--the Timberlakes.  They, in their large house on Ashland
+Avenue, had a stage, and Georgia Timberlake, a romantic-minded girl of
+twenty with flaxen hair, imagined she could act.  Mrs. Timberlake, a
+fat, indulgent mother, rather agreed with her.  The whole idea, after a
+few discursive performances of Milton's "The Masque of Comus," "Pyramus
+and Thisbe," and an improved Harlequin and Columbine, written by one of
+the members, was transferred to the realm of the studios, then
+quartered in the New Arts Building.  An artist by the name of Lane
+Cross, a portrait-painter, who was much less of an artist than he was a
+stage director, and not much of either, but who made his living by
+hornswaggling society into the belief that he could paint, was induced
+to take charge of these stage performances.
+
+By degrees the "Garrick Players," as they chose to call themselves,
+developed no little skill and craftsmanship in presenting one form and
+another of classic and semi-classic play.  "Romeo and Juliet," with few
+properties of any kind, "The Learned Ladies" of Moliere, Sheridan's
+"The Rivals," and the "Elektra" of Sophocles were all given.
+Considerable ability of one kind and another was developed, the group
+including two actresses of subsequent repute on the American stage, one
+of whom was Stephanie Platow.  There were some ten girls and women
+among the active members, and almost as many men--a variety of
+characters much too extended to discuss here. There was a dramatic
+critic by the name of Gardner Knowles, a young man, very smug and
+handsome, who was connected with the Chicago Press.  Whipping his
+neatly trousered legs with his bright little cane, he used to appear at
+the rooms of the players at the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday teas
+which they inaugurated, and discuss the merits of the venture.  Thus
+the Garrick Players were gradually introduced into the newspapers.
+Lane Cross, the smooth-faced, pasty-souled artist who had charge, was a
+rake at heart, a subtle seducer of women, who, however, escaped
+detection by a smooth, conventional bearing.  He was interested in such
+girls as Georgia Timberlake, Irma Ottley, a rosy, aggressive maiden who
+essayed comic roles, and Stephanie Platow.  These, with another girl,
+Ethel Tuckerman, very emotional and romantic, who could dance
+charmingly and sing, made up a group of friends which became very
+close. Presently intimacies sprang up, only in this realm, instead of
+ending in marriage, they merely resulted in sex liberty.  Thus Ethel
+Tuckerman became the mistress of Lane Cross; an illicit attachment grew
+up between Irma Ottley and a young society idler by the name of Bliss
+Bridge; and Gardner Knowles, ardently admiring Stephanie Platow
+literally seized upon her one afternoon in her own home, when he went
+ostensibly to interview her, and overpersuaded her.  She was only
+reasonably fond of him, not in love; but, being generous, nebulous,
+passionate, emotional, inexperienced, voiceless, and vainly curious,
+without any sense of the meums and teums that govern society in such
+matters, she allowed this rather brutal thing to happen.  She was not a
+coward--was too nebulous and yet forceful to be such.  Her parents
+never knew.  And once so launched, another world--that of sex
+satisfaction--began to dawn on her.
+
+Were these young people evil? Let the social philosopher answer. One
+thing is certain: They did not establish homes and raise children.  On
+the contrary, they led a gay, butterfly existence for nearly two years;
+then came a gift in the lute.  Quarrels developed over parts,
+respective degrees of ability, and leadership. Ethel Tuckerman fell out
+with Lane Cross, because she discovered him making love to Irma Ottley.
+Irma and Bliss Bridge released each other, the latter transferring his
+affections to Georgia Timberlake.  Stephanie Platow, by far the most
+individual of them all, developed a strange inconsequence as to her
+deeds.  It was when she was drawing near the age of twenty that the
+affair with Gardner Knowles began.  After a time Lane Cross, with his
+somewhat earnest attempt at artistic interpretation and his superiority
+in the matter of years--he was forty, and young Knowles only
+twenty-four--seemed more interesting to Stephanie, and he was quick to
+respond. There followed an idle, passionate union with this man, which
+seemed important, but was not so at all.  And then it was that
+Stephanie began dimly to perceive that it was on and on that the
+blessings lie, that somewhere there might be some man much more
+remarkable than either of these; but this was only a dream.  She
+thought of Cowperwood at times; but he seemed to her to be too wrapped
+up in grim tremendous things, far apart from this romantic world of
+amateur dramatics in which she was involved.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+
+Airs from the Orient
+
+
+Cowperwood gained his first real impression of Stephanie at the Garrick
+Players, where he went with Aileen once to witness a performance of
+"Elektra." He liked Stephanie particularly in this part, and thought
+her beautiful.  One evening not long afterward he noticed her in his
+own home looking at his jades, particularly a row of bracelets and
+ear-rings.  He liked the rhythmic outline of her body, which reminded
+him of a letter S in motion.  Quite suddenly it came over him that she
+was a remarkable girl--very--destined, perhaps, to some significant
+future.  At the same time Stephanie was thinking of him.
+
+"Do you find them interesting?" he asked, stopping beside her.
+
+"I think they're wonderful.  Those dark-greens, and that pale, fatty
+white! I can see how beautiful they would be in a Chinese setting.  I
+have always wished we could find a Chinese or Japanese play to produce
+sometime."
+
+"Yes, with your black hair those ear-rings would look well," said
+Cowperwood.
+
+He had never deigned to comment on a feature of hers before.  She
+turned her dark, brown-black eyes on him--velvety eyes with a kind of
+black glow in them--and now he noticed how truly fine they were, and
+how nice were her hands--brown almost as a Malay's.
+
+He said nothing more; but the next day an unlabeled box was delivered
+to Stephanie at her home containing a pair of jade ear-rings, a
+bracelet, and a brooch with Chinese characters intagliated. Stephanie
+was beside herself with delight.  She gathered them up in her hands and
+kissed them, fastening the ear-rings in her ears and adjusting the
+bracelet and ring.  Despite her experience with her friends and
+relatives, her stage associates, and her paramours, she was still a
+little unschooled in the world.  Her heart was essentially poetic and
+innocent.  No one had ever given her much of anything--not even her
+parents.  Her allowance thus far in life had been a pitiful six dollars
+a week outside of her clothing.  As she surveyed these pretty things in
+the privacy of her room she wondered oddly whether Cowperwood was
+growing to like her.  Would such a strong, hard business man be
+interested in her? She had heard her father say he was becoming very
+rich.  Was she a great actress, as some said she was, and would strong,
+able types of men like Cowperwood take to her--eventually? She had
+heard of Rachel, of Nell Gwynne, of the divine Sarah and her loves.
+She took the precious gifts and locked them in a black-iron box which
+was sacred to her trinkets and her secrets.
+
+The mere acceptance of these things in silence was sufficient
+indication to Cowperwood that she was of a friendly turn of mind. He
+waited patiently until one day a letter came to his office--not his
+house--addressed, "Frank Algernon Cowperwood, Personal." It was written
+in a small, neat, careful hand, almost printed.
+
+
+I don't know how to thank you for your wonderful present.  I didn't
+mean you should give them to me, and I know you sent them.  I shall
+keep them with pleasure and wear them with delight.  It was so nice of
+you to do this.
+
+                                       STEPHANIE PLATOW.
+
+
+Cowperwood studied the handwriting, the paper, the phraseology. For a
+girl of only a little over twenty this was wise and reserved and
+tactful.  She might have written to him at his residence.  He gave her
+the benefit of a week's time, and then found her in his own home one
+Sunday afternoon.  Aileen had gone calling, and Stephanie was
+pretending to await her return.
+
+"It's nice to see you there in that window," he said.  "You fit your
+background perfectly."
+
+"Do I?" The black-brown eyes burned soulfully.  The panneling back of
+her was of dark oak, burnished by the rays of an afternoon winter sun.
+
+Stephanie Platow had dressed for this opportunity.  Her full, rich,
+short black hair was caught by a childish band of blood-red ribbon,
+holding it low over her temples and ears.  Her lithe body, so
+harmonious in its graven roundness, was clad in an apple-green bodice,
+and a black skirt with gussets of red about the hem; her smooth arms,
+from the elbows down, were bare.  On one wrist was the jade bracelet he
+had given her.  Her stockings were apple-green silk, and, despite the
+chill of the day, her feet were shod in enticingly low slippers with
+brass buckles.
+
+Cowperwood retired to the hall to hang up his overcoat and came back
+smiling.
+
+"Isn't Mrs. Cowperwood about?"
+
+"The butler says she's out calling, but I thought I'd wait a little
+while, anyhow.  She may come back."
+
+She turned up a dark, smiling face to him, with languishing,
+inscrutable eyes, and he recognized the artist at last, full and clear.
+
+"I see you like my bracelet, don't you?"
+
+"It's beautiful," she replied, looking down and surveying it dreamily.
+"I don't always wear it.  I carry it in my muff.  I've just put it on
+for a little while.  I carry them all with me always. I love them so.
+I like to feel them."
+
+She opened a small chamois bag beside her--lying with her handkerchief
+and a sketch-book which she always carried--and took out the ear-rings
+and brooch.
+
+Cowperwood glowed with a strange feeling of approval and enthusiasm at
+this manifestation of real interest.  He liked jade himself very much,
+but more than that the feeling that prompted this expression in
+another.  Roughly speaking, it might have been said of him that youth
+and hope in women--particularly youth when combined with beauty and
+ambition in a girl--touched him.  He responded keenly to her impulse to
+do or be something in this world, whatever it might be, and he looked
+on the smart, egoistic vanity of so many with a kindly, tolerant,
+almost parental eye.  Poor little organisms growing on the tree of
+life--they would burn out and fade soon enough.  He did not know the
+ballad of the roses of yesteryear, but if he had it would have appealed
+to him.  He did not care to rifle them, willy-nilly; but should their
+temperaments or tastes incline them in his direction, they would not
+suffer vastly in their lives because of him.  The fact was, the man was
+essentially generous where women were concerned.
+
+"How nice of you!" he commented, smiling.  "I like that." And then,
+seeing a note-book and pencil beside her, he asked, "What are you
+doing?"
+
+"Just sketching."
+
+"Let me see?"
+
+"It's nothing much," she replied, deprecatingly.  "I don't draw very
+well."
+
+"Gifted girl!" he replied, picking it up.  "Paints, draws, carves on
+wood, plays, sings, acts."
+
+"All rather badly," she sighed, turning her head languidly and looking
+away.  In her sketch-book she had put all of her best drawings; there
+were sketches of nude women, dancers, torsos, bits of running figures,
+sad, heavy, sensuous heads and necks of sleeping girls, chins up,
+eyelids down, studies of her brothers and sister, and of her father and
+mother.
+
+"Delightful!" exclaimed Cowperwood, keenly alive to a new treasure.
+Good heavens, where had been his eyes all this while? Here was a jewel
+lying at his doorstep--innocent, untarnished--a real jewel. These
+drawings suggested a fire of perception, smoldering and somber, which
+thrilled him.
+
+"These are beautiful to me, Stephanie," he said, simply, a strange,
+uncertain feeling of real affection creeping over him.  The man's
+greatest love was for art.  It was hypnotic to him.  "Did you ever
+study art?" he asked.
+
+"No."
+
+"And you never studied acting?"
+
+"No."
+
+She shook her head in a slow, sad, enticing way.  The black hair
+concealing her ears moved him strangely.
+
+"I know the art of your stage work is real, and you have a natural art
+which I just seem to see.  What has been the matter with me, anyhow?"
+
+"Oh no," she sighed.  "It seems to me that I merely play at everything.
+I could cry sometimes when I think how I go on."
+
+"At twenty?"
+
+"That is old enough," she smiled, archly.
+
+"Stephanie," he asked, cautiously, "how old are you, exactly?"
+
+"I will be twenty-one in April," she answered.
+
+"Have your parents been very strict with you?"
+
+She shook her head dreamily.  "No; what makes you ask? They haven't
+paid very much attention to me.  They've always liked Lucille and
+Gilbert and Ormond best." Her voice had a plaintive, neglected ring.
+It was the voice she used in her best scenes on the stage.
+
+"Don't they realize that you are very talented?"
+
+"I think perhaps my mother feels that I may have some ability. My
+father doesn't, I'm sure.  Why?"
+
+She lifted those languorous, plaintive eyes.
+
+"Why, Stephanie, if you want to know, I think you're wonderful. I
+thought so the other night when you were looking at those jades. It all
+came over me.  You are an artist, truly, and I have been so busy I have
+scarcely seen it.  Tell me one thing."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She drew in a soft breath, filling her chest and expanding her bosom,
+while she looked at him from under her black hair.  Her hands were
+crossed idly in her lap.  Then she looked demurely down.
+
+"Look, Stephanie! Look up! I want to ask you something.  You have known
+something of me for over a year.  Do you like me?"
+
+"I think you're very wonderful," she murmured.
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"Isn't that much?" she smiled, shooting a dull, black-opal look in his
+direction.
+
+"You wore my bracelet to-day.  Were you very glad to get it?"
+
+"Oh yes," she sighed, with aspirated breath, pretending a kind of
+suffocation.
+
+"How beautiful you really are!" he said, rising and looking down at her.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No."
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"No."
+
+"Come, Stephanie! Stand by me and look at me.  You are so tall and
+slender and graceful.  You are like something out of Asia."
+
+She sighed, turning in a sinuous way, as he slipped his arm her. "I
+don't think we should, should we?" she asked, naively, after a moment,
+pulling away from him.
+
+"Stephanie!"
+
+"I think I'd better go, now, please."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+
+Love and War
+
+
+It was during the earlier phases of his connection with Chicago
+street-railways that Cowperwood, ardently interesting himself in
+Stephanie Platow, developed as serious a sex affair as any that had yet
+held him.  At once, after a few secret interviews with her, he adopted
+his favorite ruse in such matters and established bachelor quarters in
+the down-town section as a convenient meeting-ground.  Several
+conversations with Stephanie were not quite as illuminating as they
+might have been, for, wonderful as she was--a kind of artistic godsend
+in this dull Western atmosphere--she was also enigmatic and elusive,
+very.  He learned speedily, in talking with her on several days when
+they met for lunch, of her dramatic ambitions, and of the seeming
+spiritual and artistic support she required from some one who would
+have faith in her and inspire her by his or her confidence.  He learned
+all about the Garrick Players, her home intimacies and friends, the
+growing quarrels in the dramatic organization.  He asked her, as they
+sat in a favorite and inconspicuous resort of his finding, during one
+of those moments when blood and not intellect was ruling between them,
+whether she had ever--
+
+"Once," she naively admitted.
+
+It was a great shock to Cowperwood.  He had fancied her refreshingly
+innocent.  But she explained it was all so accidental, so unintentional
+on her part, very.  She described it all so gravely, soulfully,
+pathetically, with such a brooding, contemplative backward searching of
+the mind, that he was astonished and in a way touched.  What a pity! It
+was Gardner Knowles who had done this, she admitted.  But he was not
+very much to blame, either.  It just happened.  She had tried to
+protest, but-- Wasn't she angry? Yes, but then she was sorry to do
+anything to hurt Gardner Knowles.  He was such a charming boy, and he
+had such a lovely mother and sister, and the like.
+
+Cowperwood was astonished.  He had reached that point in life where the
+absence of primal innocence in a woman was not very significant; but in
+Stephanie, seeing that she was so utterly charming, it was almost too
+bad.  He thought what fools the Platows must be to tolerate this art
+atmosphere for Stephanie without keeping a sharp watch over it.
+Nevertheless, he was inclined to believe from observation thus far that
+Stephanie might be hard to watch.  She was ingrainedly irresponsible,
+apparently--so artistically nebulous, so non-self-protective.  To go on
+and be friends with this scamp! And yet she protested that never after
+that had there been the least thing between them.  Cowperwood could
+scarcely believe it. She must be lying, and yet he liked her so.  The
+very romantic, inconsequential way in which she narrated all this
+staggered, amused, and even fascinated him.
+
+"But, Stephanie," he argued, curiously, "there must been some aftermath
+to all this.  What happened? What did you do?"
+
+"Nothing." She shook her head.
+
+He had to smile.
+
+"But oh, don't let's talk about it!" she pleaded.  "I don't want to.
+It hurts me.  There was nothing more."
+
+She sighed, and Cowperwood meditated.  The evil was now done, and the
+best that he could do, if he cared for her at all--and he did--was to
+overlook it.  He surveyed her oddly, wonderingly. What a charming soul
+she was, anyhow! How naive--how brooding! She had art--lots of it.  Did
+he want to give her up?
+
+As he might have known, it was dangerous to trifle with a type of this
+kind, particularly once awakened to the significance of promiscuity,
+and unless mastered by some absorbing passion. Stephanie had had too
+much flattery and affection heaped upon her in the past two years to be
+easily absorbed.  Nevertheless, for the time being, anyhow, she was
+fascinated by the significance of Cowperwood.  It was wonderful to have
+so fine, so powerful a man care for her.  She conceived of him as a
+very great artist in his realm rather than as a business man, and he
+grasped this fact after a very little while and appreciated it.  To his
+delight, she was even more beautiful physically than he had
+anticipated--a smoldering, passionate girl who met him with a fire
+which, though somber, quite rivaled his own.  She was different, too,
+in her languorous acceptance of all that he bestowed from any one he
+had ever known.  She was as tactful as Rita Sohlberg--more so--but so
+preternaturally silent at times.
+
+"Stephanie," he would exclaim, "do talk.  What are you thinking of? You
+dream like an African native."
+
+She merely sat and smiled in a dark way or sketched or modeled him.
+She was constantly penciling something, until moved by the fever of her
+blood, when she would sit and look at him or brood silently, eyes down.
+Then, when he would reach for her with seeking hands, she would sigh,
+"Oh yes, oh yes!"
+
+Those were delightful days with Stephanie.
+
+In the matter of young MacDonald's request for fifty thousand dollars
+in securities, as well as the attitude of the other editors--Hyssop,
+Braxton, Ricketts, and so on--who had proved subtly critical,
+Cowperwood conferred with Addison and McKenty.
+
+"A likely lad, that," commented McKenty, succintly, when he heard it.
+"He'll do better than his father in one way, anyhow.  He'll probably
+make more money."
+
+McKenty had seen old General MacDonald just once in his life, and liked
+him.
+
+"I should like to know what the General would think of that if he
+knew," commented Addison, who admired the old editor greatly. "I'm
+afraid he wouldn't sleep very well."
+
+"There is just one thing," observed Cowperwood, thoughtfully. "This
+young man will certainly come into control of the Inquirer sometime.
+He looks to me like some one who would not readily forget an injury."
+He smiled sardonically.  So did McKenty and Addison.
+
+"Be that as it may," suggested the latter, "he isn't editor yet."
+McKenty, who never revealed his true views to any one but Cowperwood,
+waited until he had the latter alone to observe:
+
+What can they do? Your request is a reasonable one.  Why shouldn't the
+city give you the tunnel? It's no good to anyone as it is. And the loop
+is no more than the other roads have now.  I'm thinking it's the
+Chicago City Railway and that silk-stocking crowd on State Street or
+that gas crowd that's talking against you.  I've heard them before.
+Give them what they want, and it's a fine moral cause.  Give it to
+anyone else, and there's something wrong with it.  It's little
+attention I pay to them.  We have the council, let it pass the
+ordinances.  It can't be proved that they don't do it willingly.  The
+mayor is a sensible man.  He'll sign them. Let young MacDonald talk if
+he wants to.  If he says too much you can talk to his father.  As for
+Hyssop, he's an old grandmother anyhow.  I've never known him to be for
+a public improvement yet that was really good for Chicago unless
+Schryhart or Merrill or Arneel or someone else of that crowd wanted it.
+I know them of old.  My advice is to go ahead and never mind them.  To
+hell with them! Things will be sweet enough, once you are as powerful
+as they are.  They'll get nothing in the future without paying for it.
+It's little enough they've ever done to further anything that I wanted.
+
+Cowperwood, however, remained cool and thoughtful.  Should he pay young
+MacDonald? he asked himself.  Addison knew of no influence that he
+could bring to bear.  Finally, after much thought, he decided to
+proceed as he had planned.  Consequently, the reporters around the City
+Hall and the council-chamber, who were in touch with Alderman Thomas
+Dowling, McKenty's leader on the floor of council, and those who called
+occasionally--quite regularly, in fact--at the offices of the North
+Chicago Street Railway Company, Cowperwood's comfortable new offices in
+the North Side, were now given to understand that two ordinances--one
+granting the free use of the La Salle Street tunnel for an unlimited
+period (practically a gift of it), and another granting a right of way
+in La Salle, Munroe, Dearborn, and Randolph streets for the proposed
+loop--would be introduced in council very shortly.  Cowperwood granted
+a very flowery interview, in which he explained quite enthusiastically
+all that the North Chicago company was doing and proposed to do, and
+made clear what a splendid development it would assure to the North
+Side and to the business center.
+
+At once Schryhart, Merrill, and some individuals connected with the
+Chicago West Division Company, began to complain in the newspaper
+offices and at the clubs to Ricketts, Braxton, young MacDonald, and the
+other editors.  Envy of the pyrotechnic progress of the man was as much
+a factor in this as anything else.  It did not make the slightest
+difference, as Cowperwood had sarcastically pointed out, that every
+other corporation of any significance in Chicago had asked and received
+without money and without price. Somehow his career in connection with
+Chicago gas, his venturesome, if unsuccessful effort to enter Chicago
+society, his self-acknowledged Philadelphia record, rendered the
+sensitive cohorts of the ultra-conservative exceedingly fearful.  In
+Schryhart's Chronicle appeared a news column which was headed, "Plain
+Grab of City Tunnel Proposed." It was a very truculent statement, and
+irritated Cowperwood greatly.  The Press (Mr. Haguenin's paper), on the
+other hand, was most cordial to the idea of the loop, while appearing
+to be a little uncertain as to whether the tunnel should be granted
+without compensation or not.  Editor Hyssop felt called upon to insist
+that something more than merely nominal compensation should be made for
+the tunnel, and that "riders" should be inserted in the loop ordinance
+making it incumbent upon the North Chicago company to keep those
+thoroughfares in full repair and well lighted. The Inquirer, under Mr.
+MacDonald, junior, and Mr. Du Bois, was in rumbling opposition.  No
+free tunnels, it cried; no free ordinances for privileges in the
+down-town heart.  It had nothing to say about Cowperwood personally.
+The Globe, Mr. Braxton's paper, was certain that no free rights to the
+tunnel should be given, and that a much better route for the loop could
+be found--one larger and more serviceable to the public, one that might
+be made to include State Street or Wabash Avenue, or both, where Mr.
+Merrill's store was located.  So it went, and one could see quite
+clearly to what extent the interests of the public figured in the
+majority of these particular viewpoints.
+
+Cowperwood, individual, reliant, utterly indifferent to opposition of
+any kind, was somewhat angered by the manner in which his overtures had
+been received, but still felt that the best way out of his troubles was
+to follow McKenty's advice and get power first. Once he had his
+cable-conduit down, his new cars running, the tunnel rebuilt,
+brilliantly lighted, and the bridge crush disposed of, the public would
+see what a vast change for the better had been made and would support
+him.  Finally all things were in readiness and the ordinance jammed
+through.  McKenty, being a little dubious of the outcome, had a
+rocking-chair brought into the council-chamber itself during the hours
+when the ordinances were up for consideration. In this he sat,
+presumably as a curious spectator, actually as a master dictating the
+course of liquidation in hand.  Neither Cowperwood nor any one else
+knew of McKenty's action until too late to interfere with it.  Addison
+and Videra, when they read about it as sneeringly set forth in the news
+columns of the papers, lifted and then wrinkled their eyebrows.
+
+"That looks like pretty rough work to me," commented Addison.  "I
+thought McKenty had more tact.  That's his early Irish training."
+
+Alexander Rambaud, who was an admirer and follower of Cowperwood's,
+wondered whether the papers were lying, whether it really could be true
+that Cowperwood had a serious political compact with McKenty which
+would allow him to walk rough-shod over public opinion. Rambaud
+considered Cowperwood's proposition so sane and reasonable that he
+could not understand why there should be serious opposition, or why
+Cowperwood and McKenty should have to resort to such methods.
+
+However, the streets requisite for the loop were granted.  The tunnel
+was leased for nine hundred and ninety-nine years at the nominal sum of
+five thousand dollars per year.  It was understood that the old bridges
+over State, Dearborn, and Clark streets should be put in repair or
+removed; but there was "a joker" inserted elsewhere which nullified
+this.  Instantly there were stormy outbursts in the Chronicle,
+Inquirer, and Globe; but Cowperwood, when he read them, merely smiled.
+"Let them grumble," he said to himself.  "I put a very reasonable
+proposition before them.  Why should they complain? I'm doing more now
+than the Chicago City Railway.  It's jealousy, that's all.  If
+Schryhart or Merrill had asked for it, there would have been no
+complaint."
+
+McKenty called at the offices of the Chicago Trust Company to
+congratulate Cowperwood.  "The boys did as I thought they would," he
+said.  "I had to be there, though, for I heard some one say that about
+ten of them intended to ditch us at the last moment."
+
+"Good work, good work!" replied Cowperwood, cheerfully.  "This row will
+all blow over.  It would be the same whenever we asked.  The air will
+clear up.  We'll give them such a fine service that they'll forget all
+about this, and be glad they gave us the tunnel."
+
+Just the same, the morning after the enabling ordinances had passed,
+there was much derogatory comment in influential quarters.  Mr. Norman
+Schryhart, who, through his publisher, had been fulminating defensively
+against Cowperwood, stared solemnly at Mr. Ricketts when they met.
+
+"Well," said the magnate, who imagined he foresaw a threatened attack
+on his Chicago City Street Railway preserves, "I see our friend Mr.
+Cowperwood has managed to get his own way with the council.  I am
+morally certain he uses money to get what he is after as freely as a
+fireman uses water.  He's as slippery as an eel.  I should be glad if
+we could establish that there is a community of interest between him
+and these politicians around City Hall, or between him and Mr. McKenty.
+I believe he has set out to dominate this city politically as well as
+financially, and he'll need constant watching.  If public opinion can
+be aroused against him he may be dislodged in the course of time.
+Chicago may get too uncomfortable for him.  I know Mr. McKenty
+personally, but he is not the kind of man I care to do business with."
+
+Mr. Schryhart's method of negotiating at City Hall was through certain
+reputable but somewhat slow-going lawyers who were in the employ of the
+South Side company.  They had never been able to reach Mr. McKenty at
+all.  Ricketts echoed a hearty approval. "You're very right," he said,
+with owlish smugness, adjusting a waistcoat button that had come loose,
+and smoothing his cuffs. "He's a prince of politicians.  We'll have to
+look sharp if we ever trap him" Mr. Ricketts would have been glad to
+sell out to Mr. Cowperwood, if he had not been so heavily obligated to
+Mr. Schryhart. He had no especial affection for Cowperwood, but he
+recognized in him a coming man.
+
+Young MacDonald, talking to Clifford Du Bois in the office of the
+Inquirer, and reflecting how little his private telephone message had
+availed him, was in a waspish, ironic frame of mind.
+
+"Well," he said, "it seems our friend Cowperwood hasn't taken our
+advice.  He may make his mark, but the Inquirer isn't through with him
+by a long shot.  He'll be wanting other things from the city in the
+future."
+
+Clifford Du Bois regarded his acid young superior with a curious eye.
+He knew nothing of MacDonald's private telephone message to Cowperwood;
+but he knew how he himself would have dealt with the crafty financier
+had he been in MacDonald's position.
+
+"Yes, Cowperwood is shrewd," was his comment.  "Pritchard, our
+political man, says the ways of the City Hall are greased straight up
+to the mayor and McKenty, and that Cowperwood can have anything he
+wants at any time.  Tom Dowling eats out of his hand, and you know what
+that means.  Old General Van Sickle is working for him in some way.
+Did you ever see that old buzzard flying around if there wasn't
+something dead in the woods?"
+
+"He's a slick one," remarked MacDonald.  "But as for Cowperwood, he
+can't get away with this sort of thing very long.  He's going too fast.
+He wants too much."
+
+Mr. Du Bois smiled quite secretly.  It amused him to see how Cowperwood
+had brushed MacDonald and his objections aside--dispensed for the time
+being with the services of the Inquirer.  Du Bois confidently believed
+that if the old General had been at home he would have supported the
+financier.
+
+Within eight months after seizing the La Salle Street tunnel and
+gobbling four of the principal down-town streets for his loop,
+Cowperwood turned his eyes toward the completion of the second part of
+the programme--that of taking over the Washington Street tunnel and the
+Chicago West Division Company, which was still drifting along under its
+old horse-car regime.  It was the story of the North Side company all
+over again.  Stockholders of a certain type--the average--are extremely
+nervous, sensitive, fearsome. They are like that peculiar bivalve, the
+clam, which at the slightest sense of untoward pressure withdraws into
+its shell and ceases all activity.  The city tax department began by
+instituting proceedings against the West Division company, compelling
+them to disgorge various unpaid street-car taxes which had hitherto
+been conveniently neglected.  The city highway department was
+constantly jumping on them for neglect of street repairs.  The city
+water department, by some hocus-pocus, made it its business to discover
+that they had been stealing water.  On the other hand were the smiling
+representatives of Cowperwood, Kaifrath, Addison, Videra, and others,
+approaching one director or stockholder after another with glistening
+accounts of what a splendid day would set in for the Chicago West
+Division Company if only it would lease fifty-one per cent. of its
+holdings--fifty-one per cent. of twelve hundred and fifty shares, par
+value two hundred dollars--for the fascinating sum of six hundred
+dollars per share, and thirty per cent. interest on all stock not
+assumed.
+
+Who could resist? Starve and beat a dog on the one hand; wheedle, pet,
+and hold meat in front of it on the other, and it can soon be brought
+to perform.  Cowperwood knew this.  His emissaries for good and evil
+were tireless.  In the end--and it was not long in coming--the
+directors and chief stockholders of the Chicago West Division Company
+succumbed; and then, ho! the sudden leasing by the Chicago West
+Division Company of all its property--to the North Chicago Street
+Railway Company, lessee in turn of the Chicago City Passenger Railway,
+a line which Cowperwood had organized to take over the Washington
+Street tunnel.  How had he accomplished it? The question was on the tip
+of every financial tongue.  Who were the men or the organization
+providing the enormous sums necessary to pay six hundred dollars per
+share for six hundred and fifty shares of the twelve hundred and fifty
+belonging to the old West Division company, and thirty per cent. per
+year on all the remainder? Where was the money coming from to cable all
+these lines? It was simple enough if they had only thought.  Cowperwood
+was merely capitalizing the future.
+
+Before the newspapers or the public could suitably protest, crowds of
+men were at work day and night in the business heart of the city, their
+flaring torches and resounding hammers making a fitful bedlamic world
+of that region; they were laying the first great cable loop and
+repairing the La Salle Street tunnel.  It was the same on the North and
+West Sides, where concrete conduits were being laid, new grip and
+trailer cars built, new car-barns erected, and large, shining
+power-houses put up.  The city, so long used to the old bridge delays,
+the straw-strewn, stoveless horse-cars on their jumping rails, was agog
+to see how fine this new service would be.  The La Salle Street tunnel
+was soon aglow with white plaster and electric lights.  The long
+streets and avenues of the North Side were threaded with concrete-lined
+conduits and heavy street-rails.  The powerhouses were completed and
+the system was started, even while the contracts for the changes on the
+West Side were being let.
+
+Schryhart and his associates were amazed at this swiftness of action,
+this dizzy phantasmagoria of financial operations.  It looked very much
+to the conservative traction interests of Chicago as if this young
+giant out of the East had it in mind to eat up the whole city.  The
+Chicago Trust Company, which he, Addison, McKenty, and others had
+organized to manipulate the principal phases of the local bond issues,
+and of which he was rumored to be in control, was in a flourishing
+condition.  Apparently he could now write his check for millions, and
+yet he was not beholden, so far as the older and more conservative
+multimillionaires of Chicago were concerned, to any one of them.  The
+worst of it was that this Cowperwood--an upstart, a jail-bird, a
+stranger whom they had done their best to suppress financially and
+ostracize socially, had now become an attractive, even a sparkling
+figure in the eyes of the Chicago public.  His views and opinions on
+almost any topic were freely quoted; the newspapers, even the most
+antagonistic, did not dare to neglect him.  Their owners were now fully
+alive to the fact that a new financial rival had appeared who was
+worthy of their steel.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+
+A Financier Bewitched
+
+
+It was interesting to note how, able though he was, and bound up with
+this vast street-railway enterprise which was beginning to affect
+several thousand men, his mind could find intense relief and
+satisfaction in the presence and actions of Stephanie Platow. It is not
+too much to say that in her, perhaps, he found revivified the spirit
+and personality of Rita Sohlberg.  Rita, however, had not contemplated
+disloyalty--it had never occurred to her to be faithless to Cowperwood
+so long as he was fond of her any more than for a long time it had been
+possible for her, even after all his philanderings, to be faithless to
+Sohlberg.  Stephanie, on the other hand, had the strange feeling that
+affection was not necessarily identified with physical loyalty, and
+that she could be fond of Cowperwood and still deceive him--a fact
+which was based on her lack as yet of a true enthusiasm for him.  She
+loved him and she didn't.  Her attitude was not necessarily identified
+with her heavy, lizardish animality, though that had something to do
+with it; but rather with a vague, kindly generosity which permitted her
+to feel that it was hard to break with Gardner Knowles and Lane Cross
+after they had been so nice to her.  Gardner Knowles had sung her
+praises here, there, and everywhere, and was attempting to spread her
+fame among the legitimate theatrical enterprises which came to the city
+in order that she might be taken up and made into a significant figure.
+Lane Cross was wildly fond of her in an inadequate way which made it
+hard to break with him, and yet certain that she would eventually.
+There was still another man--a young playwright and poet by the name of
+Forbes Gurney--tall, fair, passionate--who had newly arrived on the
+scene and was courting her, or, rather, being courted by her at odd
+moments, for her time was her own.  In her artistically errant way she
+had refused to go to school like her sister, and was idling about,
+developing, as she phrased it, her artistic possibilities.
+
+Cowperwood, as was natural, heard much of her stage life.  At first he
+took all this palaver with a grain of salt, the babbling of an ardent
+nature interested in the flighty romance of the studio world.  By
+degrees, however, he became curious as to the freedom of her actions,
+the ease with which she drifted from place to place--Lane Cross's
+studio; Bliss Bridge's bachelor rooms, where he appeared always to be
+receiving his theatrical friends of the Garrick Players; Mr. Gardner
+Knowles's home on the near North Side, where he was frequently
+entertaining a party after the theater. It seemed to Cowperwood, to say
+the least, that Stephanie was leading a rather free and inconsequential
+existence, and yet it reflected her exactly--the color of her soul.
+But he began to doubt and wonder.
+
+"Where were you, Stephanie, yesterday?" he would ask, when they met for
+lunch, or in the evenings early, or when she called at his new offices
+on the North Side, as she sometimes did to walk or drive with him.
+
+"Oh, yesterday morning I was at Lane Cross's studio trying on some of
+his Indian shawls and veils.  He has such a lot of those things--some
+of the loveliest oranges and blues.  You just ought to see me in them.
+I wish you might."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"For a while.  I thought Ethel Tuckerman and Bliss Bridge would be
+there, but they didn't come until later.  Lane Cross is such a dear.
+He's sort of silly at times, but I like him.  His portraits are so
+bizarre."
+
+She went off into a description of his pretentious but insignificant
+art.
+
+Cowperwood marveled, not at Lane Cross's art nor his shawls, but at
+this world in which Stephanie moved.  He could not quite make her out.
+He had never been able to make her explain satisfactorily that first
+single relationship with Gardner Knowles, which she declared had ended
+so abruptly.  Since then he had doubted, as was his nature; but this
+girl was so sweet, childish, irreconcilable with herself, like a
+wandering breath of air, or a pale-colored flower, that he scarcely
+knew what to think.  The artistically inclined are not prone to quarrel
+with an enticing sheaf of flowers. She was heavenly to him, coming in,
+as she did at times when he was alone, with bland eyes and yielding
+herself in a kind of summery ecstasy.  She had always something
+artistic to tell of storms, winds, dust, clouds, smoke forms, the
+outline of buildings, the lake, the stage.  She would cuddle in his
+arms and quote long sections from "Romeo and Juliet," "Paolo and
+Francesca," "The Ring and the Book," Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes." He
+hated to quarrel with her, because she was like a wild rose or some art
+form in nature.  Her sketch-book was always full of new things.  Her
+muff, or the light silk shawl she wore in summer, sometimes concealed a
+modeled figure of some kind which she would produce with a look like
+that of a doubting child, and if he wanted it, if he liked it, he could
+have it. Cowperwood meditated deeply.  He scarcely knew what to think.
+
+The constant atmosphere of suspicion and doubt in which he was
+compelled to remain, came by degrees to distress and anger him. While
+she was with him she was clinging enough, but when she was away she was
+ardently cheerful and happy.  Unlike the station he had occupied in so
+many previous affairs, he found himself, after the first little while,
+asking her whether she loved him instead of submitting to the same
+question from her.
+
+He thought that with his means, his position, his future possibilities
+he had the power to bind almost any woman once drawn to his
+personality; but Stephanie was too young and too poetic to be greatly
+impaired by wealth and fame, and she was not yet sufficiently gripped
+by the lure of him.  She loved him in her strange way; but she was
+interested also by the latest arrival, Forbes Gurney. This tall,
+melancholy youth, with brown eyes and pale-brown hair, was very poor.
+He hailed from southern Minnesota, and what between a penchant for
+journalism, verse-writing, and some dramatic work, was somewhat
+undecided as to his future.  His present occupation was that of an
+instalment collector for a furniture company, which set him free, as a
+rule, at three o'clock in the afternoon.  He was trying, in a mooning
+way, to identify himself with the Chicago newspaper world, and was a
+discovery of Gardner Knowles.
+
+Stephanie had seen him about the rooms of the Garrick Players. She had
+looked at his longish face with its aureole of soft, crinkly hair, his
+fine wide mouth, deep-set eyes, and good nose, and had been touched by
+an atmosphere of wistfulness, or, let us say, life-hunger.  Gardner
+Knowles brought a poem of his once, which he had borrowed from him, and
+read it to the company, Stephanie, Ethel Tuckerman, Lane Cross, and
+Irma Ottley assembled.
+
+"Listen to this," Knowles had suddenly exclaimed, taking it out of his
+pocket.
+
+It concerned a garden of the moon with the fragrance of pale blossoms,
+a mystic pool, some ancient figures of joy, a quavered Lucidian tune.
+
+"With eerie flute and rhythmic thrum Of muted strings and beaten drum."
+
+Stephanie Platow had sat silent, caught by a quality that was akin to
+her own.  She asked to see it, and read it in silence.
+
+"I think it's charming," she said.
+
+Thereafter she hovered in the vicinity of Forbes Gurney.  Why, she
+could scarcely say.  It was not coquetry.  She just drew near, talked
+to him of stage work and her plays and her ambitions.  She sketched him
+as she had Cowperwood and others, and one day Cowperwood found three
+studies of Forbes Gurney in her note-book idyllicly done, a note of
+romantic feeling about them.
+
+"Who is this?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, he's a young poet who comes up to the Players--Forbes Gurney. He's
+so charming; he's so pale and dreamy."
+
+Cowperwood contemplated the sketches curiously.  His eyes clouded.
+
+"Another one of Stephanie's adherents," he commented, teasingly. "It's
+a long procession I've joined.  Gardner Knowles, Lane Cross, Bliss
+Bridge, Forbes Gurney."
+
+Stephanie merely pouted moodily.
+
+"How you talk! Bliss Bridge, Gardner Knowles! I admit I like them all,
+but that's all I do do.  They're just sweet and dear.  You'd like Lane
+Cross yourself; he's such a foolish old Polly.  As for Forbes Gurney,
+he just drifts up there once in a while as one of the crowd.  I
+scarcely know him."
+
+"Exactly," said Cowperwood, dolefully; "but you sketch him." For some
+reason Cowperwood did not believe this.  Back in his brain he did not
+believe Stephanie at all, he did not trust her.  Yet he was intensely
+fond of her--the more so, perhaps, because of this.
+
+"Tell me truly, Stephanie," he said to her one day, urgently, and yet
+very diplomatically.  "I don't care at all, so far as your past is
+concerned.  You and I are close enough to reach a perfect
+understanding.  But you didn't tell me the whole truth about you and
+Knowles, did you? Tell me truly now.  I sha'n't mind.  I can understand
+well enough how it could have happened.  It doesn't make the least bit
+of difference to me, really."
+
+Stephanie was off her guard for once, in no truly fencing mood. She was
+troubled at times about her various relations, anxious to put herself
+straight with Cowperwood or with any one whom she truly liked.
+Compared to Cowperwood and his affairs, Cross and Knowles were trivial,
+and yet Knowles was interesting to her.  Compared to Cowperwood, Forbes
+Gurney was a stripling beggar, and yet Gurney had what Cowperwood did
+not have--a sad, poetic lure.  He awakened her sympathies.  He was such
+a lonely boy.  Cowperwood was so strong, brilliant, magnetic.
+
+Perhaps it was with some idea of clearing up her moral status generally
+that she finally said: "Well, I didn't tell you the exact truth about
+it, either.  I was a little ashamed to."
+
+At the close of her confession, which involved only Knowles, and was
+incomplete at that, Cowperwood burned with a kind of angry resentment.
+Why trifle with a lying prostitute? That she was an inconsequential
+free lover at twenty-one was quite plain.  And yet there was something
+so strangely large about the girl, so magnetic, and she was so
+beautiful after her kind, that he could not think of giving her up.
+She reminded him of himself.
+
+"Well, Stephanie," he said, trampling under foot an impulse to insult
+or rebuke and dismiss her, "you are strange.  Why didn't you tell me
+this before? I have asked and asked.  Do you really mean to say that
+you care for me at all?"
+
+"How can you ask that?" she demanded, reproachfully, feeling that she
+had been rather foolish in confessing.  Perhaps she would lose him now,
+and she did not want to do that.  Because his eyes blazed with a
+jealous hardness she burst into tears.  "Oh, I wish I had never told
+you! There is nothing to tell, anyhow.  I never wanted to."
+
+Cowperwood was nonplussed.  He knew human nature pretty well, and woman
+nature; his common sense told him that this girl was not to be trusted,
+and yet he was drawn to her.  Perhaps she was not lying, and these
+tears were real.
+
+"And you positively assure me that this was all--that there wasn't any
+one else before, and no one since?"
+
+Stephanie dried her eyes.  They were in his private rooms in Randolph
+Street, the bachelor rooms he had fitted for himself as a changing
+place for various affairs.
+
+"I don't believe you care for me at all," she observed, dolefully,
+reproachfully.  "I don't believe you understand me.  I don't think you
+believe me.  When I tell you how things are you don't understand. I
+don't lie.  I can't.  If you are so doubting now, perhaps you had
+better not see me any more.  I want to be frank with you, but if you
+won't let me--"
+
+She paused heavily, gloomily, very sorrowfully, and Cowperwood surveyed
+her with a kind of yearning.  What an unreasoning pull she had for him!
+He did not believe her, and yet he could not let her go.
+
+"Oh, I don't know what to think," he commented, morosely.  "I certainly
+don't want to quarrel with you, Stephanie, for telling me the truth.
+Please don't deceive me.  You are a remarkable girl. I can do so much
+for you if you will let me.  You ought to see that."
+
+"But I'm not deceiving you," she repeated, wearily.  "I should think
+you could see."
+
+"I believe you," he went on, trying to deceive himself against his
+better judgment.  "But you lead such a free, unconventional life."
+
+"Ah," thought Stephanie, "perhaps I talk too much."
+
+"I am very fond of you.  You appeal to me so much.  I love you, really.
+Don't deceive me.  Don't run with all these silly simpletons. They are
+really not worthy of you.  I shall be able to get a divorce one of
+these days, and then I would be glad to marry you."
+
+"But I'm not running with them in the sense that you think.  They're
+not anything to me beyond mere entertainment.  Oh, I like them, of
+course.  Lane Cross is a dear in his way, and so is Gardner Knowles.
+They have all been nice to me."
+
+Cowperwood's gorge rose at her calling Lane Cross dear.  It incensed
+him, and yet he held his peace.
+
+"Do give me your word that there will never be anything between you and
+any of these men so long as you are friendly with me?" he almost
+pleaded--a strange role for him.  "I don't care to share you with any
+one else.  I won't.  I don't mind what you have done in the past, but I
+don't want you to be unfaithful in the future."
+
+"What a question! Of course I won't.  But if you don't believe me--oh,
+dear--"
+
+Stephanie sighed painfully, and Cowperwood's face clouded with angry
+though well-concealed suspicion and jealousy.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you, Stephanie, I believe you now.  I'm going to take
+your word.  But if you do deceive me, and I should find it out, I will
+quit you the same day.  I do not care to share you with any one else.
+What I can't understand, if you care for me, is how you can take so
+much interest in all these affairs? It certainly isn't devotion to your
+art that's impelling you, is it?"
+
+"Oh, are you going to go on quarreling with me?" asked Stephanie,
+naively.  "Won't you believe me when I say that I love you? Perhaps--"
+But here her histrionic ability came to her aid, and she sobbed
+violently.
+
+Cowperwood took her in his arms.  "Never mind," he soothed.  "I do
+believe you.  I do think you care for me.  Only I wish you weren't such
+a butterfly temperament, Stephanie."
+
+So this particular lesion for the time being was healed.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVIII
+
+The Exposure of Stephanie
+
+
+At the same time the thought of readjusting her relations so that they
+would avoid disloyalty to Cowperwood was never further from Stephanie's
+mind.  Let no one quarrel with Stephanie Platow.  She was an unstable
+chemical compound, artistic to her finger-tips, not understood or
+properly guarded by her family.  Her interest in Cowperwood, his force
+and ability, was intense.  So was her interest in Forbes Gurney--the
+atmosphere of poetry that enveloped him.  She studied him curiously on
+the various occasions when they met, and, finding him bashful and
+recessive, set out to lure him. She felt that he was lonely and
+depressed and poor, and her womanly capacity for sympathy naturally
+bade her be tender.
+
+Her end was easily achieved.  One night, when they were all out in
+Bliss Bridge's single-sticker--a fast-sailing saucer--Stephanie and
+Forbes Gurney sat forward of the mast looking at the silver moon track
+which was directly ahead.  The rest were in the cockpit "cutting
+up"--laughing and singing.  It was very plain to all that Stephanie was
+becoming interested in Forbes Gurney; and since he was charming and she
+wilful, nothing was done to interfere with them, except to throw an
+occasional jest their way.  Gurney, new to love and romance, scarcely
+knew how to take his good fortune, how to begin.  He told Stephanie of
+his home life in the wheat-fields of the Northwest, how his family had
+moved from Ohio when he was three, and how difficult were the labors he
+had always undergone. He had stopped in his plowing many a day to stand
+under a tree and write a poem--such as it was--or to watch the birds or
+to wish he could go to college or to Chicago.  She looked at him with
+dreamy eyes, her dark skin turned a copper bronze in the moonlight, her
+black hair irradiated with a strange, luminous grayish blue. Forbes
+Gurney, alive to beauty in all its forms, ventured finally to touch her
+hand--she of Knowles, Cross, and Cowperwood--and she thrilled from head
+to toe.  This boy was so sweet.  His curly brown hair gave him a kind
+of Greek innocence and aspect.  She did not move, but waited, hoping he
+would do more.
+
+"I wish I might talk to you as I feel," he finally said, hoarsely, a
+catch in his throat.
+
+She laid one hand on his.
+
+"You dear!" she said.
+
+He realized now that he might.  A great ecstasy fell upon him. He
+smoothed her hand, then slipped his arm about her waist, then ventured
+to kiss the dark cheek turned dreamily from him.  Artfully her head
+sunk to his shoulder, and he murmured wild nothings--how divine she
+was, how artistic, how wonderful! With her view of things, it could
+only end one way.  She manoeuvered him into calling on her at her home,
+into studying her books and plays on the top-floor sitting-room, into
+hearing her sing.  Once fully in his arms, the rest was easy by
+suggestion.  He learned she was no longer innocent, and then-- In the
+mean time Cowperwood mingled his speculations concerning large
+power-houses, immense reciprocating engines, the problem of a wage
+scale for his now two thousand employees, some of whom were threatening
+to strike, the problem of securing, bonding, and equipping the La Salle
+Street tunnel and a down-town loop in La Salle, Munroe, Dearborn, and
+Randolph streets, with mental inquiries and pictures as to what
+possibly Stephanie Platow might be doing.  He could only make
+appointments with her from time to time.  He did not fail to note that,
+after he began to make use of information she let drop as to her
+whereabouts from day to day and her free companionship, he heard less
+of Gardner Knowles, Lane Cross, and Forbes Gurney, and more of Georgia
+Timberlake and Ethel Tuckerman.  Why this sudden reticence? On one
+occasion she did say of Forbes Gurney "that he was having such a hard
+time, and that his clothes weren't as nice as they should be, poor
+dear!" Stephanie herself, owing to gifts made to her by Cowperwood, was
+resplendent these days.  She took just enough to complete her wardrobe
+according to her taste.
+
+"Why not send him to me?" Cowperwood asked.  "I might find something to
+do for him." He would have been perfectly willing to put him in some
+position where he could keep track of his time.  However, Mr. Gurney
+never sought him for a position, and Stephanie ceased to speak of his
+poverty.  A gift of two hundred dollars, which Cowperwood made her in
+June, was followed by an accidental meeting with her and Gurney in
+Washington Street.  Mr. Gurney, pale and pleasant, was very well
+dressed indeed.  He wore a pin which Cowperwood knew had once belonged
+to Stephanie.  She was in no way confused.  Finally Stephanie let it
+out that Lane Cross, who had gone to New Hampshire for the summer, had
+left his studio in her charge.  Cowperwood decided to have this studio
+watched.
+
+There was in Cowperwood's employ at this time a young newspaper man, an
+ambitious spark aged twenty-six, by the name of Francis Kennedy.  He
+had written a very intelligent article for the Sunday Inquirer,
+describing Cowperwood and his plans, and pointing out what a remarkable
+man he was.  This pleased Cowperwood.  When Kennedy called one day,
+announcing smartly that he was anxious to get out of reportorial work,
+and inquiring whether he couldn't find something to do in the
+street-railway world, Cowperwood saw in him a possibly useful tool.
+
+"I'll try you out as secretary for a while," he said, pleasantly.
+"There are a few special things I want done.  If you succeed in those,
+I may find something else for you later."
+
+Kennedy had been working for him only a little while when he said to
+him one day: "Francis, did you ever hear of a young man by the name of
+Forbes Gurney in the newspaper world?"
+
+They were in Cowperwood's private office.
+
+"No, sir," replied Francis, briskly.
+
+"You have heard of an organization called the Garrick Players, haven't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Well, Francis, do you suppose you could undertake a little piece of
+detective work for me, and handle it intelligently and quietly?"
+
+"I think so," said Francis, who was the pink of perfection this morning
+in a brown suit, garnet tie, and sard sleeve-links.  His shoes were
+immaculately polished, and his young, healthy face glistened.
+
+"I'll tell you what I want you to do.  There is a young actress, or
+amateur actress, by the name of Stephanie Platow, who frequents the
+studio of an artist named Cross in the New Arts Building.  She may even
+occupy it in his absence--I don't know.  I want you to find out for me
+what the relations of Mr. Gurney and this woman are.  I have certain
+business reasons for wanting to know."
+
+Young Kennedy was all attention.
+
+"You couldn't tell me where I could find out anything about this Mr.
+Gurney to begin with, could you?" he asked.
+
+"I think he is a friend of a critic here by the name of Gardner
+Knowles.  You might ask him.  I need not say that you must never
+mention me.
+
+"Oh, I understand that thoroughly, Mr. Cowperwood." Young Kennedy
+departed, meditating.  How was he to do this? With true journalistic
+skill he first sought other newspaper men, from whom he learned--a bit
+from one and a scrap from another--of the character of the Garrick
+Players, and of the women who belonged to it.  He pretended to be
+writing a one-act play, which he hoped to have produced.
+
+He then visited Lane Cross's studio, posing as a newspaper interviewer.
+Mr. Cross was out of town, so the elevator man said. His studio was
+closed.
+
+Mr. Kennedy meditated on this fact for a moment.
+
+"Does any one use his studio during the summer months?" he asked.
+
+"I believe there is a young woman who comes here--yes."
+
+"You don't happen to know who it is?"
+
+"Yes, I do.  Her name is Platow.  What do you want to know for?"
+
+"Looky here," exclaimed Kennedy, surveying the rather shabby attendant
+with a cordial and persuasive eye, "do you want to make some
+money--five or ten dollars, and without any trouble to you?"
+
+The elevator man, whose wages were exactly eight dollars a week,
+pricked up his ears.
+
+"I want to know who comes here with this Miss Platow, when they
+come--all about it.  I'll make it fifteen dollars if I find out what I
+want, and I'll give you five right now."
+
+The elevator factotum had just sixty-five cents in his pocket at the
+time.  He looked at Kennedy with some uncertainty and much desire.
+
+"Well, what can I do?" he repeated.  "I'm not here after six.  The
+janitor runs this elevator from six to twelve."
+
+"There isn't a room vacant anywhere near this one, is there?" Kennedy
+asked, speculatively.
+
+The factotum thought.  "Yes, there is.  One just across the hall."
+
+"What time does she come here as a rule?"
+
+"I don't know anything about nights.  In the day she sometimes comes
+mornings, sometimes in the afternoon."
+
+"Anybody with her?"
+
+"Sometimes a man, sometimes a girl or two.  I haven't really paid much
+attention to her, to tell you the truth."
+
+Kennedy walked away whistling.
+
+From this day on Mr. Kennedy became a watcher over this very
+unconventional atmosphere.  He was in and out, principally observing
+the comings and goings of Mr. Gurney.  He found what he naturally
+suspected, that Mr. Gurney and Stephanie spent hours here at peculiar
+times--after a company of friends had jollified, for instance, and all
+had left, including Gurney, when the latter would quietly return, with
+Stephanie sometimes, if she had left with the others, alone if she had
+remained behind.  The visits were of varying duration, and Kennedy, to
+be absolutely accurate, kept days, dates, the duration of the hours,
+which he left noted in a sealed envelope for Cowperwood in the morning.
+Cowperwood was enraged, but so great was his interest in Stephanie that
+he was not prepared to act.  He wanted to see to what extent her
+duplicity would go.
+
+The novelty of this atmosphere and its effect on him was astonishing.
+Although his mind was vigorously employed during the day, nevertheless
+his thoughts kept returning constantly.  Where was she? What was she
+doing? The bland way in which she could lie reminded him of himself.
+To think that she should prefer any one else to him, especially at this
+time when he was shining as a great constructive factor in the city,
+was too much.  It smacked of age, his ultimate displacement by youth.
+It cut and hurt.
+
+One morning, after a peculiarly exasperating night of thought
+concerning her, he said to young Kennedy: "I have a suggestion for you.
+I wish you would get this elevator man you are working with down there
+to get you a duplicate key to this studio, and see if there is a bolt
+on the inside.  Let me know when you do.  Bring me the key.  The next
+time she is there of an evening with Mr. Gurney step out and telephone
+me."
+
+The climax came one night several weeks after this discouraging
+investigation began.  There was a heavy yellow moon in the sky, and a
+warm, sweet summer wind was blowing.  Stephanie had called on
+Cowperwood at his office about four to say that instead of staying
+down-town with him, as they had casually planned, she was going to her
+home on the West Side to attend a garden-party of some kind at Georgia
+Timberlake's.  Cowperwood looked at her with--for him--a morbid eye.
+He was all cheer, geniality, pleasant badinage; but he was thinking all
+the while what a shameless enigma she was, how well she played her
+part, what a fool she must take him to be.  He gave her youth, her
+passion, her attractiveness, her natural promiscuity of soul due
+credit; but he could not forgive her for not loving him perfectly, as
+had so many others.  She had on a summery black-and-white frock and a
+fetching brown Leghorn hat, which, with a rich-red poppy ornamenting a
+flare over her left ear and a peculiar ruching of white-and-black silk
+about the crown, made her seem strangely young, debonair, a study in
+Hebraic and American origins.
+
+"Going to have a nice time, are you?" he asked, genially, politically,
+eying her in his enigmatic and inscrutable way.  "Going to shine among
+that charming company you keep! I suppose all the standbys will be
+there--Bliss Bridge, Mr. Knowles, Mr. Cross--dancing attendance on you?"
+
+He failed to mention Mr. Gurney.
+
+Stephanie nodded cheerfully.  She seemed in an innocent outing mood.
+
+Cowperwood smiled, thinking how one of these days--very shortly,
+perhaps--he was certain to take a signal revenge.  He would catch her
+in a lie, in a compromising position somewhere--in this studio,
+perhaps--and dismiss her with contempt.  In an elder day, if they had
+lived in Turkey, he would have had her strangled, sewn in a sack, and
+thrown into the Bosporus.  As it was, he could only dismiss her.  He
+smiled and smiled, smoothing her hand.  "Have a good time," he called,
+as she left.  Later, at his own home--it was nearly midnight--Mr.
+Kennedy called him up.
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You know the studio in the New Arts Building?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It is occupied now."
+
+Cowperwood called a servant to bring him his runabout.  He had had a
+down-town locksmith make a round keystem with a bored clutch at the end
+of it--a hollow which would fit over the end of such a key as he had to
+the studio and turn it easily from the outside.  He felt in his pocket
+for it, jumped in his runabout, and hurried away.  When he reached the
+New Arts Building he found Kennedy in the hall and dismissed him.
+"Thanks," he observed, brusquely. "I will take care of this."
+
+He hurried up the stairs, avoiding the elevator, to the vacant room
+opposite, and thence reconnoitered the studio door.  It was as Kennedy
+had reported.  Stephanie was there, and with Gurney. The pale poet had
+been brought there to furnish her an evening of delight.  Because of
+the stillness of the building at this hour he could hear their muffled
+voices speaking alternately, and once Stephanie singing the refrain of
+a song.  He was angry and yet grateful that she had, in her genial way,
+taken the trouble to call and assure him that she was going to a summer
+lawn-party and dance.  He smiled grimly, sarcastically, as he thought
+of her surprise.  Softly he extracted the clutch-key and inserted it,
+covering the end of the key on the inside and turning it.  It gave
+solidly without sound.  He next tried the knob and turned it, feeling
+the door spring slightly as he did so.  Then inaudibly, because of a
+gurgled laugh with which he was thoroughly familiar, he opened it and
+stepped in.
+
+At his rough, firm cough they sprang up--Gurney to a hiding position
+behind a curtain, Stephanie to one of concealment behind draperies on
+the couch.  She could not speak, and could scarcely believe that her
+eyes did not deceive her.  Gurney, masculine and defiant, but by no
+means well composed, demanded: "Who are you? What do you want here?"
+Cowperwood replied very simply and smilingly: "Not very much.  Perhaps
+Miss Platow there will tell you." He nodded in her direction.
+
+Stephanie, fixed by his cold, examining eye, shrank nervously, ignoring
+Gurney entirely.  The latter perceived on the instant that he had a
+previous liaison to deal with--an angry and outraged lover--and he was
+not prepared to act either wisely or well.
+
+"Mr. Gurney," said Cowperwood, complacently, after staring at Stephanie
+grimly and scorching her with his scorn, "I have no concern with you,
+and do not propose to do anything to disturb you or Miss Platow after a
+very few moments.  I am not here without reason.  This young woman has
+been steadily deceiving me.  She has lied to me frequently, and
+pretended an innocence which I did not believe.  To-night she told me
+she was to be at a lawn-party on the West Side.  She has been my
+mistress for months.  I have given her money, jewelry, whatever she
+wanted.  Those jade ear-rings, by the way, are one of my gifts." He
+nodded cheerfully in Stephanie's direction.  "I have come here simply
+to prove to her that she cannot lie to me any more.  Heretofore, every
+time I have accused her of things like this she has cried and lied.  I
+do not know how much you know of her, or how fond you are of her.  I
+merely wish her, not you, to know"--and he turned and stared at
+Stephanie--"that the day of her lying to me is over."
+
+During this very peculiar harangue Stephanie, who, nervous, fearful,
+fixed, and yet beautiful, remained curled up in the corner of the
+suggestive oriental divan, had been gazing at Cowperwood in a way which
+plainly attested, trifle as she might with others, that she was
+nevertheless fond of him--intensely so.  His strong, solid figure,
+confronting her so ruthlessly, gripped her imagination, of which she
+had a world.  She had managed to conceal her body in part, but her
+brown arms and shoulders, her bosom, trim knees, and feet were exposed
+in part.  Her black hair and naive face were now heavy, distressed,
+sad.  She was frightened really, for Cowperwood at bottom had always
+overawed her--a strange, terrible, fascinating man.  Now she sat and
+looked, seeking still to lure him by the pathetic cast of her face and
+soul, while Cowperwood, scornful of her, and almost openly contemptuous
+of her lover, and his possible opposition, merely stood smiling before
+them.  It came over her very swiftly now just what it was she was
+losing--a grim, wonderful man.  Beside him Gurney, the pale poet, was
+rather thin--a mere breath of romance.  She wanted to say something, to
+make a plea; but it was so plain Cowperwood would have none of it, and,
+besides, here was Gurney.  Her throat clogged, her eyes filled, even
+here, and a mystical bog-fire state of emotion succeeded the primary
+one of opposition.  Cowperwood knew the look well.  It gave him the
+only sense of triumph he had.
+
+"Stephanie," he remarked, "I have just one word to say to you now. We
+will not meet any more, of course.  You are a good actress. Stick to
+your profession.  You may shine in it if you do not merge it too
+completely with your loves.  As for being a free lover, it isn't
+incompatible with what you are, perhaps, but it isn't socially
+advisable for you.  Good night."
+
+He turned and walked quickly out.
+
+"Oh, Frank," called Stephanie, in a strange, magnetized, despairing
+way, even in the face of her astonished lover.  Gurney stared with his
+mouth open.
+
+Cowperwood paid no heed.  Out he went through the dark hall and down
+the stairs.  For once the lure of a beautiful, enigmatic, immoral, and
+promiscuous woman--poison flower though she was--was haunting him.
+"D-- her!" he exclaimed.  "D-- the little beast, anyhow! The ----! The
+----!" He used terms so hard, so vile, so sad, all because he knew for
+once what it was to love and lose--to want ardently in his way and not
+to have--now or ever after.  He was determined that his path and that
+of Stephanie Platow should never be allowed to cross again.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIX
+
+A Family Quarrel
+
+
+It chanced that shortly before this liaison was broken off, some
+troubling information was quite innocently conveyed to Aileen by
+Stephanie Platow's own mother.  One day Mrs. Platow, in calling on Mrs.
+Cowperwood, commented on the fact that Stephanie was gradually
+improving in her art, that the Garrick Players had experienced a great
+deal of trouble, and that Stephanie was shortly to appear in a new
+role--something Chinese.
+
+"That was such a charming set of jade you gave her," she volunteered,
+genially.  "I only saw it the other day for the first time.  She never
+told me about it before.  She prizes it so very highly, that I feel as
+though I ought to thank you myself."
+
+Aileen opened her eyes.  "Jade!" she observed, curiously.  "Why, I
+don't remember." Recalling Cowperwood's proclivities on the instant,
+she was suspicious, distraught.  Her face showed her perplexity.
+
+"Why, yes," replied Mrs. Platow, Aileen's show of surprise troubling
+her.  "The ear-rings and necklet, you know.  She said you gave them to
+her."
+
+"To be sure," answered Aileen, catching herself as by a hair.  "I do
+recall it now.  But it was Frank who really gave them.  I hope she
+likes them."
+
+She smiled sweetly.
+
+"She thinks they're beautiful, and they do become her," continued Mrs.
+Platow, pleasantly, understanding it all, as she fancied. The truth was
+that Stephanie, having forgotten, had left her make-up box open one day
+at home, and her mother, rummaging in her room for something, had
+discovered them and genially confronted her with them, for she knew the
+value of jade.  Nonplussed for the moment, Stephanie had lost her
+mental, though not her outward, composure and referred them back
+casually to an evening at the Cowperwood home when Aileen had been
+present and the gauds had been genially forced upon her.
+
+Unfortunately for Aileen, the matter was not to be allowed to rest just
+so, for going one afternoon to a reception given by Rhees Crier, a
+young sculptor of social proclivities, who had been introduced to her
+by Taylor Lord, she was given a taste of what it means to be a
+neglected wife from a public point of view.  As she entered on this
+occasion she happened to overhear two women talking in a corner behind
+a screen erected to conceal wraps. "Oh, here comes Mrs. Cowperwood,"
+said one.  "She's the street-railway magnate's wife.  Last winter and
+spring he was running with that Platow girl--of the Garrick Players,
+you know."
+
+The other nodded, studying Aileen's splendiferous green--velvet gown
+with envy.
+
+"I wonder if she's faithful to him?" she queried, while Aileen strained
+to hear.  "She looks daring enough."
+
+Aileen managed to catch a glimpse of her observers later, when they
+were not looking, and her face showed her mingled resentment and
+feeling; but it did no good.  The wretched gossipers had wounded her in
+the keenest way.  She was hurt, angry, nonplussed.  To think that
+Cowperwood by his variability should expose her to such gossip as this!
+
+One day not so long after her conversation with Mrs. Platow, Aileen
+happened to be standing outside the door of her own boudoir, the
+landing of which commanded the lower hall, and there overheard two of
+her servants discussing the Cowperwood menage in particular and Chicago
+life in general.  One was a tall, angular girl of perhaps twenty-seven
+or eight, a chambermaid, the other a short, stout woman of forty who
+held the position of assistant housekeeper. They were pretending to
+dust, though gossip conducted in a whisper was the matter for which
+they were foregathered.  The tall girl had recently been employed in
+the family of Aymar Cochrane, the former president of the Chicago West
+Division Railway, and now a director of the new West Chicago Street
+Railway Company.
+
+"And I was that surprised," Aileen heard this girl saying, "to think I
+should be coming here.  I cud scarcely believe me ears when they told
+me.  Why, Miss Florence was runnin' out to meet him two and three times
+in the week.  The wonder to me was that her mother never guessed."
+
+"Och," replied the other, "he's the very divil and all when it comes to
+the wimmin."  (Aileen did not see the upward lift of the hand that
+accompanied this).  "There was a little girl that used to come here.
+Her father lives up the street here.  Haguenin is his name.  He owns
+that morning paper, the Press, and has a fine house up the street here
+a little way.  Well, I haven't seen her very often of late, but more
+than once I saw him kissing her in this very room.  Sure his wife knows
+all about it.  Depend on it.  She had an awful fight with some woman
+here onct, so I hear, some woman that he was runnin' with and bringin'
+here to the house.  I hear it's somethin' terrible the way she beat her
+up--screamin' and carryin' on.  Oh, they're the divil, these men, when
+it comes to the wimmin."
+
+A slight rustling sound from somewhere sent the two gossipers on their
+several ways, but Aileen had heard enough to understand. What was she
+to do? How was she to learn more of these new women, of whom she had
+never heard at all? She at once suspected Florence Cochrane, for she
+knew that this servant had worked in the Cochrane family.  And then
+Cecily Haguenin, the daughter of the editor with whom they were on the
+friendliest terms! Cowperwood kissing her! Was there no end to his
+liaisons--his infidelity?
+
+She returned, fretting and grieving, to her room, where she meditated
+and meditated, wondering whether she should leave him, wondering
+whether she should reproach him openly, wondering whether she should
+employ more detectives.  What good would it do? She had employed
+detectives once.  Had it prevented the Stephanie Platow incident? Not
+at all.  Would it prevent other liaisons in the future? Very likely
+not.  Obviously her home life with Cowperwood was coming to a complete
+and disastrous end.  Things could not go on in this way.  She had done
+wrong, possibly, in taking him away from Mrs. Cowperwood number one,
+though she could scarcely believe that, for Mrs. Lillian Cowperwood was
+so unsuited to him--but this repayment! If she had been at all
+superstitious or religious, and had known her Bible, which she didn't,
+she might have quoted to herself that very fatalistic statement of the
+New Testament, "With what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you
+again."
+
+The truth was that Cowperwood's continued propensity to rove at liberty
+among the fair sex could not in the long run fail of some results of an
+unsatisfactory character.  Coincident with the disappearance of
+Stephanie Platow, he launched upon a variety of episodes, the charming
+daughter of so worthy a man as Editor Haguenin, his sincerest and most
+sympathetic journalistic supporter; and the daughter of Aymar Cochrane,
+falling victims, among others, to what many would have called his
+wiles.  As a matter of fact, in most cases he was as much sinned
+against as sinning, since the provocation was as much offered as given.
+
+The manner in which he came to get in with Cecily Haguenin was simple
+enough.  Being an old friend of the family, and a frequent visitor at
+her father's house, he found this particular daughter of desire an easy
+victim.  She was a vigorous blonde creature of twenty at this time,
+very full and plump, with large, violet eyes, and with considerable
+alertness of mind--a sort of doll girl with whom Cowperwood found it
+pleasant to amuse himself.  A playful gamboling relationship had
+existed between them when she was a mere child attending school, and
+had continued through her college years whenever she happened to be at
+home on a vacation.  In these very latest days when Cowperwood on
+occasion sat in the Haguenin library consulting with the
+journalist-publisher concerning certain moves which he wished to have
+put right before the public he saw considerably more of Cecily.  One
+night, when her father had gone out to look up the previous action of
+the city council in connection with some matter of franchises, a series
+of more or less sympathetic and understanding glances suddenly
+culminated in Cecily's playfully waving a new novel, which she happened
+to have in her hand, in Cowperwood's face; and he, in reply, laid hold
+caressingly of her arms.
+
+"You can't stop me so easily," she observed, banteringly.
+
+"Oh yes, I can," he replied.
+
+A slight struggle ensued, in which he, with her semiwilful connivance,
+managed to manoeuver her into his arms, her head backward against his
+shoulder.
+
+"Well," she said, looking up at him with a semi-nervous,
+semi-provocative glance, "now what? You'll just have to let me go."
+
+"Not very soon, though."
+
+"Oh yes, you will.  My father will be here in a moment."
+
+"Well, not until then, anyhow.  You're getting to be the sweetest girl."
+
+She did not resist, but remained gazing half nervously, half dreamily
+at him, whereupon he smoothed her cheek, and then kissed her.  Her
+father's returning step put an end to this; but from this point on
+ascent or descent to a perfect understanding was easily made.
+
+In the matter of Florence Cochrane, the daughter of Aymar Cochrane, the
+president of the Chicago West Division Company--a second affair of the
+period--the approach was only slightly different, the result the same.
+This girl, to furnish only a brief impression, was a blonde of a
+different type from Cecily--delicate, picturesque, dreamy.  She was
+mildly intellectual at this time, engaged in reading Marlowe and
+Jonson; and Cowperwood, busy in the matter of the West Chicago Street
+Railway, and conferring with her father, was conceived by her as a
+great personage of the Elizabethan order. In a tentative way she was in
+revolt against an apple-pie order of existence which was being forced
+upon her.  Cowperwood recognized the mood, trifled with her spiritedly,
+looked into her eyes, and found the response he wanted.  Neither old
+Aymar Cochrane nor his impeccably respectable wife ever discovered.
+
+Subsequently Aileen, reflecting upon these latest developments, was
+from one point of view actually pleased or eased.  There is always
+safety in numbers, and she felt that if Cowperwood were going to go on
+like this it would not be possible for him in the long run to take a
+definite interest in any one; and so, all things considered, and other
+things being equal, he would probably just as leave remain married to
+her as not.
+
+But what a comment, she could not help reflecting, on her own charms!
+What an end to an ideal union that had seemed destined to last all
+their days! She, Aileen Butler, who in her youth had deemed herself the
+peer of any girl in charm, force, beauty, to be shoved aside thus early
+in her life--she was only forty--by the younger generation.  And such
+silly snips as they were--Stephanie Platow! and Cecily Haguenin! and
+Florence Cochrane, in all likelihood another pasty-faced beginner! And
+here she was--vigorous, resplendent, smooth of face and body, her
+forehead, chin, neck, eyes without a wrinkle, her hair a rich golden
+reddish glow, her step springing, her weight no more than one hundred
+and fifty pounds for her very normal height, with all the advantages of
+a complete toilet cabinet, jewels, clothing, taste, and skill in
+material selection--being elbowed out by these upstarts.  It was almost
+unbelievable.  It was so unfair.  Life was so cruel, Cowperwood so
+temperamentally unbalanced.  Dear God! to think that this should be
+true! Why should he not love her? She studied her beauty in the mirror
+from time to time, and raged and raged.  Why was her body not
+sufficient for him? Why should he deem any one more beautiful? Why
+should he not be true to his reiterated protestations that he cared for
+her? Other men were true to other women.  Her father had been faithful
+to her mother.  At the thought of her own father and his opinion of her
+conduct she winced, but it did not change her point of view as to her
+present rights.  See her hair! See her eyes! See her smooth,
+resplendent arms! Why should Cowperwood not love her? Why, indeed?
+
+One night, shortly afterward, she was sitting in her boudoir reading,
+waiting for him to come home, when the telephone-bell sounded and he
+informed her that he was compelled to remain at the office late.
+Afterward he said he might be obliged to run on to Pittsburg for
+thirty-six hours or thereabouts; but he would surely be back on the
+third day, counting the present as one.  Aileen was chagrined.  Her
+voice showed it.  They had been scheduled to go to dinner with the
+Hoecksemas, and afterward to the theater. Cowperwood suggested that she
+should go alone, but Aileen declined rather sharply; she hung up the
+receiver without even the pretense of a good-by.  And then at ten
+o'clock he telephoned again, saying that he had changed his mind, and
+that if she were interested to go anywhere--a later supper, or the
+like--she should dress, otherwise he would come home expecting to
+remain.
+
+Aileen immediately concluded that some scheme he had had to amuse
+himself had fallen through.  Having spoiled her evening, he was coming
+home to make as much hay as possible out of this bit of sunshine.  This
+infuriated her.  The whole business of uncertainty in the matter of his
+affections was telling on her nerves.  A storm was in order, and it had
+come.  He came bustling in a little later, slipped his arms around her
+as she came forward and kissed her on the mouth.  He smoothed her arms
+in a make-believe and yet tender way, and patted her shoulders.  Seeing
+her frown, he inquired, "What's troubling Babykins?"
+
+"Oh, nothing more than usual," replied Aileen, irritably.  "Let's not
+talk about that.  Have you had your dinner?"
+
+"Yes, we had it brought in." He was referring to McKenty, Addison, and
+himself, and the statement was true.  Being in an honest position for
+once, he felt called upon to justify himself a little. "It couldn't be
+avoided to-night.  I'm sorry that this business takes up so much of my
+time, but I'll get out of it some day soon. Things are bound to ease
+up."
+
+Aileen withdrew from his embrace and went to her dressing-table. A
+glance showed her that her hair was slightly awry, and she smoothed it
+into place.  She looked at her chin, and then went back to her
+book--rather sulkily, he thought.
+
+"Now, Aileen, what's the trouble?" he inquired.  "Aren't you glad to
+have me up here? I know you have had a pretty rough road of it of late,
+but aren't you willing to let bygones be bygones and trust to the
+future a little?"
+
+"The future! The future! Don't talk to me about the future.  It's
+little enough it holds in store for me," she replied.
+
+Cowperwood saw that she was verging on an emotional storm, but he
+trusted to his powers of persuasion, and her basic affection for him,
+to soothe and quell her.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't act this way, pet," he went on.  "You know I have
+always cared for you.  You know I always shall.  I'll admit that there
+are a lot of little things which interfere with my being at home as
+much as I would like at present; but that doesn't alter the fact that
+my feeling is the same.  I should think you could see that."
+
+"Feeling! Feeling!" taunted Aileen, suddenly.  "Yes, I know how much
+feeling you have.  You have feeling enough to give other women sets of
+jade and jewels, and to run around with every silly little snip you
+meet.  You needn't come home here at ten o'clock, when you can't go
+anywhere else, and talk about feeling for me.  I know how much feeling
+you have.  Pshaw!"
+
+She flung herself irritably back in her chair and opened her book.
+Cowperwood gazed at her solemnly, for this thrust in regard to
+Stephanie was a revelation.  This woman business could grow peculiarly
+exasperating at times.
+
+"What do you mean, anyhow?" he observed, cautiously and with much
+seeming candor.  "I haven't given any jade or jewels to any one, nor
+have I been running around with any 'little snips,' as you call them.
+I don't know what you are talking about, Aileen."
+
+"Oh, Frank," commented Aileen, wearily and incredulously, "you lie so!
+Why do you stand there and lie? I'm so tired of it; I'm so sick of it
+all.  How should the servants know of so many things to talk of here if
+they weren't true? I didn't invite Mrs. Platow to come and ask me why
+you had given her daughter a set of jade. I know why you lie; you want
+to hush me up and keep quiet.  You're afraid I'll go to Mr. Haguenin or
+Mr. Cochrane or Mr. Platow, or to all three.  Well, you can rest your
+soul on that score.  I won't.  I'm sick of you and your lies.
+Stephanie Platow--the thin stick! Cecily Haguenin--the little piece of
+gum! And Florence Cochrane--she looks like a dead fish!" (Aileen had a
+genius for characterization at times.) "If it just weren't for the way
+I acted toward my family in Philadelphia, and the talk it would create,
+and the injury it would do you financially, I'd act to-morrow.  I'd
+leave you--that's what I'd do.  And to think that I should ever have
+believed that you really loved me, or could care for any woman
+permanently.  Bosh! But I don't care.  Go on! Only I'll tell you one
+thing.  You needn't think I'm going to go on enduring all this as I
+have in the past.  I'm not.  You're not going to deceive me always.
+I'm not going to stand it.  I'm not so old yet.  There are plenty of
+men who will be glad to pay me attention if you won't.  I told you once
+that I wouldn't be faithful to you if you weren't to me, and I won't
+be.  I'll show you.  I'll go with other men.  I will! I will! I swear
+it."
+
+"Aileen," he asked, softly, pleadingly, realizing the futility of
+additional lies under such circumstances, "won't you forgive me this
+time? Bear with me for the present.  I scarcely understand myself at
+times.  I am not like other men.  You and I have run together a long
+time now.  Why not wait awhile? Give me a chance! See if I do not
+change.  I may."
+
+"Oh yes, wait! Change.  You may change.  Haven't I waited? Haven't I
+walked the floor night after night! when you haven't been here? Bear
+with you--yes, yes! Who's to bear with me when my heart is breaking?
+Oh, God!" she suddenly added, with passionate vigor, "I'm miserable!
+I'm miserable! My heart aches! It aches!"
+
+She clutched her breast and swung from the room, moving with that
+vigorous stride that had once appealed to him so, and still did. Alas,
+alas! it touched him now, but only as a part of a very shifty and cruel
+world.  He hurried out of the room after her, and (as at the time of
+the Rita Sohlberg incident) slipped his arm about her waist; but she
+pulled away irritably.  "No, no!" she exclaimed. "Let me alone.  I'm
+tired of that."
+
+"You're really not fair to me, Aileen," with a great show of feeling
+and sincerity.  "You're letting one affair that came between us blind
+your whole point of view.  I give you my word I haven't been unfaithful
+to you with Stephanie Platow or any other woman.  I may have flirted
+with them a little, but that is really nothing.  Why not be sensible?
+I'm not as black as you paint me.  I'm moving in big matters that are
+as much for your concern and future as for mine.  Be sensible, be
+liberal."
+
+There was much argument--the usual charges and countercharges--but,
+finally, because of her weariness of heart, his petting, the
+unsolvability of it all, she permitted him for the time being to
+persuade her that there were still some crumbs of affection left. She
+was soul-sick, heartsick.  Even he, as he attempted to soothe her,
+realized clearly that to establish the reality of his love in her
+belief he would have to make some much greater effort to entertain and
+comfort her, and that this, in his present mood, and with his leaning
+toward promiscuity, was practically impossible. For the time being a
+peace might be patched up, but in view of what she expected of him--her
+passion and selfish individuality--it could not be.  He would have to
+go on, and she would have to leave him, if needs be; but he could not
+cease or go back.  He was too passionate, too radiant, too individual
+and complex to belong to any one single individual alone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXX
+
+Obstacles
+
+
+The impediments that can arise to baffle a great and swelling career
+are strange and various.  In some instances all the cross-waves of life
+must be cut by the strong swimmer.  With other personalities there is a
+chance, or force, that happily allies itself with them; or they quite
+unconsciously ally themselves with it, and find that there is a tide
+that bears them on.  Divine will? Not necessarily.  There is no
+understanding of it.  Guardian spirits? There are many who so believe,
+to their utter undoing. (Witness Macbeth).  An unconscious drift in the
+direction of right, virtue, duty? These are banners of mortal
+manufacture.  Nothing is proved; all is permitted.
+
+Not long after Cowperwood's accession to control on the West Side, for
+instance, a contest took place between his corporation and a citizen by
+the name of Redmond Purdy--real-estate investor, property-trader, and
+money-lender--which set Chicago by the ears. The La Salle and
+Washington Street tunnels were now in active service, but because of
+the great north and south area of the West Side, necessitating the
+cabling of Van Buren Street and Blue Island Avenue, there was need of a
+third tunnel somewhere south of Washington Street, preferably at Van
+Buren Street, because the business heart was thus more directly
+reached.  Cowperwood was willing and anxious to build this tunnel,
+though he was puzzled how to secure from the city a right of way under
+Van Buren Street, where a bridge loaded with heavy traffic now swung.
+There were all sorts of complications.  In the first place, the consent
+of the War Department at Washington had to be secured in order to
+tunnel under the river at all.  Secondly, the excavation, if directly
+under the bridge, might prove an intolerable nuisance, necessitating
+the closing or removal of the bridge.  Owing to the critical, not to
+say hostile, attitude of the newspapers which, since the La Salle and
+Washington tunnel grants, were following his every move with a
+searchlight, Cowperwood decided not to petition the city for privileges
+in this case, but instead to buy the property rights of sufficient land
+just north of the bridge, where the digging of the tunnel could proceed
+without interference.
+
+The piece of land most suitable for this purpose, a lot 150 x 150,
+lying a little way from the river-bank, and occupied by a seven-story
+loft-building, was owned by the previously mentioned Redmond Purdy, a
+long, thin, angular, dirty person, who wore celluloid collars and cuffs
+and spoke with a nasal intonation.
+
+Cowperwood had the customary overtures made by seemingly disinterested
+parties endeavoring to secure the land at a fair price.  But Purdy, who
+was as stingy as a miser and as incisive as a rat-trap, had caught wind
+of the proposed tunnel scheme.  He was all alive for a fine profit.
+"No, no, no," he declared, over and over, when approached by the
+representatives of Mr. Sylvester Toomey, Cowperwood's ubiquitous
+land-agent.  "I don't want to sell.  Go away."
+
+Mr. Sylvester Toomey was finally at his wit's end, and complained to
+Cowperwood, who at once sent for those noble beacons of dark and stormy
+waters, General Van Sickle and the Hon. Kent Barrows McKibben.  The
+General was now becoming a little dolty, and Cowperwood was thinking of
+pensioning him; but McKibben was in his prime--smug, handsome, deadly,
+smooth.  After talking it over with Mr. Toomey they returned to
+Cowperwood's office with a promising scheme.  The Hon. Nahum
+Dickensheets, one of the judges of the State Court of Appeals, and a
+man long since attached, by methods which need not here be described,
+to Cowperwood's star, had been persuaded to bring his extensive
+technical knowledge to bear on the emergency.  At his suggestion the
+work of digging the tunnel was at once begun--first at the east or
+Franklin Street end; then, after eight months' digging, at the west or
+Canal Street end.  A shaft was actually sunk some thirty feet back of
+Mr. Purdy's building--between it and the river--while that gentleman
+watched with a quizzical gleam in his eye this defiant procedure.  He
+was sure that when it came to the necessity of annexing his property
+the North and West Chicago Street Railways would be obliged to pay
+through the nose.
+
+"Well, I'll be cussed," he frequently observed to himself, for he could
+not see how his exaction of a pound of flesh was to be evaded, and yet
+he felt strangely restless at times.  Finally, when it became
+absolutely necessary for Cowperwood to secure without further delay
+this coveted strip, he sent for its occupant, who called in pleasant
+anticipation of a profitable conversation; this should be worth a small
+fortune to him.
+
+"Mr. Purdy," observed Cowperwood, glibly, "you have a piece of land on
+the other side of the river that I need.  Why don't you sell it to me?
+Can't we fix this up now in some amicable way?"
+
+He smiled while Purdy cast shrewd, wolfish glances about the place,
+wondering how much he could really hope to exact.  The building, with
+all its interior equipment, land, and all, was worth in the
+neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars.
+
+"Why should I sell? The building is a good building.  It's as useful to
+me as it would be to you.  I'm making money out of it."
+
+"Quite true," replied Cowperwood, "but I am willing to pay you a fair
+price for it.  A public utility is involved.  This tunnel will be a
+good thing for the West Side and any other land you may own over there.
+With what I will pay you you can buy more land in that neighborhood or
+elsewhere, and make a good thing out of it.  We need to put this tunnel
+just where it is, or I wouldn't trouble to argue with you.
+
+"That's just it," replied Purdy, fixedly.  "You've gone ahead and dug
+your tunnel without consulting me, and now you expect me to get out of
+the way.  Well, I don't see that I'm called on to get out of there just
+to please you."
+
+"But I'll pay you a fair price."
+
+"How much will you pay me?"
+
+"How much do you want?"
+
+Mr. Purdy scratched a fox-like ear.  "One million dollars."
+
+"One million dollars!" exclaimed Cowperwood.  "Don't you think that's a
+little steep, Mr. Purdy?"
+
+"No," replied Purdy, sagely.  "It's not any more than it's worth."
+
+Cowperwood sighed.
+
+"I'm sorry," he replied, meditatively, "but this is really too much.
+Wouldn't you take three hundred thousand dollars in cash now and
+consider this thing closed?"
+
+"One million," replied Purdy, looking sternly at the ceiling. "Very
+well, Mr. Purdy," replied Cowperwood.  "I'm very sorry. It's plain to
+me that we can't do business as I had hoped.  I'm willing to pay you a
+reasonable sum; but what you ask is far too much--preposterous! Don't
+you think you'd better reconsider? We might move the tunnel even yet."
+
+"One million dollars," said Purdy.
+
+"It can't be done, Mr. Purdy.  It isn't worth it.  Why won't you be
+fair? Call it three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars cash, and
+my check to-night."
+
+"I wouldn't take five or six hundred thousand dollars if you were to
+offer it to me, Mr. Cowperwood, to-night or any other time.  I know my
+rights."
+
+"Very well, then," replied Cowperwood, "that's all I can say.  If you
+won't sell, you won't sell.  Perhaps you'll change your mind later."
+
+Mr. Purdy went out, and Cowperwood called in his lawyers and his
+engineers.  One Saturday afternoon, a week or two later, when the
+building in question had been vacated for the day, a company of three
+hundred laborers, with wagons, picks, shovels, and dynamite sticks,
+arrived.  By sundown of the next day (which, being Sunday, was a legal
+holiday, with no courts open or sitting to issue injunctions) this
+comely structure, the private property of Mr. Redmond Purdy, was
+completely razed and a large excavation substituted in its stead.  The
+gentleman of the celluloid cuffs and collars, when informed about nine
+o'clock of this same Sunday morning that his building had been almost
+completely removed, was naturally greatly perturbed.  A portion of the
+wall was still standing when he arrived, hot and excited, and the
+police were appealed to.
+
+But, strange to say, this was of little avail, for they were shown a
+writ of injunction issued by the court of highest jurisdiction,
+presided over by the Hon. Nahum Dickensheets, which restrained all and
+sundry from interfering.  (Subsequently on demand of another court this
+remarkable document was discovered to have disappeared; the contention
+was that it had never really existed or been produced at all.)
+
+The demolition and digging proceeded.  Then began a scurrying of
+lawyers to the door of one friendly judge after another.  There were
+apoplectic cheeks, blazing eyes, and gasps for breath while the
+enormity of the offense was being noised abroad.  Law is law, however.
+Procedure is procedure, and no writ of injunction was either issuable
+or returnable on a legal holiday, when no courts were sitting.
+Nevertheless, by three o'clock in the afternoon an obliging magistrate
+was found who consented to issue an injunction staying this terrible
+crime.  By this time, however, the building was gone, the excavation
+complete.  It remained merely for the West Chicago Street Railway
+Company to secure an injunction vacating the first injunction, praying
+that its rights, privileges, liberties, etc., be not interfered with,
+and so creating a contest which naturally threw the matter into the
+State Court of Appeals, where it could safely lie.  For several years
+there were numberless injunctions, writs of errors, doubts, motions to
+reconsider, threats to carry the matter from the state to the federal
+courts on a matter of constitutional privilege, and the like.  The
+affair was finally settled out of court, for Mr. Purdy by this time was
+a more sensible man.  In the mean time, however, the newspapers had
+been given full details of the transaction, and a storm of words
+against Cowperwood ensued.
+
+But more disturbing than the Redmond Purdy incident was the rivalry of
+a new Chicago street-railway company.  It appeared first as an idea in
+the brain of one James Furnivale Woolsen, a determined young Westerner
+from California, and developed by degrees into consents and petitions
+from fully two-thirds of the residents of various streets in the
+extreme southwest section of the city where it was proposed the new
+line should be located.  This same James Furnivale Woolsen, being an
+ambitious person, was not to be so easily put down.  Besides the
+consent and petitions, which Cowperwood could not easily get away from
+him, he had a new form of traction then being tried out in several
+minor cities--a form of electric propulsion by means of an overhead
+wire and a traveling pole, which was said to be very economical, and to
+give a service better than cables and cheaper even than horses.
+
+Cowperwood had heard all about this new electric system some time
+before, and had been studying it for several years with the greatest
+interest, since it promised to revolutionize the whole business of
+street-railroading.  However, having but so recently completed his
+excellent cable system, he did not see that it was advisable to throw
+it away.  The trolley was as yet too much of a novelty; certainly it
+was not advisable to have it introduced into Chicago until he was ready
+to introduce it himself--first on his outlying feeder lines, he
+thought, then perhaps generally.
+
+But before he could take suitable action against Woolsen, that engaging
+young upstart, who was possessed of a high-power imagination and a gift
+of gab, had allied himself with such interested investors as Truman
+Leslie MacDonald, who saw here a heaven-sent opportunity of mulcting
+Cowperwood, and Jordan Jules, once the president of the North Chicago
+Gas Company, who had lost money through Cowperwood in the gas war.  Two
+better instruments for goading a man whom they considered an enemy
+could not well be imagined--Truman Leslie with his dark, waspish,
+mistrustful, jealous eyes, and his slim, vital body; and Jordan Jules,
+short, rotund, sandy, a sickly crop of thin, oily, light hair growing
+down over his coat-collar, his forehead and crown glisteningly bald,
+his eyes a seeking, searching, revengeful blue.  They in turn brought
+in Samuel Blackman, once president of the South Side Gas Company;
+Sunderland Sledd, of local railroad management and stock-investment
+fame; and Norrie Simms, president of the Douglas Trust Company, who,
+however, was little more than a fiscal agent.  The general feeling was
+that Cowperwood's defensive tactics--which consisted in having the city
+council refuse to act--could be easily met.
+
+"Well, I think we can soon fix that," exclaimed young MacDonald, one
+morning at a meeting.  "We ought to be able to smoke them out. A little
+publicity will do it."
+
+He appealed to his father, the editor of the Inquirer, but the latter
+refused to act for the time being, seeing that his son was interested.
+MacDonald, enraged at the do-nothing attitude of the council, invaded
+that body and demanded of Alderman Dowling, still leader, why this
+matter of the Chicago general ordinances was still lying unconsidered.
+Mr. Dowling, a large, mushy, placid man with blue eyes, an iron frame,
+and a beefy smile, vouchsafed the information that, although he was
+chairman of the committee on streets and alleys, he knew nothing about
+it.  "I haven't been payin' much attention to things lately," he
+replied.
+
+Mr. MacDonald went to see the remaining members of this same committee.
+They were non-committal.  They would have to look into the matter.
+Somebody claimed that there was a flaw in the petitions.
+
+Evidently there was crooked work here somewhere.  Cowperwood was to
+blame, no doubt.  MacDonald conferred with Blackman and Jordan Jules,
+and it was determined that the council should be harried into doing its
+duty.  This was a legitimate enterprise.  A new and better system of
+traction was being kept out of the city.  Schryhart, since he was
+offered an interest, and since there was considerable chance of his
+being able to dominate the new enterprise, agreed that the ordinances
+ought to be acted upon.  In consequence there was a renewed hubbub in
+the newspapers.
+
+It was pointed out through Schryhart's Chronicle, through Hyssop's and
+Merrill's papers, and through the Inquirer that such a situation was
+intolerable.  If the dominant party, at the behest of so sinister an
+influence as Cowperwood, was to tie up all outside traction
+legislation, there could be but one thing left--an appeal to the voters
+of the city to turn the rascals out.  No party could survive such a
+record of political trickery and financial jugglery. McKenty, Dowling,
+Cowperwood, and others were characterized as unreasonable
+obstructionists and debasing influences.  But Cowperwood merely smiled.
+These were the caterwaulings of the enemy.  Later, when young MacDonald
+threatened to bring legal action to compel the council to do its duty,
+Cowperwood and his associates were not so cheerful.  A mandamus
+proceeding, however futile, would give the newspapers great opportunity
+for chatter; moreover, a city election was drawing near.  However,
+McKenty and Cowperwood were by no means helpless.  They had offices,
+jobs, funds, a well-organized party system, the saloons, the dives, and
+those dark chambers where at late hours ballot-boxes are incontinently
+stuffed.
+
+Did Cowperwood share personally in all this? Not at all.  Or McKenty?
+No.  In good tweed and fine linen they frequently conferred in the
+offices of the Chicago Trust Company, the president's office of the
+North Chicago Street Railway System, and Mr. Cowperwood's library.  No
+dark scenes were ever enacted there.  But just the same, when the time
+came, the Schryhart-Simms-MacDonald editorial combination did not win.
+Mr. McKenty's party had the votes.  A number of the most flagrantly
+debauched aldermen, it is true, were defeated; but what is an alderman
+here and there? The newly elected ones, even in the face of
+pre-election promises and vows, could be easily suborned or convinced.
+So the anti-Cowperwood element was just where it was before; but the
+feeling against him was much stronger, and considerable sentiment
+generated in the public at large that there was something wrong with
+the Cowperwood method of street-railway control.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXI
+
+Untoward Disclosures
+
+
+Coincident with these public disturbances and of subsequent hearing
+upon them was the discovery by Editor Haguenin of Cowperwood's
+relationship with Cecily.  It came about not through Aileen, who was no
+longer willing to fight Cowperwood in this matter, but through
+Haguenin's lady society editor, who, hearing rumors in the social
+world, springing from heaven knows where, and being beholden to
+Haguenin for many favors, had carried the matter to him in a very
+direct way.  Haguenin, a man of insufficient worldliness in spite of
+his journalistic profession, scarcely believed it. Cowperwood was so
+suave, so commercial.  He had heard many things concerning him--his
+past--but Cowperwood's present state in Chicago was such, it seemed to
+him, as to preclude petty affairs of this kind.  Still, the name of his
+daughter being involved, he took the matter up with Cecily, who under
+pressure confessed.  She made the usual plea that she was of age, and
+that she wished to live her own life--logic which she had gathered
+largely from Cowperwood's attitude.  Haguenin did nothing about it at
+first, thinking to send Cecily off to an aunt in Nebraska; but, finding
+her intractable, and fearing some counter-advice or reprisal on the
+part of Cowperwood, who, by the way, had indorsed paper to the extent
+of one hundred thousand dollars for him, he decided to discuss matters
+first. It meant a cessation of relations and some inconvenient
+financial readjustments; but it had to be.  He was just on the point of
+calling on Cowperwood when the latter, unaware as yet of the latest
+development in regard to Cecily, and having some variation of his
+council programme to discuss with Haguenin, asked him over the 'phone
+to lunch.  Haguenin was much surprised, but in a way relieved. "I am
+busy," he said, very heavily, "but cannot you come to the office some
+time to-day? There is something I would like to see you about."
+
+Cowperwood, imagining that there was some editorial or local political
+development on foot which might be of interest to him, made an
+appointment for shortly after four.  He drove to the publisher's office
+in the Press Building, and was greeted by a grave and almost despondent
+man.
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood," began Haguenin, when the financier entered, smart and
+trig, his usual air of genial sufficiency written all over him, "I have
+known you now for something like fourteen years, and during this time I
+have shown you nothing but courtesy and good will.  It is true that
+quite recently you have done me various financial favors, but that was
+more due, I thought, to the sincere friendship you bore me than to
+anything else.  Quite accidentally I have learned of the relationship
+that exists between you and my daughter.  I have recently spoken to
+her, and she admitted all that I need to know.  Common decency, it
+seems to me, might have suggested to you that you leave my child out of
+the list of women you have degraded.  Since it has not, I merely wish
+to say to you"--and Mr. Haguenin's face was very tense and white--"that
+the relationship between you and me is ended.  The one hundred thousand
+dollars you have indorsed for me will be arranged for otherwise as soon
+as possible, and I hope you will return to me the stock of this paper
+that you hold as collateral.  Another type of man, Mr. Cowperwood,
+might attempt to make you suffer in another way. I presume that you
+have no children of your own, or that if you have you lack the parental
+instinct; otherwise you could not have injured me in this fashion.  I
+believe that you will live to see that this policy does not pay in
+Chicago or anywhere else."
+
+Haguenin turned slowly on his heel toward his desk.  Cowperwood, who
+had listened very patiently and very fixedly, without a tremor of an
+eyelash, merely said: "There seems to be no common intellectual ground,
+Mr. Haguenin, upon which you and I can meet in this matter. You cannot
+understand my point of view.  I could not possibly adopt yours.
+However, as you wish it, the stock will be returned to you upon receipt
+of my indorsements.  I cannot say more than that."
+
+He turned and walked unconcernedly out, thinking that it was too bad to
+lose the support of so respectable a man, but also that he could do
+without it.  It was silly the way parents insisted on their daughters
+being something that they did not wish to be.
+
+Haguenin stood by his desk after Cowperwood had gone, wondering where
+he should get one hundred thousand dollars quickly, and also what he
+should do to make his daughter see the error of her ways. It was an
+astonishing blow he had received, he thought, in the house of a friend.
+It occurred to him that Walter Melville Hyssop, who was succeeding
+mightily with his two papers, might come to his rescue, and that later
+he could repay him when the Press was more prosperous.  He went out to
+his house in a quandary concerning life and chance; while Cowperwood
+went to the Chicago Trust Company to confer with Videra, and later out
+to his own home to consider how he should equalize this loss.  The
+state and fate of Cecily Haguenin was not of so much importance as many
+other things on his mind at this time.
+
+Far more serious were his cogitations with regard to a liaison he had
+recently ventured to establish with Mrs. Hosmer Hand, wife of an
+eminent investor and financier.  Hand was a solid, phlegmatic,
+heavy-thinking person who had some years before lost his first wife, to
+whom he had been eminently faithful.  After that, for a period of years
+he had been a lonely speculator, attending to his vast affairs; but
+finally because of his enormous wealth, his rather presentable
+appearance and social rank, he had been entrapped by much social
+attention on the part of a Mrs. Jessie Drew Barrett into marrying her
+daughter Caroline, a dashing skip of a girl who was clever, incisive,
+calculating, and intensely gay.  Since she was socially ambitious, and
+without much heart, the thought of Hand's millions, and how
+advantageous would be her situation in case he should die, had enabled
+her to overlook quite easily his heavy, unyouthful appearance and to
+see him in the light of a lover.  There was criticism, of course.  Hand
+was considered a victim, and Caroline and her mother designing minxes
+and cats; but since the wealthy financier was truly ensnared it
+behooved friends and future satellites to be courteous, and so they
+were.  The wedding was very well attended.  Mrs. Hand began to give
+house-parties, teas, musicales, and receptions on a lavish scale.
+
+Cowperwood never met either her or her husband until he was well
+launched on his street-car programme.  Needing two hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars in a hurry, and finding the Chicago Trust Company, the
+Lake City Bank, and other institutions heavily loaded with his
+securities, he turned in a moment of inspirational thought to Hand.
+Cowperwood was always a great borrower.  His paper was out in large
+quantities.  He introduced himself frequently to powerful men in this
+way, taking long or short loans at high or low rates of interest, as
+the case might be, and sometimes finding some one whom he could work
+with or use.  In the case of Hand, though the latter was ostensibly of
+the enemies' camp--the Schryhart-Union-Gas-Douglas-Trust-Company
+crowd--nevertheless Cowperwood had no hesitation in going to him.  He
+wished to overcome or forestall any unfavorable impression.  Though
+Hand, a solemn man of shrewd but honest nature, had heard a number of
+unfavorable rumors, he was inclined to be fair and think the best.
+Perhaps Cowperwood was merely the victim of envious rivals.
+
+When the latter first called on him at his office in the Rookery
+Building, he was most cordial.  "Come in, Mr. Cowperwood," he said. "I
+have heard a great deal about you from one person and another--mostly
+from the newspapers.  What can I do for you?"
+
+Cowperwood exhibited five hundred thousand dollars' worth of West
+Chicago Street Railway stock.  "I want to know if I can get two hundred
+and fifty thousand dollars on those by to-morrow morning."
+
+Hand, a placid man, looked at the securities peacefully.  "What's the
+matter with your own bank?" He was referring to the Chicago Trust
+Company.  "Can't it take care of them for you?"
+
+"Loaded up with other things just now," smiled Cowperwood,
+ingratiatingly.
+
+"Well, if I can believe all the papers say, you're going to wreck these
+roads or Chicago or yourself; but I don't live by the papers. How long
+would you want it for?"
+
+"Six months, perhaps.  A year, if you choose."
+
+Hand turned over the securities, eying their gold seals.  "Five hundred
+thousand dollars' worth of six per cent. West Chicago preferred," he
+commented.  "Are you earning six per cent.?"
+
+"We're earning eight right now.  You'll live to see the day when these
+shares will sell at two hundred dollars and pay twelve per cent. at
+that."
+
+"And you've quadrupled the issue of the old company? Well, Chicago's
+growing.  Leave them here until to-morrow or bring them back. Send over
+or call me, and I'll tell you."
+
+They talked for a little while on street-railway and corporation
+matters.  Hand wanted to know something concerning West Chicago land--a
+region adjoining Ravenswood.  Cowperwood gave him his best advice.
+
+The next day he 'phoned, and the stocks, so Hand informed him, were
+available.  He would send a check over.  So thus a tentative friendship
+began, and it lasted until the relationship between Cowperwood and Mrs.
+Hand was consummated and discovered.
+
+In Caroline Barrett, as she occasionally preferred to sign herself,
+Cowperwood encountered a woman who was as restless and fickle as
+himself, but not so shrewd.  Socially ambitious, she was anything but
+socially conventional, and she did not care for Hand.  Once married,
+she had planned to repay herself in part by a very gay existence.  The
+affair between her and Cowperwood had begun at a dinner at the
+magnificent residence of Hand on the North Shore Drive overlooking the
+lake.  Cowperwood had gone to talk over with her husband various
+Chicago matters.  Mrs. Hand was excited by his risque reputation.  A
+little woman in stature, with intensely white teeth, red lips which she
+did not hesitate to rouge on occasion, brown hair, and small brown eyes
+which had a gay, searching, defiant twinkle in them, she did her best
+to be interesting, clever, witty, and she was.
+
+"I know Frank Cowperwood by reputation, anyhow," she exclaimed, holding
+out a small, white, jeweled hand, the nails of which at their juncture
+with the flesh were tinged with henna, and the palms of which were
+slightly rouged.  Her eyes blazed, and her teeth gleamed.  "One can
+scarcely read of anything else in the Chicago papers."
+
+Cowperwood returned his most winning beam.  "I'm delighted to meet you,
+Mrs. Hand.  I have read of you, too.  But I hope you don't believe all
+the papers say about me."
+
+"And if I did it wouldn't hurt you in my estimation.  To do is to be
+talked about in these days."
+
+Cowperwood, because of his desire to employ the services of Hand, was
+at his best.  He kept the conversation within conventional lines; but
+all the while he was exchanging secret, unobserved smiles with Mrs.
+Hand, whom he realized at once had married Hand for his money, and was
+bent, under a somewhat jealous espionage, to have a good time anyhow.
+There is a kind of eagerness that goes with those who are watched and
+wish to escape that gives them a gay, electric awareness and sparkle in
+the presence of an opportunity for release.  Mrs. Hand had this.
+Cowperwood, a past master in this matter of femininity, studied her
+hands, her hair, her eyes, her smile.  After some contemplation he
+decided, other things being equal, that Mrs. Hand would do, and that he
+could be interested if she were very much interested in him.  Her
+telling eyes and smiles, the heightened color of her cheeks indicated
+after a time that she was.
+
+Meeting him on the street one day not long after they had first met,
+she told him that she was going for a visit to friends at Oconomowoc,
+in Wisconsin.
+
+"I don't suppose you ever get up that far north in summer, do you?" she
+asked, with an air, and smiled.
+
+"I never have," he replied; "but there's no telling what I might do if
+I were bantered.  I suppose you ride and canoe?"
+
+"Oh yes; and play tennis and golf, too."
+
+"But where would a mere idler like me stay?"
+
+"Oh, there are several good hotels.  There's never any trouble about
+that.  I suppose you ride yourself?"
+
+"After a fashion," replied Cowperwood, who was an expert.
+
+Witness then the casual encounter on horseback, early one Sunday
+morning in the painted hills of Wisconsin, of Frank Algernon Cowperwood
+and Caroline Hand.  A jaunty, racing canter, side by side; idle talk
+concerning people, scenery, conveniences; his usual direct suggestions
+and love-making, and then, subsequently--
+
+The day of reckoning, if such it might be called, came later.
+
+Caroline Hand was, perhaps, unduly reckless.  She admired Cowperwood
+greatly without really loving him.  He found her interesting,
+principally because she was young, debonair, sufficient--a new type.
+They met in Chicago after a time instead of in Wisconsin, then in
+Detroit (where she had friends), then in Rockford, where a sister had
+gone to live.  It was easy for him with his time and means.  Finally,
+Duane Kingsland, wholesale flour merchant, religious, moral,
+conventional, who knew Cowperwood and his repute, encountered Mrs. Hand
+and Cowperwood first near Oconomowoc one summer's day, and later in
+Randolph Street, near Cowperwood's bachelor rooms.  Being the man that
+he was and knowing old Hand well, he thought it was his duty to ask the
+latter if his wife knew Cowperwood intimately.  There was an explosion
+in the Hand home.  Mrs. Hand, when confronted by her husband, denied,
+of course, that there was anything wrong between her and Cowperwood.
+Her elderly husband, from a certain telltale excitement and resentment
+in her manner, did not believe this.  He thought once of confronting
+Cowperwood; but, being heavy and practical, he finally decided to sever
+all business relationships with him and fight him in other ways.  Mrs.
+Hand was watched very closely, and a suborned maid discovered an old
+note she had written to Cowperwood.  An attempt to persuade her to
+leave for Europe--as old Butler had once attempted to send Aileen years
+before--raised a storm of protest, but she went.  Hand, from being
+neutral if not friendly, became quite the most dangerous and forceful
+of all Cowperwood's Chicago enemies.  He was a powerful man.  His wrath
+was boundless.  He looked upon Cowperwood now as a dark and dangerous
+man--one of whom Chicago would be well rid.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXII
+
+A Supper Party
+
+
+Since the days in which Aileen had been left more or less lonely by
+Cowperwood, however, no two individuals had been more faithful in their
+attentions than Taylor Lord and Kent McKibben.  Both were fond of her
+in a general way, finding her interesting physically and
+temperamentally; but, being beholden to the magnate for many favors,
+they were exceedingly circumspect in their attitude toward her,
+particularly during those early years in which they knew that
+Cowperwood was intensely devoted to her.  Later they were not so
+careful.
+
+It was during this latter period that Aileen came gradually, through
+the agency of these two men, to share in a form of mid-world life that
+was not utterly dull.  In every large city there is a kind of social
+half world, where artists and the more adventurous of the socially
+unconventional and restless meet for an exchange of things which cannot
+be counted mere social form and civility.  It is the age-old world of
+Bohemia.  Hither resort those "accidentals" of fancy that make the
+stage, the drawing-room, and all the schools of artistic endeavor
+interesting or peculiar.  In a number of studios in Chicago such as
+those of Lane Cross and Rhees Crier, such little circles were to be
+found.  Rhees Crier, for instance, a purely parlor artist, with all the
+airs, conventions, and social adaptability of the tribe, had quite a
+following.  Here and to several other places by turns Taylor Lord and
+Kent McKibben conducted Aileen, both asking and obtaining permission to
+be civil to her when Cowperwood was away.
+
+Among the friends of these two at this time was a certain Polk Lynde,
+an interesting society figure, whose father owned an immense reaper
+works, and whose time was spent in idling, racing, gambling,
+socializing--anything, in short, that it came into his head to do. He
+was tall, dark, athletic, straight, muscular, with a small dark
+mustache, dark, black-brown eyes, kinky black hair, and a fine, almost
+military carriage--which he clothed always to the best advantage.  A
+clever philanderer, it was quite his pride that he did not boast of his
+conquests.  One look at him, however, by the initiated, and the story
+was told.  Aileen first saw him on a visit to the studio of Rhees
+Grier.  Being introduced to him very casually on this occasion, she was
+nevertheless clearly conscious that she was encountering a fascinating
+man, and that he was fixing her with a warm, avid eye.  For the moment
+she recoiled from him as being a little too brazen in his stare, and
+yet she admired the general appearance of him.  He was of that smart
+world that she admired so much, and from which now apparently she was
+hopelessly debarred.  That trig, bold air of his realized for her at
+last the type of man, outside of Cowperwood, whom she would prefer
+within limits to admire her.  If she were going to be "bad," as she
+would have phrased it to herself, she would be "bad" with a man such as
+he.  He would be winsome and coaxing, but at the same time strong,
+direct, deliciously brutal, like her Frank.  He had, too, what
+Cowperwood could not have, a certain social air or swagger which came
+with idleness, much loafing, a sense of social superiority and
+security--a devil-may-care insouciance which recks little of other
+people's will or whims.
+
+When she next saw him, which was several weeks later at an affair of
+the Courtney Tabors, friends of Lord's, he exclaimed:
+
+"Oh yes.  By George! You're the Mrs. Cowperwood I met several weeks ago
+at Rhees Grier's studio.  I've not forgotten you.  I've seen you in my
+eye all over Chicago.  Taylor Lord introduced me to you. Say, but
+you're a beautiful woman!"
+
+He leaned ingratiatingly, whimsically, admiringly near.
+
+Aileen realized that for so early in the afternoon, and considering the
+crowd, he was curiously enthusiastic.  The truth was that because of
+some rounds he had made elsewhere he was verging toward too much
+liquor.  His eye was alight, his color coppery, his air swagger,
+devil-may-care, bacchanal.  This made her a little cautious; but she
+rather liked his brown, hard face, handsome mouth, and crisp Jovian
+curls.  His compliment was not utterly improper; but she nevertheless
+attempted coyly to avoid him.
+
+"Come, Polk, here's an old friend of yours over here--Sadie
+Boutwell--she wants to meet you again," some one observed, catching him
+by the arm.
+
+"No, you don't," he exclaimed, genially, and yet at the same time a
+little resentfully--the kind of disjointed resentment a man who has had
+the least bit too much is apt to feel on being interrupted. "I'm not
+going to walk all over Chicago thinking of a woman I've seen somewhere
+only to be carried away the first time I do meet her.  I'm going to
+talk to her first."
+
+Aileen laughed.  "It's charming of you, but we can meet again, perhaps.
+Besides, there's some one here"--Lord was tactfully directing her
+attention to another woman.  Rhees Grier and McKibben, who were present
+also, came to her assistance.  In the hubbub that ensued Aileen was
+temporarily extricated and Lynde tactfully steered out of her way.  But
+they had met again, and it was not to be the last time.  Subsequent to
+this second meeting, Lynde thought the matter over quite calmly, and
+decided that he must make a definite effort to become more intimate
+with Aileen.  Though she was not as young as some others, she suited
+his present mood exactly.  She was rich physically--voluptuous and
+sentient.  She was not of his world precisely, but what of it? She was
+the wife of an eminent financier, who had been in society once, and she
+herself had a dramatic record.  He was sure of that.  He could win her
+if he wanted to.  It would be easy, knowing her as he did, and knowing
+what he did about her.
+
+So not long after, Lynde ventured to invite her, with Lord, McKibben,
+Mr. and Mrs. Rhees Grier, and a young girl friend of Mrs. Grier who was
+rather attractive, a Miss Chrystobel Lanman, to a theater and supper
+party.  The programme was to hear a reigning farce at Hooley's, then to
+sup at the Richelieu, and finally to visit a certain exclusive
+gambling-parlor which then flourished on the South Side--the resort of
+actors, society gamblers, and the like--where roulette,
+trente-et-quarante, baccarat, and the honest game of poker, to say
+nothing of various other games of chance, could be played amid
+exceedingly recherche surroundings.
+
+The party was gay, especially after the adjournment to the Richelieu,
+where special dishes of chicken, lobster, and a bucket of champagne
+were served.  Later at the Alcott Club, as the gambling resort was
+known, Aileen, according to Lynde, was to be taught to play baccarat,
+poker, and any other game that she wished.  "You follow my advice, Mrs.
+Cowperwood," he observed, cheerfully, at dinner--being host, he had put
+her between himself and McKibben--"and I'll show you how to get your
+money back anyhow.  That's more than some others can do," he added,
+spiritedly, recalling by a look a recent occasion when he and McKibben,
+being out with friends, the latter had advised liberally and had seen
+his advice go wrong.
+
+"Have you been gambling, Kent?" asked Aileen, archly, turning to her
+long-time social mentor and friend.
+
+"No, I can honestly say I haven't," replied McKibben, with a bland
+smile.  "I may have thought I was gambling, but I admit I don't know
+how.  Now Polk, here, wins all the time, don't you, Polk? Just follow
+him."
+
+A wry smile spread over Lynde's face at this, for it was on record in
+certain circles that he had lost as much as ten and even fifteen
+thousand in an evening.  He also had a record of winning twenty-five
+thousand once at baccarat at an all-night and all-day sitting, and then
+losing it.
+
+Lynde all through the evening had been casting hard, meaning glances
+into Aileen's eyes.  She could not avoid this, and she did not feel
+that she wanted to.  He was so charming.  He was talking to her half
+the time at the theater, without apparently addressing or even seeing
+her.  Aileen knew well enough what was in his mind. At times, quite as
+in those days when she had first met Cowperwood, she felt an unwilled
+titillation in her blood.  Her eyes brightened. It was just possible
+that she could come to love a man like this, although it would be hard.
+It would serve Cowperwood right for neglecting her.  Yet even now the
+shadow of Cowperwood was over her, but also the desire for love and a
+full sex life.
+
+In the gambling-rooms was gathered an interested and fairly smart
+throng--actors, actresses, clubmen, one or two very emancipated women
+of the high local social world, and a number of more or less
+gentlemanly young gamblers.  Both Lord and McKibben began suggesting
+column numbers for first plays to their proteges, while Lynde leaned
+caressingly over Aileen's powdered shoulders.  "Let me put this on
+quatre premier for you," he suggested, throwing down a twenty-dollar
+gold piece.
+
+"Oh, but let it be my money," complained Aileen.  "I want to play with
+my money.  I won't feel that it's mine if I don't."
+
+"Very well, but you can't just now.  You can't play with bills." She
+was extracting a crisp roll from her purse.  "I'll have to exchange
+them later for you for gold.  You can pay me then.  He's going to call
+now, anyhow.  There you are.  He's done it.  Wait a moment.  You may
+win." And he paused to study the little ball as it circled round and
+round above the receiving pockets.
+
+"Let me see.  How much do I get if I win quatre premier?" She was
+trying to recall her experiences abroad.
+
+"Ten for one," replied Lynde; "but you didn't get it.  Let's try it
+once more for luck.  It comes up every so often--once in ten or twelve.
+I've made it often on a first play.  How long has it been since the
+last quatre premier?" he asked of a neighbor whom he recognized.
+
+"Seven, I think, Polk.  Six or seven.  How's tricks?"
+
+"Oh, so so." He turned again to Aileen.  "It ought to come up now soon.
+I always make it a rule to double my plays each time.  It gets you back
+all you've lost, some time or other." He put down two twenties.
+
+"Goodness," she exclaimed, "that will be two hundred! I had forgotten
+that."
+
+Just then the call came for all placements to cease, and Aileen
+directed her attention to the ball.  It circled and circled in its
+dizzy way and then suddenly dropped.
+
+"Lost again," commented Lynde.  "Well, now we'll make it eighty," and
+he threw down four twenties.  "Just for luck we'll put something on
+thirty-six, and thirteen, and nine."  With an easy air he laid one
+hundred dollars in gold on each number.
+
+Aileen liked his manner.  This was like Frank.  Lynde had the cool
+spirit of a plunger.  His father, recognizing his temperament, had set
+over a large fixed sum to be paid to him annually.  She recognized, as
+in Cowperwood, the spirit of adventure, only working out in another
+way.  Lynde was perhaps destined to come to some startlingly reckless
+end, but what of it? He was a gentleman.  His position in life was
+secure.  That had always been Aileen's sad, secret thought.  Hers had
+not been and might never be now.
+
+"Oh, I'm getting foozled already," she exclaimed, gaily reverting to a
+girlhood habit of clapping her hands.  "How much will I win if I win?"
+The gesture attracted attention even as the ball fell.
+
+"By George, you have it!" exclaimed Lynde, who was watching the
+croupier.  "Eight hundred, two hundred, two hundred"--he was counting
+to himself--"but we lose thirteen.  Very good, that makes us nearly one
+thousand ahead, counting out what we put down. Rather nice for a
+beginning, don't you think? Now, if you'll take my advice you'll not
+play quatre premier any more for a while. Suppose you double a
+thirteen--you lost on that--and play Bates's formula.  I'll show you
+what that is."
+
+Already, because he was known to be a plunger, Lynde was gathering a
+few spectators behind him, and Aileen, fascinated, and not knowing
+these mysteries of chance, was content to watch him.  At one stage of
+the playing Lynde leaned over and, seeing her smile, whispered:
+
+"What adorable hair and eyes you have! You glow like a great rose. You
+have a radiance that is wonderful."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Lynde! How you talk! Does gambling always affect you this way?"
+
+"No, you do.  Always, apparently!" And he stared hard into her upturned
+eyes.  Still playing ostensibly for Aileen's benefit, he now doubled
+the cash deposit on his system, laying down a thousand in gold.  Aileen
+urged him to play for himself and let her watch. "I'll just put a
+little money on these odd numbers here and there, and you play any
+system you want.  How will that do?"
+
+"No, not at all," he replied, feelingly.  "You're my luck.  I play with
+you.  You keep the gold for me.  I'll make you a fine present if I win.
+The losses are mine."
+
+"Just as you like.  I don't know really enough about it to play. But I
+surely get the nice present if you win?"
+
+"You do, win or lose," he murmured.  "And now you put the money on the
+numbers I call.  Twenty on seven.  Eighty on thirteen. Eighty on
+thirty.  Twenty on nine.  Fifty on twenty-four." He was following a
+system of his own, and in obedience Aileen's white, plump arm reached
+here and there while the spectators paused, realizing that heavier
+playing was being done by this pair than by any one else.  Lynde was
+plunging for effect.  He lost a thousand and fifty dollars at one clip.
+
+"Oh, all that good money!" exclaimed Aileen, mock-pathetically, as the
+croupier raked it in.
+
+"Never mind, we'll get it back," exclaimed Lynde, throwing two
+one-thousand-dollar bills to the cashier.  "Give me gold for those."
+
+The man gave him a double handful, which he put down between Aileen's
+white arms.
+
+"One hundred on two.  One hundred on four.  One hundred on six. One
+hundred on eight."
+
+The pieces were five-dollar gold pieces, and Aileen quickly built up
+the little yellow stacks and shoved them in place.  Again the other
+players stopped and began to watch the odd pair.  Aileen's red-gold
+head, and pink cheeks, and swimming eyes, her body swathed in silks and
+rich laces; and Lynde, erect, his shirt bosom snowy white, his face
+dark, almost coppery, his eyes and hair black--they were indeed a
+strikingly assorted pair.
+
+"What's this? What's this?" asked Grier, coming up.  "Who's plunging?
+You, Mrs. Cowperwood?"
+
+"Not plunging," replied Lynde, indifferently.  "We're merely working
+out a formula--Mrs. Cowperwood and I.  We're doing it together."
+
+Aileen smiled.  She was in her element at last.  She was beginning to
+shine.  She was attracting attention.
+
+"One hundred on twelve.  One hundred on eighteen.  One hundred on
+twenty-six."
+
+"Good heavens, what are you up to, Lynde?" exclaimed Lord, leaving Mrs.
+Rhees and coming over.  She followed.  Strangers also were gathering.
+The business of the place was at its topmost toss--it being two o'clock
+in the morning--and the rooms were full.
+
+"How interesting!" observed Miss Lanman, at the other end of the table,
+pausing in her playing and staring.  McKibben, who was beside her, also
+paused.  "They're plunging.  Do look at all the money! Goodness, isn't
+she daring-looking--and he?" Aileen's shining arm was moving deftly,
+showily about.
+
+"Look at the bills he's breaking!" Lynde was taking out a thick layer
+of fresh, yellow bills which he was exchanging for gold. "They make a
+striking pair, don't they?"
+
+The board was now practically covered with Lynde's gold in quaint
+little stacks.  He had followed a system called Mazarin, which should
+give him five for one, and possibly break the bank.  Quite a crowd
+swarmed about the table, their faces glowing in the artificial light.
+The exclamation "plunging!" "plunging!" was to be heard whispered here
+and there.  Lynde was delightfully cool and straight.  His lithe body
+was quite erect, his eyes reflective, his teeth set over an unlighted
+cigarette.  Aileen was excited as a child, delighted to be once more
+the center of comment.  Lord looked at her with sympathetic eyes.  He
+liked her.  Well, let her he amused.  It was good for her now and then;
+but Lynde was a fool to make a show of himself and risk so much money.
+
+"Table closed!" called the croupier, and instantly the little ball
+began to spin.  All eyes followed it.  Round and round it went--Aileen
+as keen an observer as any.  Her face was flushed, her eyes bright.
+
+"If we lose this," said Lynde, "we will make one more bet double, and
+then if we don't win that we'll quit." He was already out nearly three
+thousand dollars.
+
+"Oh yes, indeed! Only I think we ought to quit now.  Here goes two
+thousand if we don't win.  Don't you think that's quite enough? I
+haven't brought you much luck, have I?"
+
+"You are luck," he whispered.  "All the luck I want.  One more. Stand
+by me for one more try, will you? If we win I'll quit."
+
+The little ball clicked even as she nodded, and the croupier, paying
+out on a few small stacks here and there, raked all the rest solemnly
+into the receiving orifice, while murmurs of sympathetic
+dissatisfaction went up here and there.
+
+"How much did they have on the board?" asked Miss Lanman of McKibben,
+in surprise.  "It must have been a great deal, wasn't it?"
+
+"Oh, two thousand dollars, perhaps.  That isn't so high here, though.
+People do plunge for as much as eight or ten thousand. It all depends."
+McKibben was in a belittling, depreciating mood.
+
+"Oh yes, but not often, surely."
+
+"For the love of heavens, Polk!" exclaimed Rhees Grier, coming up and
+plucking at his sleeve; "if you want to give your money away give it to
+me.  I can gather it in just as well as that croupier, and I'll go get
+a truck and haul it home, where it will do some good.  It's perfectly
+terrible the way you are carrying on."
+
+Lynde took his loss with equanimity.  "Now to double it," he observed,
+"and get all our losses back, or go downstairs and have a rarebit and
+some champagne.  What form of a present would please you best?--but
+never mind.  I know a souvenir for this occasion."
+
+He smiled and bought more gold.  Aileen stacked it up showily, if a
+little repentantly.  She did not quite approve of this--his
+plunging--and yet she did; she could not help sympathizing with the
+plunging spirit.  In a few moments it was on the board--the same
+combination, the same stacks, only doubled--four thousand all told.
+The croupier called, the ball rolled and fell.  Barring three hundred
+dollars returned, the bank took it all.
+
+"Well, now for a rarebit," exclaimed Lynde, easily, turning to Lord,
+who stood behind him smiling.  "You haven't a match, have you? We've
+had a run of bad luck, that's sure."
+
+Lynde was secretly the least bit disgruntled, for if he had won he had
+intended to take a portion of the winnings and put it in a necklace or
+some other gewgaw for Aileen.  Now he must pay for it. Yet there was
+some satisfaction in having made an impression as a calm and
+indifferent, though heavy loser.  He gave Aileen his arm.
+
+"Well, my lady," he observed, "we didn't win; but we had a little fun
+out of it, I hope? That combination, if it had come out, would have set
+us up handsomely.  Better luck next time, eh?"
+
+He smiled genially.
+
+"Yes, but I was to have been your luck, and I wasn't," replied Aileen.
+
+"You are all the luck I want, if you're willing to be.  Come to the
+Richelieu to-morrow with me for lunch--will you?"
+
+"Let me see," replied Aileen, who, observing his ready and somewhat
+iron fervor, was doubtful.  "I can't do that," she said, finally, "I
+have another engagement."
+
+"How about Tuesday, then?"
+
+Aileen, realizing of a sudden that she was making much of a situation
+that ought to be handled with a light hand, answered readily: "Very
+well--Tuesday! Only call me up before.  I may have to change my mind or
+the time." And she smiled good-naturedly.
+
+After this Lynde had no opportunity to talk to Aileen privately; but in
+saying good night he ventured to press her arm suggestively. She
+suffered a peculiar nervous thrill from this, but decided curiously
+that she had brought it upon herself by her eagerness for life and
+revenge, and must make up her mind.  Did she or did she not wish to go
+on with this? This was the question uppermost, and she felt that she
+must decide.  However, as in most such cases, circumstances were to
+help decide for her, and, unquestionably, a portion of this truth was
+in her mind as she was shown gallantly to her door by Taylor Lord.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIII
+
+Mr. Lynde to the Rescue
+
+
+The interested appearance of a man like Polk Lynde at this stage of
+Aileen's affairs was a bit of fortuitous or gratuitous humor on the
+part of fate, which is involved with that subconscious chemistry of
+things of which as yet we know nothing.  Here was Aileen brooding over
+her fate, meditating over her wrongs, as it were; and here was Polk
+Lynde, an interesting, forceful Lothario of the city, who was perhaps
+as well suited to her moods and her tastes at this time as any male
+outside of Cowperwood could be.
+
+In many respects Lynde was a charming man.  He was comparatively
+young--not more than Aileen's own age--schooled, if not educated, at
+one of the best American colleges, of excellent taste in the matter of
+clothes, friends, and the details of living with which he chose to
+surround himself, but at heart a rake.  He loved, and had from his
+youth up, to gamble.  He was in one phase of the word a HARD and yet by
+no means a self-destructive drinker, for he had an iron constitution
+and could consume spirituous waters with the minimum of ill effect.  He
+had what Gibbon was wont to call "the most amiable of our vices," a
+passion for women, and he cared no more for the cool, patient, almost
+penitent methods by which his father had built up the immense reaper
+business, of which he was supposedly the heir, than he cared for the
+mysteries or sacred rights of the Chaldees.  He realized that the
+business itself was a splendid thing.  He liked on occasion to think of
+it with all its extent of ground-space, plain red-brick buildings, tall
+stacks and yelling whistles; but he liked in no way to have anything to
+do with the rather commonplace routine of its manipulation.
+
+The principal difficulty with Aileen under these circumstances, of
+course, was her intense vanity and self-consciousness.  Never was there
+a vainer or more sex-troubled woman.  Why, she asked herself, should
+she sit here in loneliness day after day, brooding about Cowperwood,
+eating her heart out, while he was flitting about gathering the sweets
+of life elsewhere? Why should she not offer her continued charms as a
+solace and a delight to other men who would appreciate them? Would not
+such a policy have all the essentials of justice in it? Yet even now,
+so precious had Cowperwood been to her hitherto, and so wonderful, that
+she was scarcely able to think of serious disloyalty.  He was so
+charming when he was nice--so splendid.  When Lynde sought to hold her
+to the proposed luncheon engagement she at first declined.  And there,
+under slightly differing conditions, the matter might easily have
+stood. But it so happened that just at this time Aileen was being
+almost daily harassed by additional evidence and reminders of
+Cowperwood's infidelity.
+
+For instance, going one day to call on the Haguenins--for she was
+perfectly willing to keep up the pretense of amity in so long as they
+had not found out the truth--she was informed that Mrs. Haguenin was
+"not at home." Shortly thereafter the Press, which had always been
+favorable to Cowperwood, and which Aileen regularly read because of its
+friendly comment, suddenly veered and began to attack him.  There were
+solemn suggestions at first that his policy and intentions might not be
+in accord with the best interests of the city.  A little later Haguenin
+printed editorials which referred to Cowperwood as "the wrecker," "the
+Philadelphia adventurer," "a conscienceless promoter," and the like.
+Aileen guessed instantly what the trouble was, but she was too
+disturbed as to her own position to make any comment.  She could not
+resolve the threats and menaces of Cowperwood's envious world any more
+than she could see her way through her own grim difficulties.
+
+One day, in scanning the columns of that faithful chronicle of Chicago
+social doings, the Chicago Saturday Review, she came across an item
+which served as a final blow.  "For some time in high social circles,"
+the paragraph ran, "speculation has been rife as to the amours and
+liaisons of a certain individual of great wealth and pseudo social
+prominence, who once made a serious attempt to enter Chicago society.
+It is not necessary to name the man, for all who are acquainted with
+recent events in Chicago will know who is meant.  The latest rumor to
+affect his already nefarious reputation relates to two women--one the
+daughter, and the other the wife, of men of repute and standing in the
+community.  In these latest instances it is more than likely that he
+has arrayed influences of the greatest importance socially and
+financially against himself, for the husband in the one case and the
+father in the other are men of weight and authority.  The suggestion
+has more than once been made that Chicago should and eventually would
+not tolerate his bucaneering methods in finance and social matters; but
+thus far no definite action has been taken to cast him out.  The
+crowning wonder of all is that the wife, who was brought here from the
+East, and who--so rumor has it--made a rather scandalous sacrifice of
+her own reputation and another woman's heart and home in order to
+obtain the privilege of living with him, should continue so to do."
+
+Aileen understood perfectly what was meant.  "The father" of the
+so-called "one" was probably Haguenin or Cochrane, more than likely
+Haguenin.  "The husband of the other"--but who was the husband of the
+other? She had not heard of any scandal with the wife of anybody.  It
+could not be the case of Rita Sohlberg and her husband--that was too
+far back.  It must be some new affair of which she had not the least
+inkling, and so she sat and reflected. Now, she told herself, if she
+received another invitation from Lynde she would accept it.
+
+It was only a few days later that Aileen and Lynde met in the gold-room
+of the Richelieu.  Strange to relate, for one determined to be
+indifferent she had spent much time in making a fetching toilet.  It
+being February and chill with glittering snow on the ground, she had
+chosen a dark-green broadcloth gown, quite new, with lapis-lazuli
+buttons that worked a "Y" pattern across her bosom, a seal turban with
+an emerald plume which complemented a sealskin jacket with immense
+wrought silver buttons, and bronze shoes.  To perfect it all, Aileen
+had fastened lapis-lazuli ear-rings of a small flower-form in her ears,
+and wore a plain, heavy gold bracelet.  Lynde came up with a look of
+keen approval written on his handsome brown face.  "Will you let me
+tell you how nice you look?" he said, sinking into the chair opposite.
+"You show beautiful taste in choosing the right colors.  Your ear-rings
+go so well with your hair."
+
+Although Aileen feared because of his desperateness, she was caught by
+his sleek force--that air of iron strength under a parlor mask. His
+long, brown, artistic hands, hard and muscular, indicated an idle force
+that might be used in many ways.  They harmonized with his teeth and
+chin.
+
+"So you came, didn't you?" he went on, looking at her steadily, while
+she fronted his gaze boldly for a moment, only to look evasively down.
+
+He still studied her carefully, looking at her chin and mouth and
+piquant nose.  In her colorful cheeks and strong arms and shoulders,
+indicated by her well-tailored suit, he recognized the human vigor he
+most craved in a woman.  By way of diversion he ordered an
+old-fashioned whisky cocktail, urging her to join him.  Finding her
+obdurate, he drew from his pocket a little box.
+
+"We agreed when we played the other night on a memento, didn't we?" he
+said.  "A sort of souvenir? Guess?"
+
+Aileen looked at it a little nonplussed, recognizing the contents of
+the box to be jewelry.  "Oh, you shouldn't have done that," she
+protested.  "The understanding was that we were to win.  You lost, and
+that ended the bargain.  I should have shared the losses.  I haven't
+forgiven you for that yet, you know."
+
+"How ungallant that would make me!" he said, smilingly, as he trifled
+with the long, thin, lacquered case.  "You wouldn't want to make me
+ungallant, would you? Be a good fellow--a good sport, as they say.
+Guess, and it's yours."
+
+Aileen pursed her lips at this ardent entreaty.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind guessing," she commented, superiorly, "though I
+sha'n't take it.  It might be a pin, it might be a set of ear-rings, it
+might be a bracelet--"
+
+He made no comment, but opened it, revealing a necklace of gold wrought
+into the form of a grape-vine of the most curious workmanship, with a
+cluster of leaves artistically carved and arranged as a breastpiece,
+the center of them formed by a black opal, which shone with an enticing
+luster.  Lynde knew well enough that Aileen was familiar with many
+jewels, and that only one of ornate construction and value would appeal
+to her sense of what was becoming to her. He watched her face closely
+while she studied the details of the necklace.
+
+"Isn't it exquisite!" she commented.  "What a lovely opal--what an odd
+design." She went over the separate leaves.  "You shouldn't be so
+foolish.  I couldn't take it.  I have too many things as it is, and
+besides--" She was thinking of what she would say if Cowperwood chanced
+to ask her where she got it.  He was so intuitive.
+
+"And besides?" he queried.
+
+"Nothing," she replied, "except that I mustn't take it, really." "Won't
+you take it as a souvenir even if--our agreement, you know."
+
+"Even if what?" she queried.
+
+"Even if nothing else comes of it.  A memento, then--truly--you know."
+
+He laid hold of her fingers with his cool, vigorous ones.  A year
+before, even six months, Aileen would have released her hand smilingly.
+Now she hesitated.  Why should she be so squeamish with other men when
+Cowperwood was so unkind to her?
+
+"Tell me something," Lynde asked, noting the doubt and holding her
+fingers gently but firmly, "do you care for me at all?"
+
+"I like you, yes.  I can't say that it is anything more than that."
+
+She flushed, though, in spite of herself.
+
+He merely gazed at her with his hard, burning eyes.  The materiality
+that accompanies romance in so many temperaments awakened in her, and
+quite put Cowperwood out of her mind for the moment.  It was an
+astonishing and revolutionary experience for her.  She quite burned in
+reply, and Lynde smiled sweetly, encouragingly.
+
+"Why won't you be friends with me, my sweetheart? I know you're not
+happy--I can see that.  Neither am I.  I have a wreckless, wretched
+disposition that gets me into all sorts of hell.  I need some one to
+care for me.  Why won't you? You're just my sort.  I feel it.  Do you
+love him so much"--he was referring to Cowperwood--"that you can't love
+any one else?"
+
+"Oh, him!" retorted Aileen, irritably, almost disloyally.  "He doesn't
+care for me any more.  He wouldn't mind.  It isn't him."
+
+"Well, then, what is it? Why won't you? Am I not interesting enough?
+Don't you like me? Don't you feel that I'm really suited to you?" His
+hand sought hers softly.
+
+Aileen accepted the caress.
+
+"Oh, it isn't that," she replied, feelingly, running back in her mind
+over her long career with Cowperwood, his former love, his keen
+protestations.  She had expected to make so much out of her life with
+him, and here she was sitting in a public restaurant flirting with and
+extracting sympathy from a comparative stranger. It cut her to the
+quick for the moment and sealed her lips.  Hot, unbidden tears welled
+to her eyes.
+
+Lynde saw them.  He was really very sorry for her, though her beauty
+made him wish to take advantage of her distress.  "Why should you cry,
+dearest?" he asked, softly, looking at her flushed cheeks and colorful
+eyes.  "You have beauty; you are young; you're lovely.  He's not the
+only man in the world.  Why should you be faithful when he isn't
+faithful to you? This Hand affair is all over town.  When you meet some
+one that really would care for you, why shouldn't you? If he doesn't
+want you, there are others."
+
+At the mention of the Hand affair Aileen straightened up.  "The Hand
+affair?" she asked, curiously.  "What is that?"
+
+"Don't you know?" he replied, a little surprised.  "I thought you did,
+or I certainly wouldn't have mentioned it."
+
+"Oh, I know about what it is," replied Aileen, wisely, and with a touch
+of sardonic humor.  "There have been so many or the same kind.  I
+suppose it must be the case the Chicago Review was referring to--the
+wife of the prominent financier.  Has he been trifling with Mrs. Hand?"
+
+"Something like that," replied Lynde.  "I'm sorry that I spoke, though?
+really I am.  I didn't mean to be carrying tales."
+
+"Soldiers in a common fight, eh?" taunted Aileen, gaily.
+
+"Oh, not that, exactly.  Please don't be mean.  I'm not so bad. It's
+just a principle with me.  We all have our little foibles."
+
+"Yes, I know," replied Aileen; but her mind was running on Mrs. Hand.
+So she was the latest.  "Well, I admire his taste, anyway, in this
+case," she said, archly.  "There have been so many, though. She is just
+one more."
+
+Lynde smiled.  He himself admired Cowperwood's taste.  Then he dropped
+the subject.
+
+"But let's forget that," he said.  "Please don't worry about him any
+more.  You can't change that.  Pull yourself together." He squeezed her
+fingers.  "Will you?" he asked, lifting his eyebrows in inquiry.
+
+"Will I what?" replied Aileen, meditatively.
+
+"Oh, you know.  The necklace for one thing.  Me, too." His eyes coaxed
+and laughed and pleaded.
+
+Aileen smiled.  "You're a bad boy," she said, evasively.  This
+revelation in regard to Mrs. Hand had made her singularly retaliatory
+in spirit.  "Let me think.  Don't ask me to take the necklace to-day.
+I couldn't.  I couldn't wear it, anyhow.  Let me see you another time."
+She moved her plump hand in an uncertain way, and he smoothed her wrist.
+
+"I wonder if you wouldn't like to go around to the studio of a friend
+of mine here in the tower?" he asked, quite nonchalantly. "He has such
+a charming collection of landscapes.  You're interested in pictures, I
+know.  Your husband has some of the finest."
+
+Instantly Aileen understood what was meant--quite by instinct. The
+alleged studio must be private bachelor quarters.
+
+"Not this afternoon," she replied, quite wrought up and disturbed. "Not
+to-day.  Another time.  And I must be going now.  But I will see you."
+
+"And this?" he asked, picking up the necklace.
+
+"You keep it until I do come," she replied.  "I may take it then."
+
+She relaxed a little, pleased that she was getting safely away; but her
+mood was anything but antagonistic, and her spirits were as shredded as
+wind-whipped clouds.  It was time she wanted--a little time--that was
+all.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIV
+
+Enter Hosmer Hand
+
+
+It is needless to say that the solemn rage of Hand, to say nothing of
+the pathetic anger of Haguenin, coupled with the wrath of Redmond
+Purdy, who related to all his sad story, and of young MacDonald and his
+associates of the Chicago General Company, constituted an atmosphere
+highly charged with possibilities and potent for dramatic results.  The
+most serious element in this at present was Hosmer Hand, who, being
+exceedingly wealthy and a director in a number of the principal
+mercantile and financial institutions of the city, was in a position to
+do Cowperwood some real financial harm.  Hand had been extremely fond
+of his young wife.  Being a man of but few experiences with women, it
+astonished and enraged him that a man like Cowperwood should dare to
+venture on his preserves in this reckless way, should take his dignity
+so lightly.  He burned now with a hot, slow fire of revenge.
+
+Those who know anything concerning the financial world and its great
+adventures know how precious is that reputation for probity,
+solidarity, and conservatism on which so many of the successful
+enterprises of the world are based.  If men are not absolutely honest
+themselves they at least wish for and have faith in the honesty of
+others.  No set of men know more about each other, garner more
+carefully all the straws of rumor which may affect the financial and
+social well being of an individual one way or another, keep a tighter
+mouth concerning their own affairs and a sharper eye on that of their
+neighbors.  Cowperwood's credit had hitherto been good because it was
+known that he had a "soft thing" in the Chicago street-railway field,
+that he paid his interest charges promptly, that he had organized the
+group of men who now, under him, controlled the Chicago Trust Company
+and the North and West Chicago Street Railways, and that the Lake City
+Bank, of which Addison was still president, considered his collateral
+sound. Nevertheless, even previous to this time there had been a
+protesting element in the shape of Schryhart, Simms, and others of
+considerable import in the Douglas Trust, who had lost no chance to say
+to one and all that Cowperwood was an interloper, and that his course
+was marked by political and social trickery and chicanery, if not by
+financial dishonesty.  As a matter of fact, Schryhart, who had once
+been a director of the Lake City National along with Hand, Arneel, and
+others, had resigned and withdrawn all his deposits sometime before
+because he found, as he declared, that Addison was favoring Cowperwood
+and the Chicago Trust Company with loans, when there was no need of so
+doing--when it was not essentially advantageous for the bank so to do.
+Both Arneel and Hand, having at this time no personal quarrel with
+Cowperwood on any score, had considered this protest as biased.
+Addison had maintained that the loans were neither unduly large nor out
+of proportion to the general loans of the bank.  The collateral offered
+was excellent. "I don't want to quarrel with Schryhart," Addison had
+protested at the time; "but I am afraid his charge is unfair.  He is
+trying to vent a private grudge through the Lake National.  That is not
+the way nor this the place to do it."
+
+Both Hand and Arneel, sober men both, agreed with this--admiring
+Addison--and so the case stood.  Schryhart, however, frequently
+intimated to them both that Cowperwood was merely building up the
+Chicago Trust Company at the expense of the Lake City National, in
+order to make the former strong enough to do without any aid, at which
+time Addison would resign and the Lake City would be allowed to shift
+for itself.  Hand had never acted on this suggestion but he had thought.
+
+It was not until the incidents relating to Cowperwood and Mrs. Hand had
+come to light that things financial and otherwise began to darken up.
+Hand, being greatly hurt in his pride, contemplated only severe
+reprisal.  Meeting Schryhart at a directors' meeting one day not long
+after his difficulty had come upon him, he remarked:
+
+"I thought a few years ago, Norman, when you talked to me about this
+man Cowperwood that you were merely jealous--a dissatisfied business
+rival.  Recently a few things have come to my notice which cause me to
+think differently.  It is very plain to me now that the man is
+thoroughly bad--from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet.
+It's a pity the city has to endure him."
+
+"So you're just beginning to find that out, are you, Hosmer?" answered
+Schryhart.  "Well, I'll not say I told you so.  Perhaps you'll agree
+with me now that the responsible people of Chicago ought to do
+something about it."
+
+Hand, a very heavy, taciturn man, merely looked at him.  "I'll be ready
+enough to do," he said, "when I see how and what's to be done."
+
+A little later Schryhart, meeting Duane Kingsland, learned the true
+source of Hand's feeling against Cowperwood, and was not slow in
+transferring this titbit to Merrill, Simms, and others.  Merrill, who,
+though Cowperwood had refused to extend his La Salle Street tunnel loop
+about State Street and his store, had hitherto always liked him after a
+fashion--remotely admired his courage and daring--was now appropriately
+shocked.
+
+"Why, Anson," observed Schryhart, "the man is no good.  He has the
+heart of a hyena and the friendliness of a scorpion.  You heard how he
+treated Hand, didn't you?"
+
+"No," replied Merrill, "I didn't."
+
+"Well, it's this way, so I hear." And Schryhart leaned over and
+confidentially communicated considerable information into Mr. Merrill's
+left ear.
+
+The latter raised his eyebrows.  "Indeed!" he said.
+
+"And the way he came to meet her," added Schryhart, contemptuously,
+"was this.  He went to Hand originally to borrow two hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars on West Chicago Street Railway.  Angry? The word is no
+name for it."
+
+"You don't say so," commented Merrill, dryly, though privately
+interested and fascinated, for Mrs. Hand had always seemed very
+attractive to him.  "I don't wonder."
+
+He recalled that his own wife had recently insisted on inviting
+Cowperwood once.
+
+Similarly Hand, meeting Arneel not so long afterward, confided to him
+that Cowperwood was trying to repudiate a sacred agreement. Arneel was
+grieved and surprised.  It was enough for him to know that Hand had
+been seriously injured.  Between the two of them they now decided to
+indicate to Addison, as president of the Lake City Bank, that all
+relations with Cowperwood and the Chicago Trust Company must cease.
+The result of this was, not long after, that Addison, very suave and
+gracious, agreed to give Cowperwood due warning that all his loans
+would have to be taken care of and then resigned--to become, seven
+months later, president of the Chicago Trust Company.  This desertion
+created a great stir at the time, astonishing the very men who had
+suspected that it might come to pass.  The papers were full of it.
+
+"Well, let him go," observed Arneel to Hand, sourly, on the day that
+Addison notified the board of directors of the Lake City of his
+contemplated resignation.  "If he wants to sever his connection with a
+bank like this to go with a man like that, it's his own lookout.  He
+may live to regret it."
+
+It so happened that by now another election was pending Chicago, and
+Hand, along with Schryhart and Arneel--who joined their forces because
+of his friendship for Hand--decided to try to fight Cowperwood through
+this means.
+
+Hosmer Hand, feeling that he had the burden of a great duty upon him,
+was not slow in acting.  He was always, when aroused, a determined and
+able fighter.  Needing an able lieutenant in the impending political
+conflict, he finally bethought himself of a man who had recently come
+to figure somewhat conspicuously in Chicago politics--one Patrick
+Gilgan, the same Patrick Gilgan of Cowperwood's old Hyde Park gas-war
+days.  Mr. Gilgan was now a comparatively well-to-do man.  Owing to a
+genial capacity for mixing with people, a close mouth, and absolutely
+no understanding of, and consequently no conscience in matters of large
+public import (in so far as they related to the so-called rights of the
+mass), he was a fit individual to succeed politically.  His saloon was
+the finest in all Wentworth Avenue.  It fairly glittered with the newly
+introduced incandescent lamp reflected in a perfect world of beveled
+and faceted mirrors.  His ward, or district, was full of low,
+rain-beaten cottages crowded together along half-made streets; but
+Patrick Gilgan was now a state senator, slated for Congress at the next
+Congressional election, and a possible successor of the Hon. John J.
+McKenty as dictator of the city, if only the Republican party should
+come into power.  (Hyde Park, before it had been annexed to the city,
+had always been Republican, and since then, although the larger city
+was normally Democratic, Gilgan could not conveniently change.) Hearing
+from the political discussion which preceded the election that Gilgan
+was by far the most powerful politician on the South Side, Hand sent
+for him.  Personally, Hand had far less sympathy with the polite
+moralistic efforts of men like Haguenin, Hyssop, and others, who were
+content to preach morality and strive to win by the efforts of the unco
+good, than he had with the cold political logic of a man like
+Cowperwood himself.  If Cowperwood could work through McKenty to such a
+powerful end, he, Hand, could find some one else who could be made as
+powerful as McKenty.
+
+"Mr. Gilgan," said Hand, when the Irishman came in, medium tall, beefy,
+with shrewd, twinkling gray eyes and hairy hands, "you don't know me--"
+
+"I know of you well enough," smiled the Irishman, with a soft brogue.
+"You don't need an introduction to talk to me."
+
+"Very good," replied Hand, extending his hand.  "I know of you, too.
+Then we can talk.  It's the political situation here in Chicago I'd
+like to discuss with you.  I'm not a politician myself, but I take some
+interest in what's going on.  I want to know what you think will be the
+probable outcome of the present situation here in the city."
+
+Gilgan, having no reason for laying his private political convictions
+bare to any one whose motive he did not know, merely replied: "Oh, I
+think the Republicans may have a pretty good show.  They have all but
+one or two of the papers with them, I see.  I don't know much outside
+of what I read and hear people talk."
+
+Mr. Hand knew that Gilgan was sparring, and was glad to find his man
+canny and calculating.
+
+"I haven't asked you to come here just to be talking over politics in
+general, as you may imagine, Mr. Gilgan.  I want to put a particular
+problem before you.  Do you happen to know either Mr. McKenty or Mr.
+Cowperwood?"
+
+"I never met either of them to talk to," replied Gilgan.  "I know Mr.
+McKenty by sight, and I've seen Mr. Cowperwood once." He said no more.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Hand, "suppose a group of influential men here in
+Chicago were to get together and guarantee sufficient funds for a
+city-wide campaign; now, if you had the complete support of the
+newspapers and the Republican organization in the bargain, could you
+organize the opposition here so that the Democratic party could be
+beaten this fall? I'm not talking about the mayor merely and the
+principal city officers, but the council, too--the aldermen. I want to
+fix things so that the McKenty-Cowperwood crowd couldn't get an
+alderman or a city official to sell out, once they are elected.  I want
+the Democratic party beaten so thoroughly that there won't be any
+question in anybody's mind as to the fact that it has been done.  There
+will be plenty of money forthcoming if you can prove to me, or, rather,
+to the group of men I am thinking of, that the thing can be done."
+
+Mr. Gilgan blinked his eyes solemnly.  He rubbed his knees, put his
+thumbs in the armholes of his vest, took out a cigar, lit it, and gazed
+poetically at the ceiling.  He was thinking very, very hard.  Mr.
+Cowperwood and Mr. McKenty, as he knew, were very powerful men.  He had
+always managed to down the McKenty opposition in his ward, and several
+others adjacent to it, and in the Eighteenth Senatorial District, which
+he represented.  But to be called upon to defeat him in Chicago, that
+was different.  Still, the thought of a large amount of cash to be
+distributed through him, and the chance of wresting the city leadership
+from McKenty by the aid of the so-called moral forces of the city, was
+very inspiring.  Mr. Gilgan was a good politician.  He loved to scheme
+and plot and make deals--as much for the fun of it as anything else.
+Just now he drew a solemn face, which, however, concealed a very light
+heart.
+
+"I have heard," went on Hand, "that you have built up a strong
+organization in your ward and district."
+
+"I've managed to hold me own," suggested Gilgan, archly.  "But this
+winning all over Chicago," he went on, after a moment, "now, that's a
+pretty large order.  There are thirty-one wards in Chicago this
+election, and all but eight of them are nominally Democratic. I know
+most of the men that are in them now, and some of them are pretty
+shrewd men, too.  This man Dowling in council is nobody's fool, let me
+tell you that.  Then there's Duvanicki and Ungerich and Tiernan and
+Kerrigan--all good men." He mentioned four of the most powerful and
+crooked aldermen in the city.  "You see, Mr. Hand, the way things are
+now the Democrats have the offices, and the small jobs to give out.
+That gives them plenty of political workers to begin with.  Then they
+have the privilege of collecting money from those in office to help
+elect themselves.  That's another great privilege." He smiled.  "Then
+this man Cowperwood employs all of ten thousand men at present, and any
+ward boss that's favorable to him can send a man out of work to him and
+he'll find a place for him.  That's a gre-a-eat help in building up a
+party following.  Then there's the money a man like Cowperwood and
+others can contribute at election time.  Say what you will, Mr. Hand,
+but it's the two, and five, and ten dollar bills paid out at the last
+moment over the saloon bars and at the polling-places that do the work.
+Give me enough money"--and at this noble thought Mr. Gilgan
+straightened up and slapped one fist lightly in the other, adjusting at
+the same time his half-burned cigar so that it should not burn his
+hand--"and I can carry every ward in Chicago, bar none.  If I have
+money enough," he repeated, emphasizing the last two words. He put his
+cigar back in his mouth, blinked his eyes defiantly, and leaned back in
+his chair.
+
+"Very good," commented Hand, simply; "but how much money?"
+
+"Ah, that's another question," replied Gilgan, straightening up once
+more.  "Some wards require more than others.  Counting out the eight
+that are normally Republican as safe, you would have to carry eighteen
+others to have a majority in council.  I don't see how anything under
+ten to fifteen thousand dollars to a ward would be safe to go on.  I
+should say three hundred thousand dollars would be safer, and that
+wouldn't be any too much by any means."
+
+Mr. Gilgan restored his cigar and puffed heavily the while he leaned
+back and lifted his eyes once more.
+
+"And how would that money be distributed exactly?" inquired Mr. Hand.
+
+"Oh, well, it's never wise to look into such matters too closely,"
+commented Mr. Gilgan, comfortably.  "There's such a thing as cutting
+your cloth too close in politics.  There are ward captains, leaders,
+block captains, workers.  They all have to have money to do with--to
+work up sentiment--and you can't be too inquiring as to just how they
+do it.  It's spent in saloons, and buying coal for mother, and getting
+Johnnie a new suit here and there.  Then there are torch-light
+processions and club-rooms and jobs to look after. Sure, there's plenty
+of places for it.  Some men may have to be brought into these wards to
+live--kept in boarding-houses for a week or ten days." He waved a hand
+deprecatingly.
+
+Mr. Hand, who had never busied himself with the minutiae of politics,
+opened his eyes slightly.  This colonizing idea was a little liberal,
+he thought.
+
+"Who distributes this money?" he asked, finally.
+
+"Nominally, the Republican County Committee, if it's in charge;
+actually, the man or men who are leading the fight.  In the case of the
+Democratic party it's John J. McKenty, and don't you forget it.  In my
+district it's me, and no one else."
+
+Mr. Hand, slow, solid, almost obtuse at times, meditated under lowering
+brows.  He had always been associated with a more or less silk-stocking
+crew who were unused to the rough usage of back-room saloon politics,
+yet every one suspected vaguely, of course, at times that ballot-boxes
+were stuffed and ward lodging-houses colonized.  Every one (at least
+every one of any worldly intelligence) knew that political capital was
+collected from office-seekers, office-holders, beneficiaries of all
+sorts and conditions under the reigning city administration.  Mr. Hand
+had himself contributed to the Republican party for favors received or
+about to be.  As a man who had been compelled to handle large affairs
+in a large way he was not inclined to quarrel with this.  Three hundred
+thousand dollars was a large sum, and he was not inclined to subscribe
+it alone, but fancied that at his recommendation and with his advice it
+could be raised.  Was Gilgan the man to fight Cowperwood? He looked him
+over and decided--other things being equal--that he was. And forthwith
+the bargain was struck.  Gilgan, as a Republican central
+committeeman--chairman, possibly--was to visit every ward, connect up
+with every available Republican force, pick strong, suitable
+anti-Cowperwood candidates, and try to elect them, while he, Hand,
+organized the money element and collected the necessary cash.  Gilgan
+was to be given money personally.  He was to have the undivided if
+secret support of all the high Republican elements in the city.  His
+business was to win at almost any cost.  And as a reward he was to have
+the Republican support for Congress, or, failing that, the practical
+Republican leadership in city and county.
+
+"Anyhow," said Hand, after Mr. Gilgan finally took his departure,
+"things won't be so easy for Mr. Cowperwood in the future as they were
+in the past.  And when it comes to getting his franchises renewed, if
+I'm alive, we'll see whether he will or not."
+
+The heavy financier actually growled a low growl as he spoke out loud
+to himself.  He felt a boundless rancor toward the man who had, as he
+supposed, alienated the affections of his smart young wife.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXV
+
+A Political Agreement
+
+
+In the first and second wards of Chicago at this time--wards including
+the business heart, South Clark Street, the water-front, the
+river-levee, and the like--were two men, Michael (alias Smiling Mike)
+Tiernan and Patrick (alias Emerald Pat) Kerrigan, who, for
+picturequeness of character and sordidness of atmosphere, could not be
+equaled elsewhere in the city, if in the nation at large. "Smiling"
+Mike Tiernan, proud possessor of four of the largest and filthiest
+saloons of this area, was a man of large and genial mold--perhaps six
+feet one inch in height, broad-shouldered in proportion, with a bovine
+head, bullet-shaped from one angle, and big, healthy, hairy hands and
+large feet.  He had done many things from digging in a ditch to
+occupying a seat in the city council from this his beloved ward, which
+he sold out regularly for one purpose and another; but his chief
+present joy consisted in sitting behind a solid mahogany railing at a
+rosewood desk in the back portion of his largest Clark Street
+hostelry--"The Silver Moon." Here he counted up the returns from his
+various properties--salons, gambling resorts, and houses of
+prostitution--which he manipulated with the connivance or blinking
+courtesy of the present administration, and listened to the pleas and
+demands of his henchmen and tenants.
+
+The character of Mr. Kerrigan, Mr. Tiernan's only rival in this rather
+difficult and sordid region, was somewhat different.  He was a small
+man, quite dapper, with a lean, hollow, and somewhat haggard face, but
+by no means sickly body, a large, strident mustache, a wealth of
+coal-black hair parted slickly on one side, and a shrewd, genial
+brown-black eye--constituting altogether a rather pleasing and ornate
+figure whom it was not at all unsatisfactory to meet.   His ears were
+large and stood out bat-wise from his head; and his eyes gleamed with a
+smart, evasive light.  He was cleverer financially than Tiernan,
+richer, and no more than thirty-five, whereas Mr. Tiernan was
+forty-five years of age. Like Mr. Tiernan in the first ward, Mr.
+Kerrigan was a power in the second, and controlled a most useful and
+dangerous floating vote.  His saloons harbored the largest floating
+element that was to be found in the city--longshoremen, railroad hands,
+stevedores, tramps, thugs, thieves, pimps, rounders, detectives, and
+the like. He was very vain, considered himself handsome, a "killer"
+with the ladies.  Married, and with two children and a sedate young
+wife, he still had his mistress, who changed from year to year, and his
+intermediate girls.  His clothes were altogether noteworthy, but it was
+his pride to eschew jewelry, except for one enormous emerald, value
+fourteen thousand dollars, which he wore in his necktie on occasions,
+and the wonder of which, pervading all Dearborn Street and the city
+council, had won him the soubriquet of "Emerald Pat." At first he
+rejoiced heartily in this title, as he did in a gold and diamond medal
+awarded him by a Chicago brewery for selling the largest number of
+barrels of beer of any saloon in Chicago.  More recently, the
+newspapers having begun to pay humorous attention to both himself and
+Mr. Tiernan, because of their prosperity and individuality, he resented
+it.
+
+The relation of these two men to the present political situation was
+peculiar, and, as it turned out, was to constitute the weak spot in the
+Cowperwood-McKenty campaign.  Tiernan and Kerrigan, to begin with,
+being neighbors and friends, worked together in politics and business,
+on occasions pooling their issues and doing each other favors.  The
+enterprises in which they were engaged being low and shabby, they
+needed counsel and consolation. Infinitely beneath a man like McKenty
+in understanding and a politic grasp of life, they were, nevertheless,
+as they prospered, somewhat jealous of him and his high estate.  They
+saw with speculative and somewhat jealous eyes how, after his union
+with Cowperwood, he grew and how he managed to work his will in many
+ways--by extracting tolls from the police department, and heavy annual
+campaign contributions from manufacturers favored by the city gas and
+water departments.  McKenty--a born manipulator in this respect--knew
+where political funds were to be had in an hour of emergency, and he
+did not hesitate to demand them.  Tiernan and Kerrigan had always been
+fairly treated by him as politics go; but they had never as yet been
+included in his inner council of plotters.  When he was down-town on
+one errand or another, he stopped in at their places to shake hands
+with them, to inquire after business, to ask if there was any favor he
+could do them; but never did he stoop to ask a favor of them or
+personally to promise any form of reward.   That was the business of
+Dowling and others through whom he worked.
+
+Naturally men of strong, restive, animal disposition, finding no
+complete outlet for all their growing capacity, Tiernan and Kerrigan
+were both curious to see in what way they could add to their honors and
+emoluments.  Their wards, more than any in the city, were increasing in
+what might be called a vote-piling capacity, the honest, legitimate
+vote not being so large, but the opportunities afforded for colonizing,
+repeating, and ballot-box stuffing being immense.  In a doubtful
+mayoralty campaign the first and second wards alone, coupled with a
+portion of the third adjoining them, would register sufficient
+illegitimate votes (after voting-hours, if necessary) to completely
+change the complexion of the city as to the general officers nominated.
+Large amounts of money were sent to Tiernan and Kerrigan around
+election time by the Democratic County Committee to be disposed of as
+they saw fit.  They merely sent in a rough estimate of how much they
+would need, and always received a little more than they asked for.
+They never made nor were asked to make accounting afterward.  Tiernan
+would receive as high as fifteen and eighteen, Kerrigan sometimes as
+much as twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars, his being the pivotal
+ward under such circumstances.
+
+McKenty had recently begun to recognize that these two men would soon
+have to be given fuller consideration, for they were becoming more or
+less influential.  But how? Their personalities, let alone the
+reputation of their wards and the methods they employed, were not such
+as to command public confidence.  In the mean time, owing to the
+tremendous growth of the city, the growth of their own private
+business, and the amount of ballot-box stuffing, repeating, and the
+like which was required of them, they were growing more and more
+restless.  Why should not they be slated for higher offices? they now
+frequently asked themselves.  Tiernan would have been delighted to have
+been nominated for sheriff or city treasurer. He considered himself
+eminently qualified.  Kerrigan at the last city convention had
+privately urged on Dowling the wisdom of nominating him for the
+position of commissioner of highways and sewers, which office he was
+anxious to obtain because of its reported commercial perquisites; but
+this year, of all times, owing to the need of nominating an unblemished
+ticket to defeat the sharp Republican opposition, such a nomination was
+not possible.  It would have drawn the fire of all the respectable
+elements in the city.  As a result both Tiernan and Kerrigan, thinking
+over their services, past and future, felt very much disgruntled.  They
+were really not large enough mentally to understand how
+dangerous--outside of certain fields of activity--they were to the
+party.
+
+After his conference with Hand, Gilgan, going about the city with the
+promise of ready cash on his lips, was able to arouse considerable
+enthusiasm for the Republican cause.  In the wards and sections where
+the so-called "better element" prevailed it seemed probable, because of
+the heavy moral teaching of the newspapers, that the respectable vote
+would array itself almost solidly this time against Cowperwood.  In the
+poorer wards it would not be so easy.  True, it was possible, by a
+sufficient outlay of cash, to find certain hardy bucaneers who could be
+induced to knife their own brothers, but the result was not certain.
+Having heard through one person and another of the disgruntled mood of
+both Kerrigan and Tiernan, and recognizing himself, even if he was a
+Republican, to be a man much more of their own stripe than either
+McKenty or Dowling, Gilgan decided to visit that lusty pair and see
+what could be done by way of alienating them from the present center of
+power.
+
+After due reflection he first sought out "Emerald Pat" Kerrigan, whom
+he knew personally but with whom he was by no means intimate
+politically, at his "Emporium Bar" in Dearborn Street.  This particular
+saloon, a feature of political Chicago at this time, was a large affair
+containing among other marvelous saloon fixtures a circular bar of
+cherry wood twelve feet in diameter, which glowed as a small mountain
+with the customary plain and colored glasses, bottles, labels, and
+mirrors.  The floor was a composition of small, shaded red-and-green
+marbles; the ceiling a daub of pinky, fleshy nudes floating among
+diaphanous clouds; the walls were alternate panels of cerise and brown
+set in rosewood.  Mr. Kerrigan, when other duties were not pressing,
+was usually to be found standing chatting with several friends and
+surveying the wonders of his bar trade, which was very large.  On the
+day of Mr. Gilgan's call he was resplendent in a dark-brown suit with a
+fine red stripe in it, Cordovan leather shoes, a wine-colored tie
+ornamented with the emerald of so much renown, and a straw hat of
+flaring proportions and novel weave.  About his waist, in lieu of a
+waistcoat, was fastened one of the eccentricities of the day, a
+manufactured silk sash.  He formed an interesting contrast with Mr.
+Gilgan, who now came up very moist, pink, and warm, in a fine, light
+tweed of creamy, showy texture, straw hat, and yellow shoes.
+
+"How are you, Kerrigan?" he observed, genially, there being no
+political enmity between them.  "How's the first, and how's trade? I
+see you haven't lost the emerald yet?"
+
+"No.  No danger of that.  Oh, trade's all right.  And so's the first.
+How's Mr. Gilgan?" Kerrigan extended his hand cordially.
+
+"I have a word to say to you.  Have you any time to spare?"
+
+For answer Mr. Kerrigan led the way into the back room.  Already he had
+heard rumors of a strong Republican opposition at the coming election.
+
+Mr. Gilgan sat down.  "It's about things this fall I've come to see
+you, of course," he began, smilingly.  "You and I are supposed to be on
+opposite sides of the fence, and we are as a rule, but I am wondering
+whether we need be this time or not?"
+
+Mr. Kerrigan, shrewd though seemingly simple, fixed him with an amiable
+eye.  "What's your scheme?" he said.  "I'm always open to a good idea."
+
+"Well, it's just this," began Mr. Gilgan, feeling his way.  "You have a
+fine big ward here that you carry in your vest pocket, and so has
+Tiernan, as we all know; and we all know, too, that if it wasn't for
+what you and him can do there wouldn't always be a Democratic mayor
+elected.  Now, I have an idea, from looking into the thing, that
+neither you nor Tiernan have got as much out of it so far as you might
+have."
+
+Mr. Kerrigan was too cautious to comment as to that, though Mr. Gilgan
+paused for a moment.
+
+"Now, I have a plan, as I say, and you can take it or leave it, just as
+you want, and no hard feelings one way or the other.  I think the
+Republicans are going to win this fall--McKenty or no McKenty--first,
+second, and third wards with us or not, as they choose.  The doings of
+the big fellow"--he was referring to McKenty--"with the other fellow in
+North Clark Street"--Mr. Gilgan preferred to be a little enigmatic at
+times--"are very much in the wind just now.  You see how the papers
+stand.  I happen to know where there's any quantity of money coming
+into the game from big financial quarters who have no use for this
+railroad man.  It's a solid La Salle and Dearborn Street line-up, so
+far as I can see. Why, I don't know.  But so it is.  Maybe you know
+better than I do.  Anyhow, that's the way it stands now.  Add to that
+the fact that there are eight naturally Republican wards as it is, and
+ten more where there is always a fighting chance, and you begin to see
+what I'm driving at.  Count out these last ten, though, and bet only on
+the eight that are sure to stand.  That leaves twenty-three wards that
+we Republicans always conceded to you people; but if we manage to carry
+thirteen of them along with the eight I'm talking about, we'll have a
+majority in council, and"--flick! he snapped his fingers--"out you
+go--you, McKenty, Cowperwood, and all the rest.  No more franchises, no
+more street-paving contracts, no more gas deals.  Nothing--for two
+years, anyhow, and maybe longer. If we win we'll take the jobs and the
+fat deals." He paused and surveyed Kerrigan cheerfully but defiantly.
+
+"Now, I've just been all over the city," he continued, "in every ward
+and precinct, so I know something of what I am talking about. I have
+the men and the cash to put up a fight all along the line this time.
+This fall we win--me and the big fellows over there in La Salle Street,
+and all the Republicans or Democrats or Prohibitionists, or whoever
+else comes in with us--do you get me? We're going to put up the biggest
+political fight Chicago has ever seen.  I'm not naming any names just
+yet, but when the time comes you'll see.  Now, what I want to ask of
+you is this, and I'll not mince me words nor beat around the bush.
+Will you and Tiernan come in with me and Edstrom to take over the city
+and run it during the next two years? If you will, we can win hands
+down.  It will be a case of share and share alike on
+everything--police, gas, water, highways, street-railways,
+everything--or we'll divide beforehand and put it down in black and
+white.  I know that you and Tiernan work together, or I wouldn't talk
+about this.  Edstrom has the Swedes where he wants them, and he'll poll
+twenty thousand of them this fall.  There's Ungerich with his Germans;
+one of us might make a deal with him afterward, give him most any
+office he wants.  If we win this time we can hold the city for six or
+eight years anyhow, most likely, and after that--well, there's no use
+lookin' too far in the future--Anyhow we'd have a majority of the
+council and carry the mayor along with it."
+
+"If--" commented Mr. Kerrigan, dryly.
+
+"If," replied Mr. Gilgan, sententiously.  "You're very right. There's a
+big 'if' in there, I'll admit.  But if these two wards--yours and
+Tiernan's--could by any chance be carried for the Republicans they'd be
+equal to any four or five of the others."
+
+"Very true," replied Mr. Kerrigan, "if they could be carried for the
+Republicans.  But they can't be.  What do you want me to do, anyhow?
+Lose me seat in council and be run out of the Democratic party? What's
+your game? You don't take me for a plain damn fool, do you?"
+
+"Sorry the man that ever took 'Emerald Pat' for that," answered Gilgan,
+with honeyed compliment.  "I never would.  But no one is askin' ye to
+lose your seat in council and be run out of the Democratic party.
+What's to hinder you from electin' yourself and droppin' the rest of
+the ticket?" He had almost said "knifing."
+
+Mr. Kerrigan smiled.  In spite of all his previous dissatisfaction with
+the Chicago situation he had not thought of Mr. Gilgan's talk as
+leading to this.  It was an interesting idea.  He had "knifed" people
+before--here and there a particular candidate whom it was desirable to
+undo.  If the Democratic party was in any danger of losing this fall,
+and if Gilgan was honest in his desire to divide and control, it might
+not be such a bad thing.  Neither Cowperwood, McKenty, nor Dowling had
+ever favored him in any particular way. If they lost through him, and
+he could still keep himself in power, they would have to make terms
+with him.  There was no chance of their running him out.  Why shouldn't
+he knife the ticket? It was worth thinking over, to say the least.
+
+"That's all very fine," he observed, dryly, after his meditations had
+run their course; "but how do I know that you wouldn't turn around and
+'welch' on the agreement afterward?" (Mr. Gilgan stirred irritably at
+the suggestion.) "Dave Morrissey came to me four years ago to help him
+out, and a lot of satisfaction I got afterward." Kerrigan was referring
+to a man whom he had helped make county clerk, and who had turned on
+him when he asked for return favors and his support for the office of
+commissioner of highways. Morrissey had become a prominent politician.
+
+"That's very easy to say," replied Gilgan, irritably, "but it's not
+true of me.  Ask any man in my district.  Ask the men who know me.
+I'll put my part of the bargain in black and white if you'll put yours.
+If I don't make good, show me up afterward.  I'll take you to the
+people that are backing me.  I'll show you the money. I've got the
+goods this time.  What do you stand to lose, anyhow? They can't run you
+out for cutting the ticket.  They can't prove it.  We'll bring police
+in here to make it look like a fair vote. I'll put up as much money as
+they will to carry this district, and more."
+
+Mr. Kerrigan suddenly saw a grand coup here.  He could "draw down" from
+the Democrats, as he would have expressed it, twenty to twenty-five
+thousand dollars to do the dirty work here.  Gilgan would furnish him
+as much and more--the situation being so critical. Perhaps fifteen or
+eighteen thousand would be necessary to poll the number of votes
+required either way.  At the last hour, before stuffing the boxes, he
+would learn how the city was going.  If it looked favorable for the
+Republicans it would be easy to complete the victory and complain that
+his lieutenants had been suborned. If it looked certain for the
+Democrats he could throw Gilgan and pocket his funds.  In either case
+he would be "in" twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars, and he would
+still be councilman.
+
+"All very fine," replied Mr. Kerrigan, pretending a dullness which he
+did not feel; "but it's damned ticklish business at best.  I don't know
+that I want anything to do with it even if we could win.  It's true the
+City Hall crowd have never played into my hands very much; but this is
+a Democratic district, and I'm a Democrat. If it ever got out that I
+had thrown the party it would be pretty near all day with me.
+
+"I'm a man of my word," declared Mr. Gilgan, emphatically, getting up.
+"I never threw a man or a bet in my life.  Look at me record in the
+eighteenth.  Did you ever hear any one say that I had?"
+
+"No, I never did," returned Kerrigan, mildly.  "But it's a pretty large
+thing you're proposing, Mr. Gilgan.  I wouldn't want to say what I
+thought about it offhand.  This ward is supposed to be Democratic.  It
+couldn't be swung over into the Republican column without a good bit of
+fuss being made about it.  You'd better see Mr. Tiernan first and hear
+what he has to say.  Afterward I might be willing to talk about it
+further.  Not now, though--not now."
+
+Mr. Gilgan went away quite jauntily and cheerfully.  He was not at all
+downcast.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVI
+
+An Election Draws Near
+
+
+Subsequently Mr. Kerrigan called on Mr. Tiernan casually.  Mr. Tiernan
+returned the call.  A little later Messrs. Tiernan, Kerrigan, and
+Gilgan, in a parlor-room in a small hotel in Milwaukee (in order not to
+be seen together), conferred.  Finally Messrs. Tiernan, Edstrom,
+Kerrigan, and Gilgan met and mapped out a programme of division far too
+intricate to be indicated here.  Needless to say, it involved the
+division of chief clerks, pro rata, of police graft, of gambling and
+bawdy-house perquisites, of returns from gas, street-railway, and other
+organizations.  It was sealed with many solemn promises.  If it could
+be made effective this quadrumvirate was to endure for years.  Judges,
+small magistrates, officers large and small, the shrievalty, the water
+office, the tax office, all were to come within its purview.  It was a
+fine, handsome political dream, and as such worthy of every courtesy
+and consideration but it was only a political dream in its ultimate
+aspects, and as such impressed the participants themselves at times.
+
+The campaign was now in full blast.  The summer and fall (September and
+October) went by to the tune of Democratic and Republican marching club
+bands, to the sound of lusty political voices orating in parks, at
+street-corners, in wooden "wigwams," halls, tents, and
+parlors--wherever a meager handful of listeners could be drummed up and
+made by any device to keep still.  The newspapers honked and bellowed,
+as is the way with those profit-appointed advocates and guardians of
+"right" and "justice."  Cowperwood and McKenty were denounced from
+nearly every street-corner in Chicago. Wagons and sign-boards on wheels
+were hauled about labeled "Break the partnership between the
+street-railway corporations and the city council." "Do you want more
+streets stolen?" "Do you want Cowperwood to own Chicago?" Cowperwood
+himself, coming down-town of a morning or driving home of an evening,
+saw these things.  He saw the huge signs, listened to speeches
+denouncing himself, and smiled.  By now he was quite aware as to whence
+this powerful uprising had sprung.  Hand was back of it, he knew--for
+so McKenty and Addison had quickly discovered--and with Hand was
+Schryhart, Arneel, Merrill, the Douglas Trust Company, the various
+editors, young Truman Leslie MacDonald, the old gas crowd, the Chicago
+General Company--all.  He even suspected that certain aldermen might
+possibly be suborned to desert him, though all professed loyalty.
+McKenty, Addison, Videra, and himself were planning the details of
+their defenses as carefully and effectively as possible. Cowperwood was
+fully alive to the fact that if he lost this election--the first to be
+vigorously contested--it might involve a serious chain of events; but
+he did not propose to be unduly disturbed, since he could always fight
+in the courts by money, and by preferment in the council, and with the
+mayor and the city attorney.  "There is more than one way to kill a
+cat," was one of his pet expressions, and it expressed his logic and
+courage exactly. Yet he did not wish to lose.
+
+One of the amusing features of the campaign was that the McKenty
+orators had been instructed to shout as loudly for reforms as the
+Republicans, only instead of assailing Cowperwood and McKenty they were
+to point out that Schryhart's Chicago City Railway was far more
+rapacious, and that this was a scheme to give it a blanket franchise of
+all streets not yet covered by either the Cowperwood or the
+Schryhart-Hand-Arneel lines.  It was a pretty argument. The Democrats
+could point with pride to a uniformly liberal interpretation of some
+trying Sunday laws, whereby under Republican and reform administrations
+it had been occasionally difficult for the honest working-man to get
+his glass or pail of beer on Sunday. On the other hand it was possible
+for the Republican orators to show how "the low dives and gin-mills"
+were everywhere being operated in favor of McKenty, and that under the
+highly respectable administration of the Republican candidate for mayor
+this partnership between the city government and vice and crime would
+be nullified.
+
+"If I am elected," declared the Honorable Chaffee Thayer Sluss, the
+Republican candidate, "neither Frank Cowperwood nor John McKenty will
+dare to show his face in the City Hall unless he comes with clean hands
+and an honest purpose.
+
+"Hooray!" yelled the crowd.
+
+"I know that ass," commented Addison, when he read this in the
+Transcript.  "He used to be a clerk in the Douglas Trust Company. He's
+made a little money recently in the paper business.  He's a mere tool
+for the Arneel-Schryhart interests.  He hasn't the courage of a
+two-inch fish-worm."
+
+When McKenty read it he simply observed: "There are other ways of going
+to City Hall than by going yourself." He was depending upon a
+councilmanic majority at least.
+
+However, in the midst of this uproar the goings to and fro of Gilgan,
+Edstrom, Kerrigan, and Tiernan were nor fully grasped.  A more urbanely
+shifty pair than these latter were never seen.  While fraternizing
+secretly with both Gilgan and Edstrom, laying out their political
+programme most neatly, they were at the same time conferring with
+Dowling, Duvanicki, even McKenty himself.  Seeing that the outcome was,
+for some reason--he could scarcely see why--looking very uncertain,
+McKenty one day asked the two of them to come to see him.  On getting
+the letter Mr. Tiernan strolled over to Mr. Kerrigan's place to see
+whether he also had received a message.
+
+"Sure, sure! I did!" replied Mr. Kerrigan, gaily.  "Here it is now in
+me outside coat pocket.  'Dear Mr. Kerrigan,'" he read, "'won't you do
+me the favor to come over to-morrow evening at seven and dine with me?
+Mr. Ungerich, Mr. Duvanicki, and several others will very likely drop
+in afterward.  I have asked Mr. Tiernan to come at the same time.
+Sincerely, John J. McKenty.' That's the way he does it," added Mr.
+Kerrigan; "just like that."
+
+He kissed the letter mockingly and put it back into his pocket.
+
+"Sure I got one, jist the same way.  The very same langwidge, nearly,"
+commented Mr. Tiernan, sweetly.  "He's beginning to wake up, eh? What!
+The little old first and second are beginning to look purty big just
+now, eh? What!"
+
+"Tush!" observed Mr. Kerrigan to Mr. Tiernan, with a marked sardonic
+emphasis, "that combination won't last forever.  They've been getting
+too big for their pants, I'm thinking.  Well, it's a long road, eh?
+It's pretty near time, what?"
+
+"You're right," responded Mr. Tiernan, feelingly.  "It is a long road.
+These are the two big wards of the city, and everybody knows it.  If we
+turn on them at the last moment where will they be, eh?"
+
+He put a fat finger alongside of his heavy reddish nose and looked at
+Mr. Kerrigan out of squinted eyes.
+
+"You're damned right," replied the little politician, cheerfully.
+
+They went to the dinner separately, so as not to appear to have
+conferred before, and greeted each other on arriving as though they had
+not seen each other for days.
+
+"How's business, Mike?"
+
+"Oh, fair, Pat.  How's things with you?"
+
+"So so."
+
+"Things lookin' all right in your ward for November?"
+
+Mr. Tiernan wrinkled a fat forehead.  "Can't tell yet." All this was
+for the benefit of Mr. McKenty, who did not suspect rank party
+disloyalty.
+
+Nothing much came of this conference, except that they sat about
+discussing in a general way wards, pluralities, what Zeigler was likely
+to do with the twelfth, whether Pinski could make it in the sixth,
+Schlumbohm in the twentieth, and so on.  New Republican contestants in
+old, safe Democratic wards were making things look dubious.
+
+"And how about the first, Kerrigan?" inquired Ungerich, a thin,
+reflective German-American of shrewd presence.  Ungerich was one who
+had hitherto wormed himself higher in McKenty's favor than either
+Kerrigan or Tiernan.
+
+"Oh, the first's all right," replied Kerrigan, archly.  "Of course you
+never can tell.  This fellow Scully may do something, but I don't think
+it will be much.  If we have the same police protection--"
+
+Ungerich was gratified.  He was having a struggle in his own ward,
+where a rival by the name of Glover appeared to be pouring out money
+like water.  He would require considerably more money than usual to
+win.  It was the same with Duvanicki.
+
+McKenty finally parted with his lieutenants--more feelingly with
+Kerrigan and Tiernan than he had ever done before.  He did not wholly
+trust these two, and he could not exactly admire them and their
+methods, which were the roughest of all, but they were useful.
+
+"I'm glad to learn," he said, at parting, "that things are looking all
+right with you, Pat, and you, Mike," nodding to each in turn. "We're
+going to need the most we can get out of everybody.  I depend on you
+two to make a fine showing--the best of any.  The rest of us will not
+forget it when the plums are being handed around afterward."
+
+"Oh, you can depend on me to do the best I can always," commented Mr.
+Kerrigan, sympathetically.  "It's a tough year, but we haven't failed
+yet."
+
+"And me, Chief! That goes for me," observed Mr. Tiernan, raucously. "I
+guess I can do as well as I have."
+
+"Good for you, Mike!" soothed McKenty, laying a gentle hand on his
+shoulder.  "And you, too, Kerrigan.  Yours are the key wards, and we
+understand that.  I've always been sorry that the leaders couldn't
+agree on you two for something better than councilmen; but next time
+there won't be any doubt of it, if I have any influence then." He went
+in and closed the door.  Outside a cool October wind was whipping dead
+leaves and weed stalks along the pavements. Neither Tiernan nor
+Kerrigan spoke, though they had come away together, until they were two
+hundred feet down the avenue toward Van Buren.
+
+"Some talk, that, eh?" commented Mr. Tiernan, eying Mr. Kerrigan in the
+flare of a passing gas-lamp.
+
+"Sure.  That's the stuff they always hand out when they're up against
+it.  Pretty kind words, eh?"
+
+"And after ten years of about the roughest work that's done, eh? It's
+about time, what? Say, it's a wonder he didn't think of that last June
+when the convention was in session.
+
+"Tush! Mikey," smiled Mr. Kerrigan, grimly.  "You're a bad little boy.
+You want your pie too soon.  Wait another two or four or six years,
+like Paddy Kerrigan and the others."
+
+"Yes, I will--not," growled Mr. Tiernan.  "Wait'll the sixth."
+
+"No more, will I," replied Mr. Kerrigan.  "Say, we know a trick that
+beats that next-year business to a pulp.  What?"
+
+"You're dead right," commented Mr. Tiernan.
+
+And so they went peacefully home.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVII
+
+Aileen's Revenge
+
+
+The interesting Polk Lynde, rising one morning, decided that his affair
+with Aileen, sympathetic as it was, must culminate in the one fashion
+satisfactory to him here and now--this day, if possible, or the next.
+Since the luncheon some considerable time had elapsed, and although he
+had tried to seek her out in various ways, Aileen, owing to a certain
+feeling that she must think and not jeopardize her future, had evaded
+him.  She realized well enough that she was at the turning of the
+balance, now that opportunity was knocking so loudly at her door, and
+she was exceedingly coy and distrait. In spite of herself the old grip
+of Cowperwood was over her--the conviction that he was such a
+tremendous figure in the world--and this made her strangely disturbed,
+nebulous, and meditative. Another type of woman, having troubled as
+much as she had done, would have made short work of it, particularly
+since the details in regard to Mrs. Hand had been added.  Not so
+Aileen.  She could not quite forget the early vows and promises
+exchanged between them, nor conquer the often-fractured illusions that
+he might still behave himself.
+
+On the other hand, Polk Lynde, marauder, social adventurer, a bucaneer
+of the affections, was not so easily to be put aside, delayed, and
+gainsaid.  Not unlike Cowperwood, he was a man of real force, and his
+methods, in so far as women were concerned, were even more daring.
+Long trifling with the sex had taught him that they were coy,
+uncertain, foolishly inconsistent in their moods, even with regard to
+what they most desired.  If one contemplated victory, it had frequently
+to be taken with an iron hand.
+
+From this attitude on his part had sprung his rather dark fame. Aileen
+felt it on the day that she took lunch with him.  His solemn, dark eyes
+were treacherously sweet.  She felt as if she might be paving the way
+for some situation in which she would find herself helpless before his
+sudden mood--and yet she had come.
+
+But Lynde, meditating Aileen's delay, had this day decided that he
+should get a definite decision, and that it should be favorable. He
+called her up at ten in the morning and chafed her concerning her
+indecision and changeable moods.  He wanted to know whether she would
+not come and see the paintings at his friend's studio--whether she
+could not make up her mind to come to a barn-dance which some bachelor
+friends of his had arranged.  When she pleaded being out of sorts he
+urged her to pull herself together.  "You're making things very
+difficult for your admirers," he suggested, sweetly.
+
+Aileen fancied she had postponed the struggle diplomatically for some
+little time without ending it, when at two o'clock in the afternoon her
+door-bell was rung and the name of Lynde brought up. "He said he was
+sure you were in," commented the footman, on whom had been pressed a
+dollar, "and would you see him for just a moment? He would not keep you
+more than a moment."
+
+Aileen, taken off her guard by this effrontery, uncertain as to whether
+there might not be something of some slight import concerning which he
+wished to speak to her, quarreling with herself because of her
+indecision, really fascinated by Lynde as a rival for her affections,
+and remembering his jesting, coaxing voice of the morning, decided to
+go down.  She was lonely, and, clad in a lavender housegown with an
+ermine collar and sleeve cuffs, was reading a book.
+
+"Show him into the music-room," she said to the lackey.  When she
+entered she was breathing with some slight difficulty, for so Lynde
+affected her.  She knew she had displayed fear by not going to him
+before, and previous cowardice plainly manifested does not add to one's
+power of resistance.
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, with an assumption of bravado which she did not
+feel.  "I didn't expect to see you so soon after your telephone
+message.  You have never been in our house before, have you? Won't you
+put up your coat and hat and come into the gallery? It's brighter
+there, and you might be interested in some of the pictures."
+
+Lynde, who was seeking for any pretext whereby he might prolong his
+stay and overcome her nervous mood, accepted, pretending, however, that
+he was merely passing and with a moment to spare.
+
+"Thought I'd get just one glimpse of you again.  Couldn't resist the
+temptation to look in.  Stunning room, isn't it? Spacious--and there
+you are! Who did that? Oh, I see--Van Beers.  And a jolly fine piece of
+work it is, too, charming."
+
+He surveyed her and then turned back to the picture where, ten years
+younger, buoyant, hopeful, carrying her blue-and-white striped parasol,
+she sat on a stone bench against the Dutch background of sky and
+clouds.  Charmed by the picture she presented in both cases, he was
+genially complimentary.  To-day she was stouter, ruddier--the fiber of
+her had hardened, as it does with so many as the years come on; but she
+was still in full bloom--a little late in the summer, but in full bloom.
+
+"Oh yes; and this Rembrandt--I'm surprised! I did not know your
+husband's collection was so representative.  Israels, I see, and
+Gerome, and Meissonier! Gad! It is a representative collection, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Some of the things are excellent," she commented, with an air, aping
+Cowperwood and others, "but a number will be weeded out
+eventually--that Paul Potter and this Goy--as better examples come into
+the market."
+
+She had heard Cowperwood say as much, over and over.
+
+Finding that conversation was possible between them in this easy,
+impersonal way, Aileen became quite natural and interested, pleased and
+entertained by his discreet and charming presence.  Evidently he did
+not intend to pay much more than a passing social call. On the other
+hand, Lynde was studying her, wondering what effect his light, distant
+air was having.  As he finished a very casual survey of the gallery he
+remarked:
+
+"I have always wondered about this house.  I knew Lord did it, of
+course, and I always heard it was well done.  That is the dining-room,
+I suppose?"
+
+Aileen, who had always been inordinately vain of the house in spite of
+the fact that it had proved of small use socially, was delighted to
+show him the remainder of the rooms.  Lynde, who was used, of course,
+to houses of all degrees of material splendor--that of his own family
+being one of the best--pretended an interest he did not feel.  He
+commented as he went on the taste of the decorations and wood-carving,
+the charm of the arrangement that permitted neat brief vistas, and the
+like.
+
+"Just wait a moment," said Aileen, as they neared the door of her own
+boudoir.  "I've forgotten whether mine is in order.  I want you to see
+that."
+
+She opened it and stepped in.
+
+"Yes, you may come," she called.
+
+He followed.  "Oh yes, indeed.  Very charming.  Very graceful--those
+little lacy dancing figures--aren't they? A delightful color scheme. It
+harmonizes with you exactly.  It is quite like you."
+
+He paused, looking at the spacious rug, which was of warm blues and
+creams, and at the gilt ormolu bed.  "Well done," he said, and then,
+suddenly changing his mood and dropping his talk of decoration (Aileen
+was to his right, and he was between her and the door), he added: "Tell
+me now why won't you come to the barn-dance to-night? It would be
+charming.  You will enjoy it."
+
+Aileen saw the sudden change in his mood.  She recognized that by
+showing him the rooms she had led herself into an easily made
+disturbing position.  His dark engaging eyes told their own story.
+
+"Oh, I don't feel in the mood to.  I haven't for a number of things for
+some time.  I--"
+
+She began to move unconcernedly about him toward the door, but he
+detained her with his hand.  "Don't go just yet," he said.  "Let me
+talk to you.  You always evade me in such a nervous way.  Don't you
+like me at all?"
+
+"Oh yes, I like you; but can't we talk just as well down in the
+music-room as here? Can't I tell you why I evade you down there just as
+well as I can here?" She smiled a winning and now fearless smile.
+
+Lynde showed his even white teeth in two gleaming rows.  His eyes
+filled with a gay maliciousness.  "Surely, surely," he replied; "but
+you're so nice in your own room here.  I hate to leave it."
+
+"Just the same," replied Aileen, still gay, but now slightly disturbed
+also, "I think we might as well.  You will find me just as entertaining
+downstairs."
+
+She moved, but his strength, quite as Cowperwood's, was much too great
+for her.  He was a strong man.
+
+"Really, you know," she said, "you mustn't act this way here. Some one
+might come in.  What cause have I given you to make you think you could
+do like this with me?"
+
+"What cause?" he asked, bending over her and smoothing her plump arms
+with his brown hands.  "Oh, no definite cause, perhaps.  You are a
+cause in yourself.  I told you how sweet I thought you were, the night
+we were at the Alcott.  Didn't you understand then? I thought you did."
+
+"Oh, I understood that you liked me, and all that, perhaps.  Any one
+might do that.  But as for anything like--well--taking such liberties
+with me--I never dreamed of it.  But listen.  I think I hear some one
+coming." Aileen, making a sudden vigorous effort to free herself and
+failing, added: "Please let me go, Mr. Lynde. It isn't very gallant of
+you, I must say, restraining a woman against her will.  If I had given
+you any real cause--I shall be angry in a moment."
+
+Again the even smiling teeth and dark, wrinkling, malicious eyes.
+
+"Really! How you go on! You would think I was a perfect stranger. Don't
+you remember what you said to me at lunch? You didn't keep your
+promise.  You practically gave me to understand that you would come.
+Why didn't you? Are you afraid of me, or don't you like me, or both? I
+think you're delicious, splendid, and I want to know."
+
+He shifted his position, putting one arm about her waist, pulling her
+close to him, looking into her eyes.  With the other he held her free
+arm.  Suddenly he covered her mouth with his and then kissed her
+cheeks.  "You care for me, don't you? What did you mean by saying you
+might come, if you didn't?"
+
+He held her quite firm, while Aileen struggled.  It was a new sensation
+this--that of the other man, and this was Polk Lynde, the first
+individual outside of Cowperwood to whom she had ever felt drawn.  But
+now, here, in her own room--and it was within the range of
+possibilities that Cowperwood might return or the servants enter.
+
+"Oh, but think what you are doing," she protested, not really disturbed
+as yet as to the outcome of the contest with him, and feeling as though
+he were merely trying to make her be sweet to him without intending
+anything more at present--"here in my own room! Really, you're not the
+man I thought you were at all, if you don't instantly let me go.  Mr.
+Lynde! Mr. Lynde!" (He had bent over and was kissing her).  "Oh, you
+shouldn't do this! Really! I--I said I might come, but that was far
+from doing it.  And to have you come here and take advantage of me in
+this way! I think you're horrid.  If I ever had any interest in you, it
+is quite dead now, I can assure you.  Unless you let me go at once, I
+give you my word I will never see you any more.  I won't! Really, I
+won't! I mean it! Oh, please let me go! I'll scream, I tell you! I'll
+never see you again after this day! Oh--" It was an intense but useless
+struggle.
+
+Coming home one evening about a week later, Cowperwood found Aileen
+humming cheerfully, and yet also in a seemingly deep and reflective
+mood.  She was just completing an evening toilet, and looked young and
+colorful--quite her avid, seeking self of earlier days.
+
+"Well," he asked, cheerfully, "how have things gone to-day?" Aileen,
+feeling somehow, as one will on occasions, that if she had done wrong
+she was justified and that sometime because of this she might even win
+Cowperwood back, felt somewhat kindlier toward him.  "Oh, very well,"
+she replied.  "I stopped in at the Hoecksemas' this afternoon for a
+little while.  They're going to Mexico in November. She has the
+darlingest new basket-carriage--if she only looked like anything when
+she rode in it.  Etta is getting ready to enter Bryn Mawr.  She is all
+fussed up about leaving her dog and cat. Then I went down to one of
+Lane Cross's receptions, and over to Merrill's"--she was referring to
+the great store--"and home.  I saw Taylor Lord and Polk Lynde together
+in Wabash Avenue."
+
+"Polk Lynde?" commented Cowperwood.  "Is he interesting?"
+
+"Yes, he is," replied Aileen.  "I never met a man with such perfect
+manners.  He's so fascinating.  He's just like a boy, and yet, Heaven
+knows, he seems to have had enough worldly experience."
+
+"So I've heard," commented Cowperwood.  "Wasn't he the one that was
+mixed up in that Carmen Torriba case here a few years ago?" Cowperwood
+was referring to the matter of a Spanish dancer traveling in America
+with whom Lynde had been apparently desperately in love.
+
+"Oh yes," replied Aileen, maliciously; "but that oughtn't to make any
+difference to you.  He's charming, anyhow.  I like him."
+
+"I didn't say it did, did I? You don't object to my mentioning a mere
+incident?"
+
+"Oh, I know about the incident," replied Aileen, jestingly.  "I know
+you."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" he asked, studying her face.
+
+"Oh, I know you," she replied, sweetly and yet defensively.  "You think
+I'll stay here and be content while you run about with other
+women--play the sweet and loving wife? Well, I won't.  I know why you
+say this about Lynde.  It's to keep me from being interested in him,
+possibly.  Well, I will be if I want to.  I told you I would be, and I
+will.  You can do what you please about that.  You don't want me, so
+why should you be disturbed as to whether other men are interested in
+me or not?"
+
+The truth was that Cowperwood was not clearly thinking of any probable
+relation between Lynde and Aileen any more than he was in connection
+with her and any other man, and yet in a remote way he was sensing some
+one.  It was this that Aileen felt in him, and that brought forth her
+seemingly uncalled-for comment.  Cowperwood, under the circumstances,
+attempted to be as suave as possible, having caught the implication
+clearly.
+
+"Aileen," he cooed, "how you talk! Why do you say that? You know I care
+for you.  I can't prevent anything you want to do, and I'm sure you
+know I don't want to.  It's you that I want to see satisfied. You know
+that I care."
+
+"Yes, I know how you care," replied Aileen, her mood changing for the
+moment.  "Don't start that old stuff, please.  I'm sick of it. I know
+how you're running around.  I know about Mrs. Hand.  Even the
+newspapers make that plain.  You've been home just one evening in the
+last eight days, long enough for me to get more than a glimpse of you.
+Don't talk to me.  Don't try to bill and coo. I've always known.  Don't
+think I don't know who your latest flame is.  But don't begin to whine,
+and don't quarrel with me if I go about and get interested in other
+men, as I certainly will.  It will be all your fault if I do, and you
+know it.  Don't begin and complain.  It won't do you any good.  I'm not
+going to sit here and be made a fool of.  I've told you that over and
+over.  You don't believe it, but I'm not.  I told you that I'd find
+some one one of these days, and I will.  As a matter of fact, I have
+already."
+
+At this remark Cowperwood surveyed her coolly, critically, and yet not
+unsympathetically; but she swung out of the room with a defiant air
+before anything could be said, and went down to the music-room, from
+whence a few moments later there rolled up to him from the hall below
+the strains of the second Hungarian Rhapsodie, feelingly and for once
+movingly played.  Into it Aileen put some of her own wild woe and
+misery.  Cowperwood hated the thought for the moment that some one as
+smug as Lynde--so good-looking, so suave a society rake--should
+interest Aileen; but if it must be, it must be.  He could have no
+honest reason for complaint.  At the same time a breath of real sorrow
+for the days that had gone swept over him. He remembered her in
+Philadelphia in her red cape as a school-girl--in his father's
+house--out horseback-riding, driving.  What a splendid, loving girl she
+had been--such a sweet fool of love. Could she really have decided not
+to worry about him any more? Could it be possible that she might find
+some one else who would be interested in her, and in whom she would
+take a keen interest? It was an odd thought for him.
+
+He watched her as she came into the dining-room later, arrayed in green
+silk of the shade of copper patina, her hair done in a high coil--and
+in spite of himself he could not help admiring her.  She looked very
+young in her soul, and yet moody--loving (for some one), eager, and
+defiant.  He reflected for a moment what terrible things passion and
+love are--how they make fools of us all.  "All of us are in the grip of
+a great creative impulse," he said to himself.  He talked of other
+things for a while--the approaching election, a poster-wagon he had
+seen bearing the question, "Shall Cowperwood own the city?" "Pretty
+cheap politics, I call that," he commented.  And then he told of
+stopping in a so-called Republican wigwam at State and Sixteenth
+streets--a great, cheaply erected, unpainted wooden shack with seats,
+and of hearing himself bitterly denounced by the reigning orator.  "I
+was tempted once to ask that donkey a few questions," he added, "but I
+decided I wouldn't."
+
+Aileen had to smile.  In spite of all his faults he was such a
+wonderful man--to set a city thus by the ears.  "Yet, what care I how
+fair he be, if he be not fair to me."
+
+"Did you meet any one else besides Lynde you liked?" he finally asked,
+archly, seeking to gather further data without stirring up too much
+feeling.
+
+Aileen, who had been studying him, feeling sure the subject would come
+up again, replied: "No, I haven't; but I don't need to.  One is enough."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" he asked, gently.
+
+"Oh, just what I say.  One will do."
+
+"You mean you are in love with Lynde?"
+
+"I mean--oh!" She stopped and surveyed him defiantly.  "What difference
+does it make to you what I mean? Yes, I am.  But what do you care? Why
+do you sit there and question me? It doesn't make any difference to you
+what I do.  You don't want me.  Why should you sit there and try to
+find out, or watch? It hasn't been any consideration for you that has
+restrained me so far.  Suppose I am in love? What difference would it
+make to you?"
+
+"Oh, I care.  You know I care.  Why do you say that?"
+
+"Yes, you care," she flared.  "I know how you care.  Well, I'll just
+tell you one thing"--rage at his indifference was driving her on--"I am
+in love with Lynde, and what's more, I'm his mistress. And I'll
+continue to be.  But what do you care?  Pshaw!"
+
+Her eyes blazed hotly, her color rose high and strong.  She breathed
+heavily.
+
+At this announcement, made in the heat of spite and rage generated by
+long indifference, Cowperwood sat up for a moment, and his eyes
+hardened with quite that implacable glare with which he sometimes
+confronted an enemy.  He felt at once there were many things he could
+do to make her life miserable, and to take revenge on Lynde, but he
+decided after a moment he would not.  It was not weakness, but a sense
+of superior power that was moving him.  Why should he be jealous? Had
+he not been unkind enough? In a moment his mood changed to one of
+sorrow for Aileen, for himself, for life, indeed--its tangles of desire
+and necessity.  He could not blame Aileen. Lynde was surely attractive.
+He had no desire to part with her or to quarrel with him--merely to
+temporarily cease all intimate relations with her and allow her mood to
+clear itself up.  Perhaps she would want to leave him of her own
+accord.  Perhaps, if he ever found the right woman, this might prove
+good grounds for his leaving her.  The right woman--where was she? He
+had never found her yet.
+
+"Aileen," he said, quite softly, "I wish you wouldn't feel so bitterly
+about this.  Why should you? When did you do this? Will you tell me
+that?"
+
+"No, I'll not tell you that," she replied, bitterly.  "It's none of
+your affair, and I'll not tell you.  Why should you ask? You don't
+care."
+
+"But I do care, I tell you," he returned, irritably, almost roughly.
+"When did you? You can tell me that, at least." His eyes had a hard,
+cold look for the moment, dying away, though, into kindly inquiry.
+
+"Oh, not long ago.  About a week," Aileen answered, as though she were
+compelled.
+
+"How long have you known him?" he asked, curiously.
+
+"Oh, four or five months, now.  I met him last winter."
+
+"And did you do this deliberately--because you were in love with him,
+or because you wanted to hurt me?"
+
+He could not believe from past scenes between them that she had ceased
+to love him.
+
+Aileen stirred irritably.  "I like that," she flared.  "I did it
+because I wanted to, and not because of any love for you--I can tell
+you that.  I like your nerve sitting here presuming to question me
+after the way you have neglected me." She pushed back her plate, and
+made as if to get up.
+
+"Wait a minute, Aileen," he said, simply, putting down his knife and
+fork and looking across the handsome table where Sevres, silver, fruit,
+and dainty dishes were spread, and where under silk-shaded lights they
+sat opposite each other.  "I wish you wouldn't talk that way to me.
+You know that I am not a petty, fourth-rate fool. You know that,
+whatever you do, I am not going to quarrel with you.  I know what the
+trouble is with you.  I know why you are acting this way, and how you
+will feel afterward if you go on. It isn't anything I will do--" He
+paused, caught by a wave of feeling.
+
+"Oh, isn't it?" she blazed, trying to overcome the emotion that was
+rising in herself.  The calmness of him stirred up memories of the
+past.  "Well, you keep your sympathy for yourself.  I don't need it.  I
+will get along.  I wish you wouldn't talk to me."
+
+She shoved her plate away with such force that she upset a glass in
+which was champagne, the wine making a frayed, yellowish splotch on the
+white linen, and, rising, hurried toward the door.  She was choking
+with anger, pain, shame, regret.
+
+"Aileen! Aileen!" he called, hurrying after her, regardless of the
+butler, who, hearing the sound of stirring chairs, had entered. These
+family woes were an old story to him.  "It's love you want--not
+revenge.  I know--I can tell.  You want to be loved by some one
+completely.  I'm sorry.  You mustn't be too hard on me.  I sha'n't be
+on you." He seized her by the arm and detained her as they entered the
+next room.  By this time Aileen was too ablaze with emotion to talk
+sensibly or understand what he was doing.
+
+"Let me go!" she exclaimed, angrily, hot tears in her eyes.  "Let me
+go! I tell you I don't love you any more.  I tell you I hate you!" She
+flung herself loose and stood erect before him.  "I don't want you to
+talk to me! I don't want you to speak to me! You're the cause of all my
+troubles.  You're the cause of whatever I do, when I do it, and don't
+you dare to deny it! You'll see! You'll see! I'll show you what I'll
+do!"
+
+She twisted and turned, but he held her firmly until, in his strong
+grasp, as usual, she collapsed and began to cry.  "Oh, I cry," she
+declared, even in her tears, "but it will be just the same.  It's too
+late! too late!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVIII
+
+An Hour of Defeat
+
+
+The stoic Cowperwood, listening to the blare and excitement that went
+with the fall campaign, was much more pained to learn of Aileen's
+desertion than to know that he had arrayed a whole social element
+against himself in Chicago.  He could not forget the wonder of those
+first days when Aileen was young, and love and hope had been the
+substance of her being.  The thought ran through all his efforts and
+cogitations like a distantly orchestrated undertone. In the main, in
+spite of his activity, he was an introspective man, and art, drama, and
+the pathos of broken ideals were not beyond him.  He harbored in no way
+any grudge against Aileen--only a kind of sorrow over the inevitable
+consequences of his own ungovernable disposition, the will to freedom
+within himself. Change! Change! the inevitable passing of things! Who
+parts with a perfect thing, even if no more than an unreasoning love,
+without a touch of self-pity?
+
+But there followed swiftly the sixth of November, with its election,
+noisy and irrational, and the latter resulted in a resounding defeat.
+Out of the thirty-two Democratic aldermen nominated only ten were
+elected, giving the opposition a full two-thirds majority in council,
+Messrs. Tiernan and Kerrigan, of course, being safely in their places.
+With them came a Republican mayor and all his Republican associates on
+the ticket, who were now supposed to carry out the theories of the
+respectable and the virtuous.  Cowperwood knew what it meant and
+prepared at once to make overtures to the enemy.  From McKenty and
+others he learned by degrees the full story of Tiernan's and Kerrigan's
+treachery, but he did not store it up bitterly against them.  Such was
+life.  They must be looked after more carefully in future, or caught in
+some trap and utterly undone.  According to their own accounts, they
+had barely managed to scrape through.
+
+"Look at meself! I only won by three hundred votes," archly declared
+Mr. Kerrigan, on divers and sundry occasions.  "By God, I almost lost
+me own ward!"
+
+Mr. Tiernan was equally emphatic.  "The police was no good to me," he
+declared, firmly.  "They let the other fellows beat up me men. I only
+polled six thousand when I should have had nine."
+
+But no one believed them.
+
+While McKenty meditated as to how in two years he should be able to
+undo this temporary victory, and Cowperwood was deciding that
+conciliation was the best policy for him, Schryhart, Hand, and Arneel,
+joining hands with young MacDonald, were wondering how they could make
+sure that this party victory would cripple Cowperwood and permanently
+prevent him from returning to power.  It was a long, intricate fight
+that followed, but it involved (before Cowperwood could possibly reach
+the new aldermen) a proposed reintroduction and passage of the
+much-opposed General Electric franchise, the granting of rights and
+privileges in outlying districts to various minor companies, and last
+and worst--a thing which had not previously dawned on Cowperwood as in
+any way probable--the projection of an ordinance granting to a certain
+South Side corporation the privilege of erecting and operating an
+elevated road.  This was as severe a blow as any that had yet been
+dealt Cowperwood, for it introduced a new factor and complication into
+the Chicago street-railway situation which had hitherto, for all its
+troubles, been comparatively simple.
+
+In order to make this plain it should be said that some eighteen or
+twenty years before in New York there had been devised and erected a
+series of elevated roads calculated to relieve the congestion of
+traffic on the lower portion of that long and narrow island, and they
+had proved an immense success.  Cowperwood had been interested in them,
+along with everything else which pertained to public street traffic,
+from the very beginning.  In his various trips to New York he had made
+a careful physical inspection of them.  He knew all about their
+incorporation, backers, the expense connected with them, their returns,
+and so forth.  Personally, in so far as New York was concerned, he
+considered them an ideal solution of traffic on that crowded island.
+Here in Chicago, where the population was as yet comparatively
+small--verging now toward a million, and widely scattered over a great
+area--he did not feel that they would be profitable--certainly not for
+some years to come.  What traffic they gained would be taken from the
+surface lines, and if he built them he would be merely doubling his
+expenses to halve his profits.  From time to time he had contemplated
+the possibility of their being built by other men--providing they could
+secure a franchise, which previous to the late election had not seemed
+probable--and in this connection he had once said to Addison: "Let them
+sink their money, and about the time the population is sufficient to
+support the lines they will have been driven into the hands of
+receivers.  That will simply chase the game into my bag, and I can buy
+them for a mere song."  With this conclusion Addison had agreed.  But
+since this conversation circumstances made the construction of these
+elevated roads far less problematic.
+
+In the first place, public interest in the idea of elevated roads was
+increasing.  They were a novelty, a factor in the life of New York; and
+at this time rivalry with the great cosmopolitan heart was very keen in
+the mind of the average Chicago citizen.  Public sentiment in this
+direction, however naive or unworthy, was nevertheless sufficient to
+make any elevated road in Chicago popular for the time being.  In the
+second place, it so happened that because of this swelling tide of
+municipal enthusiasm, this renaissance of the West, Chicago had finally
+been chosen, at a date shortly preceding the present campaign, as the
+favored city for an enormous international fair--quite the largest ever
+given in America.  Men such as Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel, to
+say nothing of the various newspaper publishers and editors, had been
+enthusiastic supporters of the project, and in this Cowperwood had been
+one with them.  No sooner, however, had the award actually been granted
+than Cowperwood's enemies made it their first concern to utilize the
+situation against him.
+
+To begin with, the site of the fair, by aid of the new anti-Cowperwood
+council, was located on the South Side, at the terminus of the
+Schryhart line, thus making the whole city pay tribute to that
+corporation.  Simultaneously the thought suddenly dawned upon the
+Schryhart faction that it would be an excellent stroke of business if
+the New York elevated-road idea were now introduced into the city--not
+so much with the purpose of making money immediately, but in order to
+bring the hated magnate to an understanding that he had a formidable
+rival which might invade the territory that he now monopolized,
+curtailing his and thus making it advisable for him to close out his
+holdings and depart.  Bland and interesting were the conferences held
+by Mr. Schryhart with Mr. Hand, and by Mr. Hand with Mr. Arneel on this
+subject.  Their plan as first outlined was to build an elevated road on
+the South Side--south of the proposed fair-grounds--and once that was
+popular--having previously secured franchises which would cover the
+entire field, West, South, and North--to construct the others at their
+leisure, and so to bid Mr. Cowperwood a sweet and smiling adieu.
+
+Cowperwood, awaiting the assembling of the new city council one month
+after election, did not propose to wait in peace and quiet until the
+enemy should strike at him unprepared.  Calling those familiar agents,
+his corporation attorneys, around him, he was shortly informed of the
+new elevated-road idea, and it gave him a real shock.  Obviously Hand
+and Schryhart were now in deadly earnest.  At once he dictated a letter
+to Mr. Gilgan asking him to call at his office.  At the same time he
+hurriedly adjured his advisers to use due diligence in discovering what
+influences could be brought to bear on the new mayor, the honorable
+Chaffee Thayer Sluss, to cause him to veto the ordinances in case they
+came before him--to effect in him, indeed, a total change of heart.
+
+The Hon. Chaffee Thayer Sluss, whose attitude in this instance was to
+prove crucial, was a tall, shapely, somewhat grandiloquent person who
+took himself and his social and commercial opportunities and doings in
+the most serious and, as it were, elevated light. You know, perhaps,
+the type of man or woman who, raised in an atmosphere of comparative
+comfort and some small social pretension, and being short of those gray
+convolutions in the human brain-pan which permit an individual to see
+life in all its fortuitousness and uncertainty, proceed because of an
+absence of necessity and the consequent lack of human experience to
+take themselves and all that they do in the most reverential and
+Providence-protected spirit. The Hon. Chaffee Thayer Sluss reasoned
+that, because of the splendid ancestry on which he prided himself, he
+was an essentially honest man.  His father had amassed a small fortune
+in the wholesale harness business.  The wife whom at the age of
+twenty-eight he had married--a pretty but inconsequential type of
+woman--was the daughter of a pickle manufacturer, whose wares were in
+some demand and whose children had been considered good "catches" in
+the neighborhood from which the Hon. Chaffee Sluss emanated.  There had
+been a highly conservative wedding feast, and a honeymoon trip to the
+Garden of the Gods and the Grand Canon.  Then the sleek Chaffee, much
+in the grace of both families because of his smug determination to rise
+in the world, had returned to his business, which was that of a
+paper-broker, and had begun with the greatest care to amass a
+competence on his own account.
+
+The Honorable Chaffee, be it admitted, had no particular faults, unless
+those of smugness and a certain over-carefulness as to his own
+prospects and opportunities can be counted as such.  But he had one
+weakness, which, in view of his young wife's stern and somewhat
+Puritanic ideas and the religious propensities of his father and
+father-in-law, was exceedingly disturbing to him.  He had an eye for
+the beauty of women in general, and particularly for plump, blonde
+women with corn-colored hair.  Now and then, in spite of the fact that
+he had an ideal wife and two lovely children, he would cast a
+meditative and speculative eye after those alluring forms that cross
+the path of all men and that seem to beckon slyly by implication if not
+by actual, open suggestion.
+
+However, it was not until several years after Mr. Sluss had married,
+and when he might have been considered settled in the ways of
+righteousness, that he actually essayed to any extent the role of a gay
+Lothario.  An experience or two with the less vigorous and vicious
+girls of the streets, a tentative love affair with a girl in his office
+who was not new to the practices she encouraged, and he was fairly
+launched.  He lent himself at first to the great folly of pretending to
+love truly; but this was taken by one and another intelligent young
+woman with a grain of salt.  The entertainment and preferment he could
+provide were accepted as sufficient reward.  One girl, however,
+actually seduced, had to be compensated by five thousand dollars--and
+that after such terrors and heartaches (his wife, her family, and his
+own looming up horribly in the background) as should have cured him
+forever of a penchant for stenographers and employees generally.
+Thereafter for a long time he confined himself strictly to such
+acquaintances as he could make through agents, brokers, and
+manufacturers who did business with him, and who occasionally invited
+him to one form of bacchanalian feast or another.
+
+As time went on he became wiser, if, alas, a little more eager. By
+association with merchants and some superior politicians whom he
+chanced to encounter, and because the ward in which he lived happened
+to be a pivotal one, he began to speak publicly on occasion and to
+gather dimly the import of that logic which sees life as a pagan wild,
+and religion and convention as the forms man puts on or off to suit his
+fancy, mood, and whims during the onward drift of the ages.  Not for
+Chaffee Thayer Sluss to grasp the true meaning of it all.  His brain
+was not big enough.  Men led dual lives, it was true; but say what you
+would, and in the face of his own erring conduct, this was very bad.
+On Sunday, when he went to church with his wife, he felt that religion
+was essential and purifying. In his own business he found himself
+frequently confronted by various little flaws of logic relating to
+undue profits, misrepresentations, and the like; but say what you
+would, nevertheless and notwithstanding, God was God, morality was
+superior, the church was important.  It was wrong to yield to one's
+impulses, as he found it so fascinating to do.  One should be better
+than his neighbor, or pretend to be.
+
+What is to be done with such a rag-bag, moralistic ass as this? In
+spite of all his philanderings, and the resultant qualms due to his
+fear of being found out, he prospered in business and rose to some
+eminence in his own community.  As he had grown more lax he had become
+somewhat more genial and tolerant, more generally acceptable.  He was a
+good Republican, a follower in the wake of Norrie Simms and young
+Truman Leslie MacDonald.  His father-in-law was both rich and
+moderately influential.  Having lent himself to some campaign speaking,
+and to party work in general, he proved quite an adept.  Because of all
+these things--his ability, such as it was, his pliability, and his
+thoroughly respectable savor--he had been slated as candidate for mayor
+on the Republican ticket, which had subsequently been elected.
+
+Cowperwood was well aware, from remarks made in the previous campaign,
+of the derogatory attitude of Mayor Sluss.  Already he had discussed it
+in a conversation with the Hon. Joel Avery (ex-state senator), who was
+in his employ at the time.  Avery had recently been in all sorts of
+corporation work, and knew the ins and outs of the courts--lawyers,
+judges, politicians--as he knew his revised statutes.  He was a very
+little man--not more than five feet one inch tall--with a wide
+forehead, saffron hair and brows, brown, cat-like eyes and a mushy
+underlip that occasionally covered the upper one as he thought.  After
+years and years Mr. Avery had learned to smile, but it was in a
+strange, exotic way. Mostly he gazed steadily, folded his lower lip
+over his upper one, and expressed his almost unchangeable conclusions
+in slow Addisonian phrases.  In the present crisis it was Mr. Avery who
+had a suggestion to make.
+
+"One thing that I think could be done," he said to Cowperwood one day
+in a very confidential conference, "would be to have a look into
+the--the--shall I say the heart affairs--of the Hon. Chaffee Thayer
+Sluss." Mr. Avery's cat-like eyes gleamed sardonically. "Unless I am
+greatly mistaken, judging the man by his personal presence merely, he
+is the sort of person who probably has had, or if not might readily be
+induced to have, some compromising affair with a woman which would
+require considerable sacrifice on his part to smooth over.  We are all
+human and vulnerable"--up went Mr. Avery's lower lip covering the upper
+one, and then down again--"and it does not behoove any of us to be too
+severely ethical and self-righteous.  Mr. Sluss is a well-meaning man,
+but a trifle sentimental, as I take it."
+
+As Mr. Avery paused Cowperwood merely contemplated him, amused no less
+by his personal appearance than by his suggestion.
+
+"Not a bad idea," he said, "though I don't like to mix heart affairs
+with politics."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Avery, soulfully, "there may be something in it. I
+don't know.  You never can tell."
+
+The upshot of this was that the task of obtaining an account of Mr.
+Sluss's habits, tastes, and proclivities was assigned to that now
+rather dignified legal personage, Mr. Burton Stimson, who in turn
+assigned it to an assistant, a Mr. Marchbanks.  It was an amazing
+situation in some respects, but those who know anything concerning the
+intricacies of politics, finance, and corporate control, as they were
+practised in those palmy days, would never marvel at the wells of
+subtlety, sinks of misery, and morasses of disaster which they
+represented.
+
+From another quarter, the Hon. Patrick Gilgan was not slow in
+responding to Cowperwood's message.  Whatever his political connections
+and proclivities, he did not care to neglect so powerful a man.
+
+"And what can I be doing for you to-day, Mr. Cowperwood?" he inquired,
+when he arrived looking nice and fresh, very spick and span after his
+victory.
+
+"Listen, Mr. Gilgan," said Cowperwood, simply, eying the Republican
+county chairman very fixedly and twiddling his thumbs with fingers
+interlocked, "are you going to let the city council jam through the
+General Electric and that South Side 'L' road ordinance without giving
+me a chance to say a word or do anything about it?"
+
+Mr. Gilgan, so Cowperwood knew, was only one of a new quadrumvirate
+setting out to rule the city, but he pretended to believe that he was
+the last word--an all power and authority--after the fashion of
+McKenty.  "Me good man," replied Gilgan, archly, "you flatter me.  I
+haven't the city council in me vest pocket.  I've been county chairman,
+it's true, and helped to elect some of these men, but I don't own 'em.
+Why shouldn't they pass the General Electric ordinance? It's an honest
+ordinance, as far as I know.  All the newspapers have been for it.  As
+for this 'L' road ordinance, I haven't anything to do with it.  It
+isn't anything I know much about.  Young MacDonald and Mr. Schryhart
+are looking after that."
+
+As a matter of fact, all that Mr. Gilgan was saying was decidedly true.
+A henchman of young MacDonald's who was beginning to learn to play
+politics--an alderman by the name of Klemm--had been scheduled as a
+kind of field-marshal, and it was MacDonald--not Gilgan, Tiernan,
+Kerrigan, or Edstrom--who was to round up the recalcitrant aldermen,
+telling them their duty.  Gilgan's quadrumvirate had not as yet got
+their machine in good working order, though they were doing their best
+to bring this about.  "I helped to elect every one of these men, it's
+true; but that doesn't mean I'm running 'em by any means," concluded
+Gilgan.  "Not yet, anyhow."
+
+At the "not yet" Cowperwood smiled.
+
+"Just the same, Mr. Gilgan," he went on, smoothly, "you're the nominal
+head and front of this whole movement in opposition to me at present,
+and you're the one I have to look to.  You have this present Republican
+situation almost entirely in your own fingers, and you can do about as
+you like if you're so minded.  If you choose you can persuade the
+members of council to take considerable more time than they otherwise
+would in passing these ordinances--of that I'm sure.  I don't know
+whether you know or not, Mr. Gilgan, though I suppose you do, that this
+whole fight against me is a strike campaign intended to drive me out of
+Chicago.  Now you're a man of sense and judgment and considerable
+business experience, and I want to ask you if you think that is fair.
+I came here some sixteen or seventeen years ago and went into the gas
+business.   It was an open field, the field I undertook to
+develop--outlying towns on the North, South, and West sides.  Yet the
+moment I started the old-line companies began to fight me, though I
+wasn't invading their territory at all at the time."
+
+"I remember it well enough," replied Gilgan.  "I was one of the men
+that helped you to get your Hyde Park franchise.  You'd never have got
+it if it hadn't been for me.  That fellow McKibben," added Gilgan, with
+a grin, "a likely chap, him.  He always walked as if he had on rubber
+shoes.  He's with you yet, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, he's around here somewhere," replied Cowperwood, loftily. "But to
+go back to this other matter, most of the men that are behind this
+General Electric ordinance and this 'L' road franchise were in the gas
+business--Blackman, Jules, Baker, Schryhart, and others--and they are
+angry because I came into their field, and angrier still because they
+had eventually to buy me out.  They're angry because I reorganized
+these old-fashioned street-railway companies here and put them on their
+feet.  Merrill is angry because I didn't run a loop around his store,
+and the others are angry because I ever got a loop at all.  They're all
+angry because I managed to step in and do the things that they should
+have done long before.  I came here--and that's the whole story in a
+nutshell. I've had to have the city council with me to be able to do
+anything at all, and because I managed to make it friendly and keep it
+so they've turned on me in that section and gone into politics.  I know
+well enough, Mr. Gilgan," concluded Cowperwood, "who has been behind
+you in this fight.  I've known all along where the money has been
+coming from.  You've won, and you've won handsomely, and I for one
+don't begrudge you your victory in the least; but what I want to know
+now is, are you going to help them carry this fight on against me in
+this way, or are you not? Are you going to give me a fighting chance?
+There's going to be another election in two years.  Politics isn't a
+bed of roses that stays made just because you make it once.  These
+fellows that you have got in with are a crowd of silk stockings.  They
+haven't any sympathy with you or any one like you.  They're willing to
+be friendly with you now--just long enough to get something out of you
+and club me to death. But after that how long do you think they will
+have any use for you--how long?"
+
+"Not very long, maybe," replied Gilgan, simply and contemplatively,
+"but the world is the world, and we have to take it as we find it."
+
+"Quite so," replied Cowperwood, undismayed; "but Chicago is Chicago,
+and I will be here as long as they will.  Fighting me in this
+fashion--building elevated roads to cut into my profits and giving
+franchises to rival companies--isn't going to get me out or seriously
+injure me, either.  I'm here to stay, and the political situation as it
+is to-day isn't going to remain the same forever and ever.  Now, you
+are an ambitious man; I can see that.  You're not in politics for your
+health--that I know.  Tell me exactly what it is you want and whether I
+can't get it for you as quick if not quicker than these other fellows?
+What is it I can do for you that will make you see that my side is just
+as good as theirs and better? I am playing a legitimate game in
+Chicago.  I've been building up an excellent street-car service.  I
+don't want to be annoyed every fifteen minutes by a rival company
+coming into the field.  Now, what can I do to straighten this out?
+Isn't there some way that you and I can come together without fighting
+at every step? Can't you suggest some programme we can both follow that
+will make things easier?"
+
+Cowperwood paused, and Gilgan thought for a long time.  It was true, as
+Cowperwood said, that he was not in politics for his health.  The
+situation, as at present conditioned, was not inherently favorable for
+the brilliant programme he had originally mapped out for himself.
+Tiernan, Kerrigan, and Edstrom were friendly as yet; but they were
+already making extravagant demands; and the reformers--those who had
+been led by the newspapers to believe that Cowperwood was a scoundrel
+and all his works vile--were demanding that a strictly moral programme
+be adhered to in all the doings of council, and that no jobs,
+contracts, or deals of any kind be entered into without the full
+knowledge of the newspapers and of the public. Gilgan, even after the
+first post-election conference with his colleagues, had begun to feel
+that he was between the devil and the deep sea, but he was feeling his
+way, and not inclined to be in too much of a hurry.
+
+"It's rather a flat proposition you're makin' me," he said softly,
+after a time, "askin' me to throw down me friends the moment I've won a
+victory for 'em.  It's not the way I've been used to playin' politics.
+There may be a lot of truth in what you say.  Still, a man can't be
+jumpin' around like a cat in a bag.  He has to be faithful to somebody
+sometime." Mr. Gilgan paused, considerably nonplussed by his own
+position.
+
+"Well," replied Cowperwood, sympathetically, "think it over.  It's
+difficult business, this business of politics.  I'm in it, for one,
+only because I have to be.  If you see any way you can help me, or I
+can help you, let me know.  In the mean time don't take in bad part
+what I've just said.  I'm in the position of a man with his hack to the
+wall.  I'm fighting for my life.  Naturally, I'm going to fight.  But
+you and I needn't be the worse friends for that.  We may become the
+best of friends yet."
+
+"It's well I know that," said Gilgan, "and it's the best of friends I'd
+like to be with you.  But even if I could take care of the aldermen,
+which I couldn't alone as yet, there's the mayor.  I don't know him at
+all except to say how-do-ye-do now and then; but he's very much opposed
+to you, as I understand it.  He'll be running around most likely and
+talking in the papers.  A man like that can do a good deal."
+
+"I may be able to arrange for that," replied Cowperwood.  "Perhaps Mr.
+Sluss can be reached.  It may be that he isn't as opposed to me as he
+thinks he is.  You never can tell."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIX
+
+The New Administration
+
+
+Oliver Marchbanks, the youthful fox to whom Stimson had assigned the
+task of trapping Mr. Sluss in some legally unsanctioned act, had by
+scurrying about finally pieced together enough of a story to make it
+exceedingly unpleasant for the Honorable Chaffee in case he were to
+become the too willing tool of Cowperwood's enemies. The principal
+agent in this affair was a certain Claudia Carlstadt--adventuress,
+detective by disposition, and a sort of smiling prostitute and
+hireling, who was at the same time a highly presentable and experienced
+individual.  Needless to say, Cowperwood knew nothing of these minor
+proceedings, though a genial nod from him in the beginning had set in
+motion the whole machinery of trespass in this respect.
+
+Claudia Carlstadt--the instrument of the Honorable Chaffee's
+undoing--was blonde, slender, notably fresh as yet, being only
+twenty-six, and as ruthless and unconsciously cruel as only the
+avaricious and unthinking type--unthinking in the larger philosophic
+meaning of the word--can be.  To grasp the reason for her being, one
+would have had to see the spiritless South Halstead Street world from
+which she had sprung--one of those neighborhoods of old, cracked, and
+battered houses where slatterns trudge to and fro with beer-cans and
+shutters swing on broken hinges.  In her youth Claudia had been made to
+"rush the growler," to sell newspapers at the corner of Halstead and
+Harrison streets, and to buy cocaine at the nearest drug store.  Her
+little dresses and underclothing had always been of the poorest and
+shabbiest material--torn and dirty, her ragged stockings frequently
+showed the white flesh of her thin little legs, and her shoes were worn
+and cracked, letting the water and snow seep through in winter.  Her
+companions were wretched little street boys of her own neighborhood,
+from whom she learned to swear and to understand and indulge in vile
+practices, though, as is often the case with children, she was not
+utterly depraved thereby, at that.  At eleven, when her mother died,
+she ran away from the wretched children's home to which she had been
+committed, and by putting up a piteous tale she was harbored on the
+West Side by an Irish family whose two daughters were clerks in a large
+retail store.  Through these Claudia became a cash-girl. Thereafter
+followed an individual career as strange and checkered as anything that
+had gone before.  Sufficient to say that Claudia's native intelligence
+was considerable.  At the age of twenty she had managed--through her
+connections with the son of a shoe manufacturer and with a rich
+jeweler--to amass a little cash and an extended wardrobe.  It was then
+that a handsome young Western Congressman, newly elected, invited her
+to Washington to take a position in a government bureau.  This
+necessitated a knowledge of stenography and typewriting, which she soon
+acquired.  Later she was introduced by a Western Senator into that form
+of secret service which has no connection with legitimate government,
+but which is profitable.  She was used to extract secrets by flattery
+and cajolery where ordinary bribery would not avail.  A matter of
+tracing the secret financial connections of an Illinois Congressman
+finally brought her back to Chicago, and here young Stimson encountered
+her.  From him she learned of the political and financial conspiracy
+against Cowperwood, and was in an odd manner fascinated. From her
+Congressmen friends she already knew something of Sluss. Stimson
+indicated that it would be worth two or three thousand dollars and
+expenses if the mayor were successfully compromised. Thus Claudia
+Carlstadt was gently navigated into Mr. Sluss's glowing life.
+
+The matter was not so difficult of accomplishment.  Through the Hon.
+Joel Avery, Marchbanks secured a letter from a political friend of Mr.
+Sluss in behalf of a young widow--temporarily embarrassed, a competent
+stenographer, and the like--who wished a place under the new
+administration.  Thus equipped, Claudia presented herself at the
+mayor's office armed for the fray, as it were, in a fetching black silk
+of a strangely heavy grain, her throat and fingers ornamented with
+simple pearls, her yellow hair arranged about her temples in exquisite
+curls.  Mr. Sluss was very busy, but made an appointment.  The next
+time she appeared a yellow and red velvet rose had been added to her
+corsage.  She was a shapely, full-bosomed young woman who had acquired
+the art of walking, sitting, standing, and bending after the most
+approved theories of the Washington cocotte.  Mr. Sluss was interested
+at once, but circumspect and careful.  He was now mayor of a great
+city, the cynosure of all eyes.  It seemed to him he remembered having
+already met Mrs. Brandon, as the lady styled herself, and she reminded
+him where. It had been two years before in the grill of the Richelieu.
+He immediately recalled details of the interesting occasion.
+
+"Ah, yes, and since then, as I understand it, you married and your
+husband died.  Most unfortunate."
+
+Mr. Sluss had a large international manner suited, as he thought, to a
+man in so exalted a position.
+
+Mrs. Brandon nodded resignedly.  Her eyebrows and lashes were carefully
+darkened so as to sweeten the lines of her face, and a dimple had been
+made in one cheek by the aid of an orange stick. She was the picture of
+delicate femininity appealingly distressful, and yet to all appearance
+commercially competent.
+
+"At the time I met you you were connected with the government service
+in Washington, I believe."
+
+"Yes, I had a small place in the Treasury Department, but this new
+administration put me out."
+
+She lifted her eyes and leaned forward, thus bringing her torso into a
+ravishing position.  She had the air of one who has done many things
+besides work in the Treasury Department.  No least detail, as she
+observed, was lost on Mr. Sluss.  He noted her shoes, which were button
+patent leather with cloth tops; her gloves, which were glace black kid
+with white stitching at the back and fastened by dark-gamet buttons;
+the coral necklace worn on this occasion, and her yellow and red velvet
+rose.  Evidently a trig and hopeful widow, even if so recently bereaved.
+
+"Let me see," mused Mr. Sluss, "where are you living? Just let me make
+a note of your address.  This is a very nice letter from Mr. Barry.
+Suppose you give me a few days to think what I can do? This is Tuesday.
+Come in again on Friday.  I'll see if anything suggests itself."
+
+He strolled with her to the official door, and noted that her step was
+light and springy.  At parting she turned a very melting gaze upon him,
+and at once he decided that if he could he would find her something.
+She was the most fascinating applicant that had yet appeared.
+
+The end of Chaffee Thayer Sluss was not far distant after this. Mrs.
+Brandon returned, as requested, her costume enlivened this time by a
+red-silk petticoat which contrived to show its ingratiating flounces
+beneath the glistening black broadcloth of her skirt.
+
+"Say, did you get on to that?" observed one of the doormen, a hold-over
+from the previous regime, to another of the same vintage. "Some style
+to the new administration, hey? We're not so slow, do you think?"
+
+He pulled his coat together and fumbled at his collar to give himself
+an air of smartness, and gazed gaily at his partner, both of them over
+sixty and dusty specimens, at that.
+
+The other poked him in the stomach.  "Hold your horses there, Bill. Not
+so fast.  We ain't got a real start yet.  Give us another six months,
+and then watch out."
+
+Mr. Sluss was pleased to see Mrs. Brandon.  He had spoken to John
+Bastienelli, the new commissioner of taxes, whose offices were directly
+over the way on the same hall, and the latter, seeing that he might
+want favors of the mayor later on, had volubly agreed to take care of
+the lady.
+
+"I am very glad to be able to give you this letter to Mr. Bastienelli,"
+commented Mr. Sluss, as he rang for a stenographer, "not only for the
+sake of my old friend Mr. Barry, but for your own as well. Do you know
+Mr. Barry very well?" he asked, curiously.
+
+"Only slightly," admitted Mrs. Brandon, feeling that Mr. Sluss would be
+glad to know she was not very intimate with those who were recommending
+her.  "I was sent to him by a Mr. Amerman." (She named an entirely
+fictitious personage.)
+
+Mr. Sluss was relieved.  As he handed her the note she once more
+surveyed him with those grateful, persuasive, appealing eyes. They made
+him almost dizzy, and set up a chemical perturbation in his blood which
+quite dispelled his good resolutions in regard to the strange woman and
+his need of being circumspect.
+
+"You say you are living on the North Side?" he inquired, smiling
+weakly, almost foolishly.
+
+"Yes, I have taken such a nice little apartment over-looking Lincoln
+Park.  I didn't know whether I was going to be able to keep it up, but
+now that I have this position-- You've been so very kind to me, Mr.
+Sluss," she concluded, with the same I-need-to-be-cared-for air.  "I
+hope you won't forget me entirely. If I could be of any personal
+service to you at any time--"
+
+Mr. Sluss was rather beside himself at the thought that this charming
+baggage of femininity, having come so close for the minute, was now
+passing on and might disappear entirely.  By a great effort of daring,
+as they walked toward the door, he managed to say: "I shall have to
+look into that little place of yours sometime and see how you are
+getting along.  I live up that way myself."
+
+"Oh, do!" she exclaimed, warmly.  "It would be so kind.  I am
+practically alone in the world.  Perhaps you play cards.  I know how to
+make a most wonderful punch.  I should like you to see how cozily I am
+settled."
+
+At this Mr. Sluss, now completely in tow of his principal weakness,
+capitulated.  "I will," he said, "I surely will.  And that sooner than
+you expect, perhaps.  You must let me know how you are getting along."
+
+He took her hand.  She held his quite warmly.  "Now I'll hold you to
+your promise," she gurgled, in a throaty, coaxing way.  A few days
+later he encountered her at lunch-time in his hall, where she had been
+literally lying in wait for him in order to repeat her invitation.
+Then he came.
+
+The hold-over employees who worked about the City Hall in connection
+with the mayor's office were hereafter instructed to note as witnesses
+the times of arrival and departure of Mrs. Brandon and Mr. Sluss.  A
+note that he wrote to Mrs. Brandon was carefully treasured, and
+sufficient evidence as to their presence at hotels and restaurants was
+garnered to make out a damaging case.  The whole affair took about four
+months; then Mrs. Brandon suddenly received an offer to return to
+Washington, and decided to depart. The letters that followed her were a
+part of the data that was finally assembled in Mr. Stimson's office to
+be used against Mr. Sluss in case he became too obstreperous in his
+opposition to Cowperwood.
+
+In the mean time the organization which Mr. Gilgan had planned with Mr.
+Tiernan, Mr. Kerrigan, and Mr. Edstrom was encountering what might be
+called rough sledding.  It was discovered that, owing to the
+temperaments of some of the new aldermen, and to the self-righteous
+attitude of their political sponsors, no franchises of any kind were to
+be passed unless they had the moral approval of such men as Hand,
+Sluss, and the other reformers; above all, no money of any kind was to
+be paid to anybody for anything.
+
+"Whaddye think of those damn four-flushers and come-ons, anyhow?"
+inquired Mr. Kerrigan of Mr. Tiernan, shortly subsequent to a
+conference with Gilgan, from which Tiernan had been unavoidably absent.
+"They've got an ordinance drawn up covering the whole city in an
+elevated-road scheme, and there ain't anything in it for anybody.  Say,
+whaddye think they think we are, anyhow?  Hey?"
+
+Mr. Tiernan himself, after his own conference with Edstrom, had been
+busy getting the lay of the land, as he termed it; and his
+investigations led him to believe that a certain alderman by the name
+of Klemm, a clever and very respectable German-American from the North
+Side, was to be the leader of the Republicans in council, and that he
+and some ten or twelve others were determined, because of moral
+principles alone, that only honest measures should be passed.  It was
+staggering.
+
+At this news Mr. Kerrigan, who had been calculating on a number of
+thousands of dollars for his vote on various occasions, stared
+incredulously.  "Well, I'll be damned!" he commented.  "They've got a
+nerve! What?"
+
+"I've been talking to this fellow Klemm of the twentieth," said Mr.
+Tiernan, sardonically.  "Say, he's a real one! I met him over at the
+Tremont talkin' to Hvranek.  He shakes hands like a dead fish.  Whaddye
+think he had the nerve to say to me.  'This isn't the Mr. Tiernan of
+the second?' he says.
+
+"'I'm the same,' says I.
+
+"'Well, you don't look as savage as I thought you did,' says he.
+Haw-haw! I felt like sayin', 'If you don't go way I'll give you a
+slight tap on the wrist.' I'd like just one pass at a stiff like that
+up a dark alley." (Mr. Tiernan almost groaned in anguish.) "And then he
+begins to say he doesn't see how there can be any reasonable objection
+to allowin' various new companies to enter the street-car field.  'It's
+sufficiently clear,' he says, 'that the public is against monopolies in
+any form.'" (Mr. Tiernan was mocking Mr. Klemm's voice and language.)
+"My eye!" he concluded, sententiously.  "Wait till he tries to throw
+that dope into Gumble and Pinski and Schlumbohm--haw, haw, haw!"
+
+Mr. Kerrigan, at the thought of these hearty aldermen accustomed to all
+the perquisites of graft and rake-off, leaned back and gave vent to a
+burst of deep-chested laughter.  "I'll tell you what it is, Mike," he
+said, archly, hitching up his tight, very artistic, and almost English
+trousers, "we're up against a bunch of pikers in this Gilgan crowd, and
+they've gotta be taught a lesson.  He knows it as well as anybody else.
+None o' that Christian con game goes around where I am.  I believe this
+man Cowperwood's right when he says them fellows are a bunch of
+soreheads and jealous. If Cowperwood's willing to put down good hard
+money to keep 'em out of his game, let them do as much to stay in it.
+This ain't no charity grab-bag.  We ought to be able to round up enough
+of these new fellows to make Schryhart and MacDonald come down good and
+plenty for what they want.  From what Gilgan said all along, I thought
+he was dealing with live ones.  They paid to win the election.  Now let
+'em pay to pull off a swell franchise if they want it, eh?"
+
+"You're damn right," echoed Tiernan.  "I'm with you to a T."
+
+It was not long after this conversation that Mr. Truman Leslie
+MacDonald, acting through Alderman Klemm, proceeded to make a count of
+noses, and found to his astonishment that he was not as strong as he
+had thought he was.  Political loyalty is such a fickle thing.  A
+number of aldermen with curious names--Horback, Fogarty, McGrane,
+Sumulsky--showed signs of being tampered with. He hurried at once to
+Messrs. Hand, Schryhart, and Arneel with this disconcerting
+information.  They had been congratulating themselves that the recent
+victory, if it resulted in nothing else, would at least produce a
+blanket 'L' road franchise, and that this would be sufficient to bring
+Cowperwood to his knees.
+
+Upon receiving MacDonald's message Hand sent at once for Gilgan. When
+he inquired as to how soon a vote on the General Electric
+franchise--which had been introduced by Mr. Klemm--could reasonably be
+expected, Gilgan declared himself much grieved to admit that in one
+direction or other considerable opposition seemed to have developed to
+the measure.
+
+"What's that?" said Hand, a little savagely.  "Didn't we make a plain
+bargain in regard to this? You had all the money you asked for, didn't
+you? You said you could give me twenty-six aldermen who would vote as
+we agreed.  You're not going to go back on your bargain, are you?"
+
+"Bargain! bargain!" retorted Gilgan, irritated because of the spirit of
+the assault.  "I agreed to elect twenty-six Republican aldermen, and
+that I did.  I don't own 'em body and soul.  I didn't name 'em in every
+case.  I made deals with the men in the different wards that had the
+best chance, and that the people wanted.  I'm not responsible for any
+crooked work that's going on behind my back, am I? I'm not responsible
+for men's not being straight if they're not?"
+
+Mr. Gilgan's face was an aggrieved question-mark.
+
+"But you had the picking of these men," insisted Mr. Hand,
+aggressively.  "Every one of them had your personal indorsement. You
+made the deals with them.  You don't mean to say they're going back on
+their sacred agreement to fight Cowperwood tooth and nail? There can't
+be any misunderstanding on their part as to what they were elected to
+do.  The newspapers have been full of the fact that nothing favorable
+to Cowperwood was to be put through."
+
+"That's all true enough," replied Mr. Gilgan; "but I can't be held
+responsible for the private honesty of everybody.  Sure I selected
+these men.  Sure I did! But I selected them with the help of the rest
+of the Republicans and some of the Democrats.  I had to make the best
+terms I could--to pick the men that could win.  As far as I can find
+out most of 'em are satisfied not to do anything for Cowperwood.  It's
+passing these ordinances in favor of other people that's stirring up
+the trouble."
+
+Mr. Hand's broad forehead wrinkled, and his blue eyes surveyed Mr.
+Gilgan with suspicion.  "Who are these men, anyhow?" he inquired. "I'd
+like to get a list of them."
+
+Mr. Gilgan, safe in his own subtlety, was ready with a toll of the
+supposed recalcitrants.  They must fight their own battles.  Mr. Hand
+wrote down the names, determining meanwhile to bring pressure to bear.
+He decided also to watch Mr. Gilgan.  If there should prove to be a
+hitch in the programme the newspapers should be informed and commanded
+to thunder appropriately.  Such aldermen as proved unfaithful to the
+great trust imposed on them should be smoked out, followed back to the
+wards which had elected them, and exposed to the people who were behind
+them.  Their names should be pilloried in the public press.  The
+customary hints as to Cowperwood's deviltry and trickery should be
+redoubled.
+
+But in the mean time Messrs. Stimson, Avery, McKibben, Van Sickle, and
+others were on Cowperwood's behalf acting separately upon various
+unattached aldermen--those not temperamentally and chronically allied
+with the reform idea--and making them understand that if they could
+find it possible to refrain from supporting anti-Cowperwood measures
+for the next two years, a bonus in the shape of an annual salary of two
+thousand dollars or a gift in some other form--perhaps a troublesome
+note indorsed or a mortgage taken care of--would be forthcoming,
+together with a guarantee that the general public should never know.
+In no case was such an offer made direct. Friends or neighbors, or
+suave unidentified strangers, brought mysterious messages.  By this
+method some eleven aldermen--quite apart from the ten regular Democrats
+who, because of McKenty and his influence, could be counted upon--had
+been already suborned. Although Schryhart, Hand, and Arneel did not
+know it, their plans--even as they planned--were being thus undermined,
+and, try as they would, the coveted ordinance for a blanket franchise
+persistently eluded them.  They had to content themselves for the time
+being with a franchise for a single 'L' road line on the South Side in
+Schryhart's own territory, and with a franchise to the General Electric
+covering only one unimportant line, which it would be easy for
+Cowperwood, if he continued in power, to take over at some later time.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XL
+
+A Trip to Louisville
+
+
+The most serious difficulty confronting Cowperwood from now on was
+really not so much political as financial.  In building up and
+financing his Chicago street-railway enterprises he had, in those days
+when Addison was president of the Lake City National, used that bank as
+his chief source of supply.  Afterward, when Addison had been forced to
+retire from the Lake City to assume charge of the Chicago Trust
+Company, Cowperwood had succeeded in having the latter designated as a
+central reserve and in inducing a number of rural banks to keep their
+special deposits in its vaults. However, since the war on him and his
+interests had begun to strengthen through the efforts of Hand and
+Arneel--men most influential in the control of the other
+central-reserve banks of Chicago, and in close touch with the money
+barons of New York--there were signs not wanting that some of the
+country banks depositing with the Chicago Trust Company had been
+induced to withdraw because of pressure from outside inimical forces,
+and that more were to follow.  It was some time before Cowperwood fully
+realized to what an extent this financial opposition might be directed
+against himself.  In its very beginning it necessitated speedy
+hurryings to New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore,
+Boston--even London at times--on the chance that there would be loose
+and ready cash in someone's possession.  It was on one of these
+peregrinations that he encountered a curious personality which led to
+various complications in his life, sentimental and otherwise, which he
+had not hitherto contemplated.
+
+In various sections of the country Cowperwood had met many men of
+wealth, some grave, some gay, with whom he did business, and among
+these in Louisville, Kentucky, he encountered a certain Col. Nathaniel
+Gillis, very wealthy, a horseman, inventor, roue, from whom he
+occasionally extracted loans.  The Colonel was an interesting figure in
+Kentucky society; and, taking a great liking to Cowperwood, he found
+pleasure, during the brief periods in which they were together, in
+piloting him about.  On one occasion in Louisville he observed:
+"To-night, Frank, with your permission, I am going to introduce you to
+one of the most interesting women I know.  She isn't good, but she's
+entertaining.  She has had a troubled history. She is the ex-wife of
+two of my best friends, both dead, and the ex-mistress of another.  I
+like her because I knew her father and mother, and because she was a
+clever little girl and still is a nice woman, even if she is getting
+along.  She keeps a sort of house of convenience here in Louisville for
+a few of her old friends. You haven't anything particular to do
+to-night, have you? Suppose we go around there?"
+
+Cowperwood, who was always genially sportive when among strong men--a
+sort of bounding collie--and who liked to humor those who could be of
+use to him, agreed.
+
+"It sounds interesting to me.  Certainly I'll go.  Tell me more about
+her.  Is she good-looking?"
+
+"Rather.  But better yet, she is connected with a number of women who
+are." The Colonel, who had a small, gray goatee and sportive dark eyes,
+winked the latter solemnly.
+
+Cowperwood arose.
+
+"Take me there," he said.
+
+It was a rainy night.  The business on which he was seeing the Colonel
+required another day to complete.  There was little or nothing to do.
+On the way the Colonel retailed more of the life history of Nannie
+Hedden, as he familiarly called her, and explained that, although this
+was her maiden name, she had subsequently become first Mrs. John
+Alexander Fleming, then, after a divorce, Mrs. Ira George Carter, and
+now, alas! was known among the exclusive set of fast livers, to which
+he belonged, as plain Hattie Starr, the keeper of a more or less secret
+house of ill repute.  Cowperwood did not take so much interest in all
+this until he saw her, and then only because of two children the
+Colonel told him about, one a girl by her first marriage, Berenice
+Fleming, who was away in a New York boarding-school, the other a boy,
+Rolfe Carter, who was in a military school for boys somewhere in the
+West.
+
+"That daughter of hers," observed the Colonel, "is a chip of the old
+block, unless I miss my guess.  I only saw her two or three times a few
+years ago when I was down East at her mother's summer home; but she
+struck me as having great charm even for a girl of ten.  She's a lady
+born, if ever there was one.  How her mother is to keep her straight,
+living as she does, is more than I know. How she keeps her in that
+school is a mystery.  There's apt to be a scandal here at any time.
+I'm very sure the girl doesn't know anything about her mother's
+business.  She never lets her come out here."
+
+"Berenice Fleming," Cowperwood thought to himself.  "What a pleasing
+name, and what a peculiar handicap in life."
+
+"How old is the daughter now?" he inquired.
+
+"Oh, she must be about fifteen--not more than that."
+
+When they reached the house, which was located in a rather somber,
+treeless street, Cowperwood was surprised to find the interior spacious
+and tastefully furnished.  Presently Mrs. Carter, as she was generally
+known in society, or Hattie Starr, as she was known to a less
+satisfying world, appeared.  Cowperwood realized at once that he was in
+the presence of a woman who, whatever her present occupation, was not
+without marked evidences of refinement.  She was exceedingly
+intelligent, if not highly intellectual, trig, vivacious, anything but
+commonplace.  A certain spirited undulation in her walk, a seeming gay,
+frank indifference to her position in life, an obvious accustomedness
+to polite surroundings took his fancy.  Her hair was built up in a
+loose Frenchy way, after the fashion of the empire, and her cheeks were
+slightly mottled with red veins.  Her color was too high, and yet it
+was not utterly unbecoming.  She had friendly gray-blue eyes, which
+went well with her light-brown hair; along with a pink flowered
+house-gown, which became her fulling figure, she wore pearls.
+
+"The widow of two husbands," thought Cowperwood; "the mother of two
+children!" With the Colonel's easy introduction began a light
+conversation.  Mrs. Carter gracefully persisted that she had known of
+Cowperwood for some time.  His strenuous street-railway operations were
+more or less familiar to her.
+
+"It would be nice," she suggested, "since Mr. Cowperwood is here, if we
+invited Grace Deming to call."
+
+The latter was a favorite of the Colonel's.
+
+"I would be very glad if I could talk to Mrs. Carter," gallantly
+volunteered Cowperwood--he scarcely knew why.  He was curious to learn
+more of her history.  On subsequent occasions, and in more extended
+conversation with the Colonel, it was retailed to him in full.
+
+Nannie Hedden, or Mrs. John Alexander Fleming, or Mrs. Ira George
+Carter, or Hattie Starr, was by birth a descendant of a long line of
+Virginia and Kentucky Heddens and Colters, related in a definite or
+vague way to half the aristocracy of four or five of the surrounding
+states.  Now, although still a woman of brilliant parts, she was the
+keeper of a select house of assignation in this meager city of perhaps
+two hundred thousand population.  How had it happened? How could it
+possibly have come about? She had been in her day a reigning beauty.
+She had been born to money and had married money.  Her first husband,
+John Alexander Fleming, who had inherited wealth, tastes, privileges,
+and vices from a long line of slave-holding, tobacco-growing Flemings,
+was a charming man of the Kentucky-Virginia society type.  He had been
+trained in the law with a view to entering the diplomatic service, but,
+being an idler by nature, had never done so.  Instead, horse-raising,
+horse-racing, philandering, dancing, hunting, and the like, had taken
+up his time.  When their wedding took place the Kentucky-Virginia
+society world considered it a great match.  There was wealth on both
+sides.  Then came much more of that idle social whirl which had
+produced the marriage.  Even philanderings of a very vital character
+were not barred, though deception, in some degree at least, would be
+necessary.  As a natural result there followed the appearance in the
+mountains of North Carolina during a charming autumn outing of a gay
+young spark by the name of Tucker Tanner, and the bestowal on him by
+the beautiful Nannie Fleming--as she was then called--of her temporary
+affections.  Kind friends were quick to report what Fleming himself did
+not see, and Fleming, roue that he was, encountering young Mr. Tanner
+on a high mountain road one evening, said to him, "You get out of this
+party by night, or I will let daylight through you in the morning."
+Tucker Tanner, realizing that however senseless and unfair the
+exaggerated chivalry of the South might be, the end would be bullets
+just the same, departed.  Mrs. Fleming, disturbed but unrepentant,
+considered herself greatly abused.  There was much scandal.  Then came
+quarrels, drinking on both sides, finally a divorce.  Mr. Tucker Tanner
+did not appear to claim his damaged love, but the aforementioned Ira
+George Carter, a penniless never-do-well of the same generation and
+social standing, offered himself and was accepted.  By the first
+marriage there had been one child, a girl.  By the second there was
+another child, a boy.  Ira George Carter, before the children were old
+enough to impress Mrs. Carter with the importance of their needs or her
+own affection for them, had squandered, in one ridiculous venture after
+another, the bulk of the property willed to her by her father, Major
+Wickham Hedden.  Ultimately, after drunkenness and dissipation on the
+husband's side, and finally his death, came the approach of poverty.
+Mrs. Carter was not practical, and still passionate and inclined to
+dissipation. However, the aimless, fatuous going to pieces of Ira
+George Carter, the looming pathos of the future of the children, and a
+growing sense of affection and responsibility had finally sobered her.
+The lure of love and life had not entirely disappeared, but her chance
+of sipping at those crystal founts had grown sadly slender. A woman of
+thirty-eight and still possessing some beauty, she was not content to
+eat the husks provided for the unworthy.  Her gorge rose at the thought
+of that neglected state into which the pariahs of society fall and on
+which the inexperienced so cheerfully comment.  Neglected by her own
+set, shunned by the respectable, her fortune quite gone, she was
+nevertheless determined that she would not be a back-street seamstress
+or a pensioner upon the bounty of quondam friends.  By insensible
+degrees came first unhallowed relationships through friendship and
+passing passion, then a curious intermediate state between the high
+world of fashion and the half world of harlotry, until, finally, in
+Louisville, she had become, not openly, but actually, the mistress of a
+house of ill repute.  Men who knew how these things were done, and who
+were consulting their own convenience far more than her welfare,
+suggested the advisability of it.  Three or four friends like Colonel
+Gillis wished rooms--convenient place in which to loaf, gamble, and
+bring their women.  Hattie Starr was her name now, and as such she had
+even become known in a vague way to the police--but only vaguely--as a
+woman whose home was suspiciously gay on occasions.
+
+Cowperwood, with his appetite for the wonders of life, his appreciation
+of the dramas which produce either failure or success, could not help
+being interested in this spoiled woman who was sailing so vaguely the
+seas of chance.  Colonel Gillis once said that with some strong man to
+back her, Nannie Fleming could be put back into society.  She had a
+pleasant appeal--she and her two children, of whom she never spoke.
+After a few visits to her home Cowperwood spent hours talking with Mrs.
+Carter whenever he was in Louisville.  On one occasion, as they were
+entering her boudoir, she picked up a photograph of her daughter from
+the dresser and dropped it into a drawer.  Cowperwood had never seen
+this picture before.  It was that of a girl of fifteen or sixteen, of
+whom he obtained but the most fleeting glance.  Yet, with that instinct
+for the essential and vital which invariably possessed him, he gained a
+keen impression of it.  It was of a delicately haggard child with a
+marvelously agreeable smile, a fine, high-poised head upon a thin neck,
+and an air of bored superiority.  Combined with this was a touch of
+weariness about the eyelids which drooped in a lofty way.  Cowperwood
+was fascinated.  Because of the daughter he professed an interest in
+the mother, which he really did not feel.
+
+A little later Cowperwood was moved to definite action by the discovery
+in a photographer's window in Louisville of a second picture of
+Berenice--a rather large affair which Mrs. Carter had had enlarged from
+a print sent her by her daughter some time before. Berenice was
+standing rather indifferently posed at the corner of a colonial mantel,
+a soft straw outing-hat held negligently in one hand, one hip sunk
+lower than the other, a faint, elusive smile playing dimly around her
+mouth.  The smile was really not a smile, but only the wraith of one,
+and the eyes were wide, disingenuous, mock-simple.  The picture because
+of its simplicity, appealed to him.  He did not know that Mrs. Carter
+had never sanctioned its display.  "A personage," was Cowperwood's
+comment to himself, and he walked into the photographer's office to see
+what could be done about its removal and the destruction of the plates.
+A half-hundred dollars, he found, would arrange it all--plates, prints,
+everything. Since by this ruse he secured a picture for himself, he
+promptly had it framed and hung in his Chicago rooms, where sometimes
+of an afternoon when he was hurrying to change his clothes he stopped
+to look at it.  With each succeeding examination his admiration and
+curiosity grew.  Here was perhaps, he thought, the true society woman,
+the high-born lady, the realization of that ideal which Mrs. Merrill
+and many another grande dame had suggested.
+
+It was not so long after this again that, chancing to be in Louisville,
+he discovered Mrs. Carter in a very troubled social condition.  Her
+affairs had received a severe setback.  A certain Major Hagenback, a
+citizen of considerable prominence, had died in her home under peculiar
+circumstances.  He was a man of wealth, married, and nominally living
+with his wife in Lexington.  As a matter of fact, he spent very little
+time there, and at the time of his death of heart failure was leading a
+pleasurable existence with a Miss Trent, an actress, whom he had
+introduced to Mrs. Carter as his friend.  The police, through a
+talkative deputy coroner, were made aware of all the facts.  Pictures
+of Miss Trent, Mrs. Carter, Major Hagenback, his wife, and many curious
+details concerning Mrs. Carter's home were about to appear in the
+papers when Colonel Gillis and others who were powerful socially and
+politically interfered; the affair was hushed up, but Mrs. Carter was
+in distress.  This was more than she had bargained for.
+
+Her quondam friends were frightened away for the nonce.  She herself
+had lost courage.  When Cowperwood saw her she had been in the very
+human act of crying, and her eyes were red.
+
+"Well, well," he commented, on seeing her--she was in moody gray in the
+bargain--"you don't mean to tell me you're worrying about anything, are
+you?"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Cowperwood," she explained, pathetically, "I have had so much
+trouble since I saw you.  You heard of Major Hagenback's death, didn't
+you?" Cowperwood, who had heard something of the story from Colonel
+Gillis, nodded.  "Well, I have just been notified by the police that I
+will have to move, and the landlord has given me notice, too.  If it
+just weren't for my two children--"
+
+She dabbed at her eyes pathetically.
+
+Cowperwood meditated interestedly.
+
+"Haven't you any place you can go?" he asked.
+
+"I have a summer place in Pennsylvania," she confessed; "but I can't go
+there very well in February.  Besides, it's my living I'm worrying
+about.  I have only this to depend on."
+
+She waved her hand inclusively toward the various rooms.  "Don't you
+own that place in Pennsylvania?" he inquired.
+
+"Yes, but it isn't worth much, and I couldn't sell it.  I've been
+trying to do that anyhow for some time, because Berenice is getting
+tired of it."
+
+"And haven't you any money laid away?"
+
+"It's taken all I have to run this place and keep the children in
+school.  I've been trying to give Berenice and Rolfe a chance to do
+something for themselves."
+
+At the repetition of Berenice's name Cowperwood consulted his own
+interest or mood in the matter.  A little assistance for her would not
+bother him much.  Besides, it would probably eventually bring about a
+meeting with the daughter.
+
+"Why don't you clear out of this?" he observed, finally.  "It's no
+business to be in, anyhow, if you have any regard for your children.
+They can't survive anything like this.  You want to put your daughter
+back in society, don't you?"
+
+"Oh yes," almost pleaded Mrs. Carter.
+
+"Precisely," commented Cowperwood, who, when he was thinking, almost
+invariably dropped into a short, cold, curt, business manner. Yet he
+was humanely inclined in this instance.
+
+"Well, then, why not live in your Pennsylvania place for the present,
+or, if not that, go to New York? You can't stay here. Ship or sell
+these things." He waved a hand toward the rooms.
+
+"I would only too gladly," replied Mrs. Carter, "if I knew what to do."
+
+"Take my advice and go to New York for the present.  You will get rid
+of your expenses here, and I will help you with the rest--for the
+present, anyhow.  You can get a start again.  It is too bad about these
+children of yours.  I will take care of the boy as soon as he is old
+enough.  As for Berenice"--he used her name softly--"if she can stay in
+her school until she is nineteen or twenty the chances are that she
+will make social connections which will save her nicely.  The thing for
+you to do is to avoid meeting any of this old crowd out here in the
+future if you can.  It might be advisable to take her abroad for a time
+after she leaves school."
+
+"Yes, if I just could," sighed Mrs. Carter, rather lamely.
+
+"Well, do what I suggest now, and we will see," observed Cowperwood.
+"It would be a pity if your two children were to have their lives
+ruined by such an accident as this."
+
+Mrs. Carter, realizing that here, in the shape of Cowperwood, if he
+chose to be generous, was the open way out of a lowering dungeon of
+misery, was inclined to give vent to a bit of grateful emotion, but,
+finding him subtly remote, restrained herself.  His manner, while
+warmly generous at times, was also easily distant, except when he
+wished it to be otherwise.  Just now he was thinking of the high soul
+of Berenice Fleming and of its possible value to him.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLI
+
+The Daughter of Mrs. Fleming
+
+
+Berenice Fleming, at the time Cowperwood first encountered her mother,
+was an inmate of the Misses Brewster's School for Girls, then on
+Riverside Drive, New York, and one of the most exclusive establishments
+of its kind in America.  The social prestige and connections of the
+Heddens, Flemings, and Carters were sufficient to gain her this
+introduction, though the social fortunes of her mother were already at
+this time on the down grade.  A tall girl, delicately haggard, as he
+had imagined her, with reddish-bronze hair of a tinge but distantly
+allied to that of Aileen's, she was unlike any woman Cowperwood had
+ever known.  Even at seventeen she stood up and out with an
+inexplicable superiority which brought her the feverish and exotic
+attention of lesser personalities whose emotional animality found an
+outlet in swinging a censer at her shrine.
+
+A strange maiden, decidedly! Even at this age, when she was, as one
+might suppose, a mere slip of a girl, she was deeply conscious of
+herself, her sex, her significance, her possible social import. Armed
+with a fair skin, a few freckles, an almost too high color at times,
+strange, deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather
+pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always
+with a feline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the
+acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines. One of her mess-hall
+tricks, when unobserved by her instructors, was to walk with six plates
+and a water-pitcher all gracefully poised on the top of her head after
+the fashion of the Asiatic and the African, her hips moving, her
+shoulders, neck, and head still. Girls begged weeks on end to have her
+repeat this "stunt," as they called it.  Another was to put her arms
+behind her and with a rush imitate the Winged Victory, a copy of which
+graced the library hall.
+
+"You know," one little rosy-cheeked satellite used to urge on her,
+adoringly, "she must have been like you.  Her head must have been like
+yours.  You are lovely when you do it."
+
+For answer Berenice's deep, almost black-blue eyes turned on her
+admirer with solemn unflattered consideration.  She awed always by the
+something that she did not say.
+
+The school, for all the noble dames who presided over it--solemn,
+inexperienced owl-like conventionalists who insisted on the last tittle
+and jot of order and procedure--was a joke to Berenice. She recognized
+the value of its social import, but even at fifteen and sixteen she was
+superior to it.  She was superior to her superiors and to the specimens
+of maidenhood--supposed to be perfect socially--who gathered about to
+hear her talk, to hear her sing, declaim, or imitate.  She was deeply,
+dramatically, urgently conscious of the value of her personality in
+itself, not as connected with any inherited social standing, but of its
+innate worth, and of the artistry and wonder of her body.  One of her
+chief delights was to walk alone in her room--sometimes at night, the
+lamp out, the moon perhaps faintly illuminating her chamber--and to
+pose and survey her body, and dance in some naive, graceful, airy Greek
+way a dance that was singularly free from sex consciousness--and yet
+was it? She was conscious of her body--of every inch of it--under the
+ivory-white clothes which she frequently wore.  Once she wrote in a
+secret diary which she maintained--another art impulse or an
+affectation, as you will: "My skin is so wonderful.  It tingles so with
+rich life.  I love it and my strong muscles underneath. I love my hands
+and my hair and my eyes.  My hands are long and thin and delicate; my
+eyes are a dark, deep blue; my hair is a brown, rusty red, thick and
+sleepy.  My long, firm, untired limbs can dance all night.  Oh, I love
+life! I love life!"
+
+You would not have called Berenice Fleming sensuous--though she
+was--because she was self-controlled.  Her eyes lied to you.  They lied
+to all the world.  They looked you through and through with a calm
+savoir faire, a mocking defiance, which said with a faint curl of the
+lips, barely suggested to help them out, "You cannot read me, you
+cannot read me." She put her head to one side, smiled, lied (by
+implication), assumed that there was nothing.  And there was nothing,
+as yet.  Yet there was something, too--her inmost convictions, and
+these she took good care to conceal.  The world--how little it should
+ever, ever know!  How little it ever could know truly!
+
+The first time Cowperwood encountered this Circe daughter of so
+unfortunate a mother was on the occasion of a trip to New York, the
+second spring following his introduction to Mrs. Carter in Louisville.
+Berenice was taking some part in the closing exercises of the Brewster
+School, and Mrs. Carter, with Cowperwood for an escort, decided to go
+East.  Cowperwood having located himself at the Netherlands, and Mrs.
+Carter at the much humbler Grenoble, they journeyed together to visit
+this paragon whose picture he had had hanging in his rooms in Chicago
+for months past.  When they were introduced into the somewhat somber
+reception parlor of the Brewster School, Berenice came slipping in
+after a few moments, a noiseless figure of a girl, tall and slim, and
+deliciously sinuous. Cowperwood saw at first glance that she fulfilled
+all the promise of her picture, and was delighted.  She had, he
+thought, a strange, shrewd, intelligent smile, which, however, was
+girlish and friendly. Without so much as a glance in his direction she
+came forward, extending her arms and hands in an inimitable histrionic
+manner, and exclaimed, with a practised and yet natural inflection:
+"Mother, dear! So here you are really! You know, I've been thinking of
+you all morning.  I wasn't sure whether you would come to-day, you
+change about so.  I think I even dreamed of you last night."
+
+Her skirts, still worn just below the shoe-tops, had the richness of
+scraping silk then fashionable.  She was also guilty of using a faint
+perfume of some kind.
+
+Cowperwood could see that Mrs. Carter, despite a certain nervousness
+due to the girl's superior individuality and his presence, was very
+proud of her.  Berenice, he also saw quickly, was measuring him out of
+the tail of her eye--a single sweeping glance which she vouchsafed from
+beneath her long lashes sufficing; but she gathered quite accurately
+the totality of Cowperwood's age, force, grace, wealth, and worldly
+ability.  Without hesitation she classed him as a man of power in some
+field, possibly finance, one of the numerous able men whom her mother
+seemed to know.  She always wondered about her mother.  His large gray
+eyes, that searched her with lightning accuracy, appealed to her as
+pleasant, able eyes.  She knew on the instant, young as she was, that
+he liked women, and that probably he would think her charming; but as
+for giving him additional attention it was outside her code.  She
+preferred to be interested in her dear mother exclusively.
+
+"Berenice," observed Mrs. Carter, airily, "let me introduce Mr.
+Cowperwood."
+
+Berenice turned, and for the fraction of a second leveled a frank and
+yet condescending glance from wells of what Cowperwood considered to be
+indigo blue.
+
+"Your mother has spoken of you from time to time," he said, pleasantly.
+
+She withdrew a cool, thin hand as limp and soft as wax, and turned to
+her mother again without comment, and yet without the least
+embarrassment.  Cowperwood seemed in no way important to her.
+
+"What would you say, dear," pursued Mrs. Carter, after a brief exchange
+of commonplaces, "if I were to spend next winter in New York?"
+
+"It would be charming if I could live at home.  I'm sick of this silly
+boarding-school."
+
+"Why, Berenice! I thought you liked it."
+
+"I hate it, but only because it's so dull.  The girls here are so
+silly."
+
+Mrs. Carter lifted her eyebrows as much as to say to her escort, "Now
+what do you think?" Cowperwood stood solemnly by.  It was not for him
+to make a suggestion at present.  He could see that for some
+reason--probably because of her disordered life--Mrs. Carter was
+playing a game of manners with her daughter; she maintained always a
+lofty, romantic air.  With Berenice it was natural--the expression of a
+vain, self-conscious, superior disposition.
+
+"A rather charming garden here," he observed, lifting a curtain and
+looking out into a blooming plot.
+
+"Yes, the flowers are nice," commented Berenice.
+
+"Wait; I'll get some for you.  It's against the rules, but they can't
+do more than send me away, and that's what I want."
+
+"Berenice! Come back here!"
+
+It was Mrs. Carter calling.
+
+The daughter was gone in a fling of graceful lines and flounces. "Now
+what do you make of her?" asked Mrs. Carter, turning to her friend.
+
+"Youth, individuality, energy--a hundred things.  I see nothing wrong
+with her."
+
+"If I could only see to it that she had her opportunities unspoiled."
+
+Already Berenice was returning, a subject for an artist in almost
+studied lines.  Her arms were full of sweet-peas and roses which she
+had ruthlessly gathered.
+
+"You wilful girl!" scolded her mother, indulgently.  "I shall have to
+go and explain to your superiors.  Whatever shall I do with her, Mr.
+Cowperwood?"
+
+"Load her with daisy chains and transport her to Cytherea," commented
+Cowperwood, who had once visited this romantic isle, and therefore knew
+its significance.
+
+Berenice paused.  "What a pretty speech that is!" she exclaimed. "I
+have a notion to give you a special flower for that.  I will, too." She
+presented him with a rose.
+
+For a girl who had slipped in shy and still, Cowperwood commented, her
+mood had certainly changed.  Still, this was the privilege of the born
+actress, to change.  And as he viewed Berenice Fleming now he felt her
+to be such--a born actress, lissome, subtle, wise, indifferent,
+superior, taking the world as she found it and expecting it to obey--to
+sit up like a pet dog and be told to beg.  What a charming character!
+What a pity it should not be allowed to bloom undisturbed in its
+make-believe garden! What a pity, indeed!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLII
+
+F. A. Cowperwood, Guardian
+
+
+It was some time after this first encounter before Cowperwood saw
+Berenice again, and then only for a few days in that region of the
+Pocono Mountains where Mrs. Carter had her summer home.  It was an
+idyllic spot on a mountainside, some three miles from Stroudsburg,
+among a peculiar juxtaposition of hills which, from the comfortable
+recesses of a front veranda, had the appearance, as Mrs. Carter was
+fond of explaining, of elephants and camels parading in the distance.
+The humps of the hills--some of them as high as eighteen hundred
+feet--rose stately and green.  Below, quite visible for a mile or more,
+moved the dusty, white road descending to Stroudsburg. Out of her
+Louisville earnings Mrs. Carter had managed to employ, for the several
+summer seasons she had been here, a gardener, who kept the sloping
+front lawn in seasonable flowers.  There was a trig two-wheeled trap
+with a smart horse and harness, and both Rolfe and Berenice were
+possessed of the latest novelty of the day--low-wheeled bicycles, which
+had just then superseded the old, high-wheel variety.  For Berenice,
+also, was a music-rack full of classic music and song collections, a
+piano, a shelf of favorite books, painting-materials, various athletic
+implements, and several types of Greek dancing-tunics which she had
+designed herself, including sandals and fillet for her hair.  She was
+an idle, reflective, erotic person dreaming strange dreams of a near
+and yet far-off social supremacy, at other times busying herself with
+such social opportunities as came to her.  A more safely calculating
+and yet wilful girl than Berenice Fleming would have been hard to find.
+By some trick of mental adjustment she had gained a clear prevision of
+how necessary it was to select the right socially, and to conceal her
+true motives and feelings; and yet she was by no means a snob,
+mentally, nor utterly calculating.  Certain things in her own and in
+her mother's life troubled her--quarrels in her early days, from her
+seventh to her eleventh year, between her mother and her stepfather,
+Mr. Carter; the latter's drunkenness verging upon delirium tremens at
+times; movings from one place to another--all sorts of sordid and
+depressing happenings.  Berenice had been an impressionable child.
+Some things had gripped her memory mightily--once, for instance, when
+she had seen her stepfather, in the presence of her governess, kick a
+table over, and, seizing the toppling lamp with demoniac skill, hurl it
+through a window. She, herself, had been tossed by him in one of these
+tantrums, when, in answer to the cries of terror of those about her, he
+had shouted: "Let her fall! It won't hurt the little devil to break a
+few bones." This was her keenest memory of her stepfather, and it
+rather softened her judgment of her mother, made her sympathetic with
+her when she was inclined to be critical.  Of her own father she only
+knew that he had divorced her mother--why, she could not say.  She
+liked her mother on many counts, though she could not feel that she
+actually loved her--Mrs. Carter was too fatuous at times, and at other
+times too restrained.  This house at Pocono, or Forest Edge, as Mrs.
+Carter had named it, was conducted after a peculiar fashion.  From June
+to October only it was open, Mrs. Carter, in the past, having returned
+to Louisville at that time, while Berenice and Rolfe went back to their
+respective schools. Rolfe was a cheerful, pleasant-mannered youth, well
+bred, genial, and courteous, but not very brilliant intellectually.
+Cowperwood's judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under
+ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk,
+possibly in a bank.  Berenice, on the other hand, the child of the
+first husband, was a creature of an exotic mind and an opalescent
+heart. After his first contact with her in the reception-room of the
+Brewster School Cowperwood was deeply conscious of the import of this
+budding character.  He was by now so familiar with types and kinds of
+women that an exceptional type--quite like an exceptional horse to a
+judge of horse-flesh--stood out in his mind with singular vividness.
+Quite as in some great racing-stable an ambitious horseman might
+imagine that he detected in some likely filly the signs and lineaments
+of the future winner of a Derby, so in Berenice Fleming, in the quiet
+precincts of the Brewster School, Cowperwood previsioned the central
+figure of a Newport lawn fete or a London drawing-room.  Why? She had
+the air, the grace, the lineage, the blood--that was why; and on that
+score she appealed to him intensely, quite as no other woman before had
+ever done.
+
+It was on the lawn of Forest Edge that Cowperwood now saw Berenice. The
+latter had had the gardener set up a tall pole, to which was attached a
+tennis-ball by a cord, and she and Rolfe were hard at work on a game of
+tether-ball.  Cowperwood, after a telegram to Mrs. Carter, had been met
+at the station in Pocono by her and rapidly driven out to the house.
+The green hills pleased him, the up-winding, yellow road, the
+silver-gray cottage with the brown-shingle roof in the distance.  It
+was three in the afternoon, and bright for a sinking sun.
+
+"There they are now," observed Mrs. Carter, cheerful and smiling, as
+they came out from under a low ledge that skirted the road a little way
+from the cottage.  Berenice, executing a tripping, running step to one
+side, was striking the tethered ball with her racquet.  "They are hard
+at it, as usual.  Two such romps!"
+
+She surveyed them with pleased motherly interest, which Cowperwood
+considered did her much credit.  He was thinking that it would be too
+bad if her hopes for her children should not be realized.  Yet possibly
+they might not be.  Life was very grim.  How strange, he thought, was
+this type of woman--at once a sympathetic, affectionate mother and a
+panderer to the vices of men.  How strange that she should have these
+children at all.  Berenice had on a white skirt, white tennis-shoes, a
+pale-cream silk waist or blouse, which fitted her very loosely.
+Because of exercise her color was high--quite pink--and her dusty,
+reddish hair was blowy.  Though they turned into the hedge gate and
+drove to the west entrance, which was at one side of the house, there
+was no cessation of the game, not even a glance from Berenice, so busy
+was she.
+
+He was merely her mother's friend to her.  Cowperwood noted, with
+singular vividness of feeling, that the lines of her movements--the
+fleeting, momentary positions she assumed--were full of a wondrous
+natural charm.  He wanted to say so to Mrs. Carter, but restrained
+himself.
+
+"It's a brisk game," he commented, with a pleased glance.  "You play,
+do you?"
+
+"Oh, I did.  I don't much any more.  Sometimes I try a set with Rolfe
+or Bevy; but they both beat me so badly."
+
+"Bevy? Who is Bevy?"
+
+"Oh, that's short of Berenice.  It's what Rolfe called her when he was
+a baby."
+
+"Bevy! I think that rather nice."
+
+"I always like it, too.  Somehow it seems to suit her, and yet I don't
+know why."
+
+Before dinner Berenice made her appearance, freshened by a bath and
+clad in a light summer dress that appeared to Cowperwood to be all
+flounces, and the more graceful in its lines for the problematic
+absence of a corset.  Her face and hands, however--a face thin, long,
+and sweetly hollow, and hands that were slim and sinewy--gripped and
+held his fancy.  He was reminded in the least degree of Stephanie; but
+this girl's chin was firmer and more delicately, though more
+aggressively, rounded.  Her eyes, too, were shrewder and less evasive,
+though subtle enough.
+
+"So I meet you again," he observed, with a somewhat aloof air, as she
+came out on the porch and sank listlessly into a wicker chair.
+ "The last time I met you you were hard at work in New York."
+
+"Breaking the rules.  No, I forget; that was my easiest work.  Oh,
+Rolfe," she called over her shoulder, indifferently, "I see your
+pocket-knife out on the grass."
+
+Cowperwood, properly suppressed, waited a brief space.  "Who won that
+exciting game?"
+
+"I did, of course.  I always win at tether-ball."
+
+"Oh, do you?" commented Cowperwood.
+
+"I mean with brother, of course.  He plays so poorly." She turned to
+the west--the house faced south--and studied the road which came up
+from Stroudsburg.  "I do believe that's Harry Kemp," she added, quite
+to herself.  "If so, he'll have my mail, if there is any."
+
+She got up again and disappeared into the house, coming out a few
+moments later to saunter down to the gate, which was over a hundred
+feet away.  To Cowperwood she seemed to float, so hale and graceful was
+she.  A smart youth in blue serge coat, white trousers, and white shoes
+drove by in a high-seated trap.
+
+"Two letters for you," he called, in a high, almost falsetto voice. "I
+thought you would have eight or nine.  Blessed hot, isn't it?" He had a
+smart though somewhat effeminate manner, and Cowperwood at once wrote
+him down as an ass.  Berenice took the mail with an engaging smile.
+She sauntered past him reading, without so much as a glance.  Presently
+he heard her voice within.
+
+"Mother, the Haggertys have invited me for the last week in August. I
+have half a mind to cut Tuxedo and go.  I like Bess Haggerty."
+
+"Well, you'll have to decide that, dearest.  Are they going to be at
+Tarrytown or Loon Lake?"
+
+"Loon Lake, of course," came Berenice's voice.
+
+What a world of social doings she was involved in, thought Cowperwood.
+She had begun well.  The Haggertys were rich coal-mine operators in
+Pennsylvania.  Harris Haggerty, to whose family she was probably
+referring, was worth at least six or eight million.  The social world
+they moved in was high.
+
+They drove after dinner to The Saddler, at Saddler's Run, where a dance
+and "moonlight promenade" was to be given.  On the way over, owing to
+the remoteness of Berenice, Cowperwood for the first time in his life
+felt himself to be getting old.  In spite of the vigor of his mind and
+body, he realized constantly that he was over fifty-two, while she was
+only seventeen.  Why should this lure of youth continue to possess him?
+She wore a white concoction of lace and silk which showed a pair of
+smooth young shoulders and a slender, queenly, inimitably modeled neck.
+He could tell by the sleek lines of her arms how strong she was.
+
+"It is perhaps too late," he said to himself, in comment.  "I am
+getting old."
+
+The freshness of the hills in the pale night was sad.
+
+Saddler's, when they reached there after ten, was crowded with the
+youth and beauty of the vicinity.  Mrs. Carter, who was prepossessing
+in a ball costume of silver and old rose, expected that Cowperwood
+would dance with her.  And he did, but all the time his eyes were on
+Berenice, who was caught up by one youth and another of dapper mien
+during the progress of the evening and carried rhythmically by in the
+mazes of the waltz or schottische.  There was a new dance in vogue that
+involved a gay, running step--kicking first one foot and then the other
+forward, turning and running backward and kicking again, and then
+swinging with a smart air, back to back, with one's partner.  Berenice,
+in her lithe, rhythmic way, seemed to him the soul of spirited and
+gracious ease--unconscious of everybody and everything save the spirit
+of the dance itself as a medium of sweet emotion, of some far-off,
+dreamlike spirit of gaiety.  He wondered. He was deeply impressed.
+
+"Berenice," observed Mrs. Carter, when in an intermission she came
+forward to where Cowperwood and she were sitting in the moonlight
+discussing New York and Kentucky social life, "haven't you saved one
+dance for Mr. Cowperwood?"
+
+Cowperwood, with a momentary feeling of resentment, protested that he
+did not care to dance any more.  Mrs. Carter, he observed to himself,
+was a fool.
+
+"I believe," said her daughter, with a languid air, "that I am full up.
+I could break one engagement, though, somewhere."
+
+"Not for me, though, please," pleaded Cowperwood.  "I don't care to
+dance any more, thank you."
+
+He almost hated her at the moment for a chilly cat.  And yet he did not.
+
+"Why, Bevy, how you talk! I think you are acting very badly this
+evening."
+
+"Please, please," pleaded Cowperwood, quite sharply.  "Not any more.  I
+don't care to dance any more."
+
+Bevy looked at him oddly for a moment--a single thoughtful glance.
+
+"But I have a dance, though," she pleaded, softly.  "I was just
+teasing.  Won't you dance it with me?
+
+"I can't refuse, of course," replied Cowperwood, coldly.
+
+"It's the next one," she replied.
+
+They danced, but he scarcely softened to her at first, so angry was he.
+Somehow, because of all that had gone before, he felt stiff and
+ungainly.  She had managed to break in upon his natural savoir
+faire--this chit of a girl.  But as they went on through a second half
+the spirit of her dancing soul caught him, and he felt more at ease,
+quite rhythmic.  She drew close and swept him into a strange unison
+with herself.
+
+"You dance beautifully," he said.
+
+"I love it," she replied.  She was already of an agreeable height for
+him.
+
+It was soon over.  "I wish you would take me where the ices are," she
+said to Cowperwood.
+
+He led her, half amused, half disturbed at her attitude toward him.
+
+"You are having a pleasant time teasing me, aren't you?" he asked.
+
+"I am only tired," she replied.  "The evening bores me.  Really it
+does.  I wish we were all home."
+
+"We can go when you say, no doubt."
+
+As they reached the ices, and she took one from his hand, she surveyed
+him with those cool, dull blue eyes of hers--eyes that had the flat
+quality of unglazed Dutch tiles.
+
+"I wish you would forgive me," she said.  "I was rude.  I couldn't help
+it.  I am all out of sorts with myself."
+
+"I hadn't felt you were rude," he observed, lying grandly, his mood
+toward her changing entirely.
+
+"Oh yes I was, and I hope you will forgive me.  I sincerely wish you
+would."
+
+"I do with all my heart--the little that there is to forgive."
+
+He waited to take her back, and yielded her to a youth who was waiting.
+He watched her trip away in a dance, and eventually led her mother to
+the trap.  Berenice was not with them on the home drive; some one else
+was bringing her.  Cowperwood wondered when she would come, and where
+was her room, and whether she was really sorry, and-- As he fell asleep
+Berenice Fleming and her slate-blue eyes were filling his mind
+completely.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLIII
+
+The Planet Mars
+
+
+The banking hostility to Cowperwood, which in its beginning had made
+necessary his trip to Kentucky and elsewhere, finally reached a climax.
+It followed an attempt on his part to furnish funds for the building of
+elevated roads.  The hour for this new form of transit convenience had
+struck.  The public demanded it.  Cowperwood saw one elevated road, the
+South Side Alley Line, being built, and another, the West Side
+Metropolitan Line, being proposed, largely, as he knew, in order to
+create sentiment for the idea, and so to make his opposition to a
+general franchise difficult.  He was well aware that if he did not
+choose to build them others would.  It mattered little that electricity
+had arrived finally as a perfected traction factor, and that all his
+lines would soon have to be done over to meet that condition, or that
+it was costing him thousands and thousands to stay the threatening
+aspect of things politically. In addition he must now plunge into this
+new realm, gaining franchises by the roughest and subtlest forms of
+political bribery. The most serious aspect of this was not political,
+but rather financial.  Elevated roads in Chicago, owing to the
+sparseness of the population over large areas, were a serious thing to
+contemplate. The mere cost of iron, right of way, rolling-stock, and
+power-plants was immense.  Being chronically opposed to investing his
+private funds where stocks could just as well be unloaded on the
+public, and the management and control retained by him, Cowperwood, for
+the time being, was puzzled as to where he should get credit for the
+millions to be laid down in structural steel, engineering fees, labor,
+and equipment before ever a dollar could be taken out in passenger
+fares.  Owing to the advent of the World's Fair, the South Side 'L'--to
+which, in order to have peace and quiet, he had finally conceded a
+franchise--was doing reasonably well.  Yet it was not making any such
+return on the investment as the New York roads.  The new lines which he
+was preparing would traverse even less populous sections of the city,
+and would in all likelihood yield even a smaller return.  Money had to
+be forthcoming--something between twelve and fifteen million
+dollars--and this on the stocks and bonds of a purely paper corporation
+which might not yield paying dividends for years to come.  Addison,
+finding that the Chicago Trust Company was already heavily loaded,
+called upon various minor but prosperous local banks to take over the
+new securities (each in part, of course).  He was astonished and
+chagrined to find that one and all uniformly refused.
+
+"I'll tell you how it is, Judah," one bank president confided to him,
+in great secrecy.  "We owe Timothy Arneel at least three hundred
+thousand dollars that we only have to pay three per cent. for.  It's a
+call-loan.  Besides, the Lake National is our main standby when it
+comes to quick trades, and he's in on that.  I understand from one or
+two friends that he's at outs with Cowperwood, and we can't afford to
+offend him.  I'd like to, but no more for me--not at present, anyhow."
+
+"Why, Simmons," replied Addison, "these fellows are simply cutting off
+their noses to spite their faces.  These stock and bond issues are
+perfectly good investments, and no one knows it better than you do.
+All this hue and cry in the newspapers against Cowperwood doesn't
+amount to anything.  He's perfectly solvent.  Chicago is growing.  His
+lines are becoming more valuable every year."
+
+"I know that," replied Simmons.  "But what about this talk of a rival
+elevated system? Won't that injure his lines for the time being,
+anyhow, if it comes into the field?"
+
+"If I know anything about Cowperwood," replied Addison, simply, "there
+isn't going to be any rival elevated road.  It's true they got the city
+council to give them a franchise for one line on the South Side; but
+that's out of his territory, anyhow, and that other one to the Chicago
+General Company doesn't amount to anything. It will be years and years
+before it can be made to pay a dollar, and when the time comes he will
+probably take it over if he wants it.  Another election will be held in
+two years, and then the city administration may not be so unfavorable.
+As it is, they haven't been able to hurt him through the council as
+much as they thought they would."
+
+"Yes; but he lost the election."
+
+"True; but it doesn't follow he's going to lose the next one, or every
+one."
+
+"Just the same," replied Simmons, very secretively, "I understand
+there's a concerted effort on to drive him out.  Schryhart, Hand,
+Merrill, Arneel--they're the most powerful men we have.  I understand
+Hand says that he'll never get his franchises renewed except on terms
+that'll make his lines unprofitable.  There's going to be an awful
+smash here one of these days if that's true." Mr. Simmons looked very
+wise and solemn.
+
+"Never believe it," replied Addison, contemptuously.  "Hand isn't
+Chicago, neither is Schryhart, nor Arneel.  Cowperwood is a brainy man.
+He isn't going to be put under so easily.  Did you ever hear what was
+the real bottom cause of all this disturbance?"
+
+"Yes, I've heard," replied Simmons.
+
+"Do you believe it?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  Yes, I suppose I do.  Still, I don't know that that
+need have anything to do with it.  Money envy is enough to make any man
+fight.  This man Hand is very powerful."
+
+Not long after this Cowperwood, strolling into the president's office
+of the Chicago Trust Company, inquired: "Well, Judah, how about those
+Northwestern 'L' bonds?"
+
+"It's just as I thought, Frank," replied Addison, softly.  "We'll have
+to go outside of Chicago for that money.  Hand, Arneel, and the rest of
+that crowd have decided to combine against us.  That's plain.
+Something has started them off in full cry.  I suppose my resignation
+may have had something to do with it.  Anyhow, every one of the banks
+in which they have any hand has uniformly refused to come in.  To make
+sure that I was right I even called up the little old Third National of
+Lake View and the Drovers and Traders on Forty-seventh Street.  That's
+Charlie Wallin's bank.  When I was over in the Lake National he used to
+hang around the back door asking for anything I could give him that was
+sound.  Now he says his orders are from his directors not to share in
+anything we have to offer.  It's the same story everywhere--they
+daren't.  I asked Wallin if he knew why the directors were down on the
+Chicago Trust or on you, and at first he said he didn't.  Then he said
+he'd stop in and lunch with me some day.  They're the silliest lot of
+old ostriches I ever heard of.  As if refusing to let us have money on
+any loan here was going to prevent us from getting it! They can take
+their little old one-horse banks and play blockhouses with them if they
+want to.  I can go to New York and in thirty-six hours raise twenty
+million dollars if we need it."
+
+Addison was a little warm.  It was a new experience for him. Cowperwood
+merely curled his mustaches and smiled sardonically.
+
+"Well, never mind," he said.  "Will you go down to New York, or shall
+I?"
+
+It was decided, after some talk, that Addison should go.  When he
+reached New York he found, to his surprise, that the local opposition
+to Cowperwood had, for some mysterious reason, begun to take root in
+the East.
+
+"I'll tell you how it is," observed Joseph Haeckelheimer, to whom
+Addison applied--a short, smug, pussy person who was the head of
+Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb & Co., international bankers.  "We hear odd
+things concerning Mr. Cowperwood out in Chicago.  Some people say he is
+sound--some not.  He has some very good franchises covering a large
+portion of the city, but they are only twenty-year franchises, and they
+will all run out by 1903 at the latest.  As I understand it, he has
+managed to stir up all the local elements--some very powerful ones,
+too--and he is certain to have a hard time to get his franchises
+renewed.  I don't live in Chicago, of course.  I don't know much about
+it, but our Western correspondent tells me this is so.  Mr. Cowperwood
+is a very able man, as I understand it, but if all these influential
+men are opposed to him they can make him a great deal of trouble.  The
+public is very easily aroused."
+
+"You do a very able man a great injustice, Mr. Haeckelheimer," Addison
+retorted.  "Almost any one who starts out to do things successfully and
+intelligently is sure to stir up a great deal of feeling.  The
+particular men you mention seem to feel that they have a sort of
+proprietor's interest in Chicago.  They really think they own it.  As a
+matter of fact, the city made them; they didn't make the city."
+
+Mr. Haeckelheimer lifted his eyebrows.  He laid two fine white hands,
+plump and stubby, over the lower buttons of his protuberant waistcoat.
+"Public favor is a great factor in all these enterprises," he almost
+sighed.  "As you know, part of a man's resources lies in his ability to
+avoid stirring up opposition.  It may be that Mr. Cowperwood is strong
+enough to overcome all that.  I don't know.  I've never met him.  I'm
+just telling you what I hear."
+
+This offish attitude on the part of Mr. Haeckelheimer was indicative of
+a new trend.  The man was enormously wealthy.  The firm of
+Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb & Co. represented a controlling interest in some
+of the principal railways and banks in America.  Their favor was not to
+be held in light esteem.
+
+It was plain that these rumors against Cowperwood in New York, unless
+offset promptly by favorable events in Chicago, might mean--in the
+large banking quarters, anyhow--the refusal of all subsequent
+Cowperwood issues.  It might even close the doors of minor banks and
+make private investors nervous.
+
+Addison's report of all this annoyed Cowperwood no little.  It made him
+angry.  He saw in it the work of Schryhart, Hand, and others who were
+trying their best to discredit him.  "Let them talk," he declared,
+crossly.  "I have the street-railways.  They're not going to rout me
+out of here.  I can sell stocks and bonds to the public direct if need
+be! There are plenty of private people who are glad to invest in these
+properties."
+
+At this psychological moment enter, as by the hand of Fate, the planet
+Mars and the University.  This latter, from having been for years a
+humble Baptist college of the cheapest character, had suddenly, through
+the beneficence of a great Standard Oil multimillionaire, flared upward
+into a great university, and was causing a stir throughout the length
+and breadth of the educational world.
+
+It was already a most noteworthy spectacle, one of the sights of the
+city.  Millions were being poured into it; new and beautiful buildings
+were almost monthly erected.  A brilliant, dynamic man had been called
+from the East as president.  There were still many things
+needed--dormitories, laboratories of one kind and another, a great
+library; and, last but not least, a giant telescope--one that would
+sweep the heavens with a hitherto unparalleled receptive eye, and wring
+from it secrets not previously decipherable by the eye and the mind of
+man.
+
+Cowperwood had always been interested in the heavens and in the giant
+mathematical and physical methods of interpreting them.  It so happened
+that the war-like planet, with its sinister aspect, was just at this
+time to be seen hanging in the west, a fiery red; and the easily
+aroused public mind was being stirred to its shallow depth by
+reflections and speculations regarding the famous canals of the
+luminary.  The mere thought of the possibility of a larger telescope
+than any now in existence, which might throw additional light on this
+evasive mystery, was exciting not only Chicago, but the whole world.
+Late one afternoon Cowperwood, looking over some open fields which
+faced his new power-house in West Madison Street, observed the planet
+hanging low and lucent in the evening sky, a warm, radiant bit of
+orange in a sea of silver.  He paused and surveyed it.  Was it true
+that there were canals on it, and people? Life was surely strange.
+
+One day not long after this Alexander Rambaud called him up on the
+'phone and remarked, jocosely:
+
+"I say, Cowperwood, I've played a rather shabby trick on you just now.
+Doctor Hooper, of the University, was in here a few minutes ago asking
+me to be one of ten to guarantee the cost of a telescope lens that he
+thinks he needs to run that one-horse school of his out there.  I told
+him I thought you might possibly be interested. His idea is to find
+some one who will guarantee forty thousand dollars, or eight or ten men
+who will guarantee four or five thousand each.  I thought of you,
+because I've heard you discuss astronomy from time to time."
+
+"Let him come," replied Cowperwood, who was never willing to be behind
+others in generosity, particularly where his efforts were likely to be
+appreciated in significant quarters.
+
+Shortly afterward appeared the doctor himself--short, rotund, rubicund,
+displaying behind a pair of clear, thick, gold-rimmed glasses, round,
+dancing, incisive eyes.  Imaginative grip, buoyant, self-delusive
+self-respect were written all over him.  The two men eyed each
+other--one with that broad-gage examination which sees even
+universities as futile in the endless shift of things; the other with
+that faith in the balance for right which makes even great personal
+forces, such as financial magnates, serve an idealistic end.
+
+"It's not a very long story I have to tell you, Mr. Cowperwood," said
+the doctor.  "Our astronomical work is handicapped just now by the
+simple fact that we have no lens at all, no telescope worthy of the
+name.  I should like to see the University do original work in this
+field, and do it in a great way.  The only way to do it, in my
+judgment, is to do it better than any one else can.  Don't you agree
+with me?" He showed a row of shining white teeth.
+
+Cowperwood smiled urbanely.
+
+"Will a forty-thousand-dollar lens be a better lens than any other
+lens?" he inquired.
+
+"Made by Appleman Brothers, of Dorchester, it will," replied the
+college president.  "The whole story is here, Mr. Cowperwood. These men
+are practical lens-makers.  A great lens, in the first place, is a
+matter of finding a suitable crystal.  Large and flawless crystals are
+not common, as you may possibly know.  Such a crystal has recently been
+found, and is now owned by Mr. Appleman. It takes about four or five
+years to grind and polish it.  Most of the polishing, as you may or may
+not know, is done by the hand--smoothing it with the thumb and
+forefinger.  The time, judgment, and skill of an optical expert is
+required.  To-day, unfortunately, that is not cheap.  The laborer is
+worthy of his hire, however, I suppose"--he waved a soft, full, white
+hand--"and forty thousand is little enough.  It would be a great honor
+if the University could have the largest, most serviceable, and most
+perfect lens in the world.  It would reflect great credit, I take it,
+on the men who would make this possible."
+
+Cowperwood liked the man's artistically educational air; obviously here
+was a personage of ability, brains, emotion, and scientific enthusiasm.
+It was splendid to him to see any strong man in earnest, for himself or
+others.
+
+"And forty thousand will do this?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, sir.  Forty thousand will guarantee us the lens, anyhow."
+
+"And how about land, buildings, a telescope frame? Have you all those
+things prepared for it?"
+
+"Not as yet, but, since it takes four years at least to grind the lens,
+there will be time enough, when the lens is nearing completion, to look
+after the accessories.  We have picked our site, however--Lake
+Geneva--and we would not refuse either land or accessories if we knew
+where to get them."
+
+Again the even, shining teeth, the keen eyes boring through the glasses.
+
+Cowperwood saw a great opportunity.  He asked what would be the cost of
+the entire project.  Dr. Hooper presumed that three hundred thousand
+would do it all handsomely--lens, telescope, land, machinery,
+building--a great monument.
+
+"And how much have you guaranteed on the cost of your lens?" "Sixteen
+thousand dollars, so far."
+
+"To be paid when?"
+
+"In instalments--ten thousand a year for four years.  Just enough to
+keep the lens-maker busy for the present."
+
+Cowperwood reflected.  Ten thousand a year for four years would be a
+mere salary item, and at the end of that time he felt sure that he
+could supply the remainder of the money quite easily.  He would be so
+much richer; his plans would be so much more mature. On such a repute
+(the ability to give a three-hundred-thousand-dollar telescope out of
+hand to be known as the Cowperwood telescope) he could undoubtedly
+raise money in London, New York, and elsewhere for his Chicago
+enterprise.  The whole world would know him in a day.  He paused, his
+enigmatic eyes revealing nothing of the splendid vision that danced
+before them.  At last! At last!
+
+"How would it do, Mr. Hooper," he said, sweetly, "if, instead of ten
+men giving you four thousand each, as you plan, one man were to give
+you forty thousand in annual instalments of ten thousand each? Could
+that be arranged as well?"
+
+"My dear Mr. Cowperwood," exclaimed the doctor, glowing, his eyes
+alight, "do I understand that you personally might wish to give the
+money for this lens?"
+
+"I might, yes.  But I should have to exact one pledge, Mr. Hooper, if I
+did any such thing."
+
+"And what would that be?"
+
+"The privilege of giving the land and the building--the whole
+telescope, in fact.  I presume no word of this will be given out unless
+the matter is favorably acted upon?" he added, cautiously and
+diplomatically.
+
+The new president of the university arose and eyed him with a
+peculiarly approbative and grateful gaze.  He was a busy, overworked
+man.  His task was large.  Any burden taken from his shoulders in this
+fashion was a great relief.
+
+"My answer to that, Mr. Cowperwood, if I had the authority, would be to
+agree now in the name of the University, and thank you.  For form's
+sake, I must submit the matter to the trustees of the University, but I
+have no doubt as to the outcome.  I anticipate nothing but grateful
+approbation.  Let me thank you again."
+
+They shook hands warmly, and the solid collegian bustled forth.
+Cowperwood sank quietly in his chair.  He pressed his fingers together,
+and for a moment or two permitted himself to dream. Then he called a
+stenographer and began a bit of dictation.  He did not care to think
+even to himself how universally advantageous all this might yet prove
+to be.
+
+The result was that in the course of a few weeks the proffer was
+formally accepted by the trustees of the University, and a report of
+the matter, with Cowperwood's formal consent, was given out for
+publication.  The fortuitous combination of circumstances already
+described gave the matter a unique news value.  Giant reflectors and
+refractors had been given and were in use in other parts of the world,
+but none so large or so important as this.  The gift was sufficient to
+set Cowperwood forth in the light of a public benefactor and patron of
+science.  Not only in Chicago, but in London, Paris, and New York,
+wherever, indeed, in the great capitals scientific and intellectual men
+were gathered, this significant gift of an apparently fabulously rich
+American became the subject of excited discussion.  Banking men, among
+others, took sharp note of the donor, and when Cowperwood's emissaries
+came around later with a suggestion that the fifty-year franchises
+about to be voted him for elevated roads should be made a basis of bond
+and mortgage loans, they were courteously received.  A man who could
+give three-hundred-thousand-dollar telescopes in the hour of his
+greatest difficulties must be in a rather satisfactory financial
+condition. He must have great wealth in reserve.  After some
+preliminaries, during which Cowperwood paid a flying visit to
+Threadneedle Street in London, and to Wall Street in New York, an
+arrangement was made with an English-American banking company by which
+the majority of the bonds for his proposed roads were taken over by
+them for sale in Europe and elsewhere, and he was given ample means
+wherewith to proceed.  Instantly the stocks of his surface lines
+bounded in price, and those who had been scheming to bring about
+Cowperwood's downfall gnashed impotent teeth.  Even Haeckelheimer & Co.
+were interested.
+
+Anson Merrill, who had only a few weeks before given a large field for
+athletic purposes to the University, pulled a wry face over this sudden
+eclipse of his glory.  Hosmer Hand, who had given a chemical
+laboratory, and Schryhart, who had presented a dormitory, were
+depressed to think that a benefaction less costly than theirs should
+create, because of the distinction of the idea, so much more notable
+comment.  It was merely another example of the brilliant fortune which
+seemed to pursue the man, the star that set all their plans at defiance.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLIV
+
+A Franchise Obtained
+
+
+The money requisite for the construction of elevated roads having been
+thus pyrotechnically obtained, the acquisition of franchises remained
+no easy matter.  It involved, among other problems, the taming of
+Chaffee Thayer Sluss, who, quite unconscious of the evidence stored up
+against him, had begun to fulminate the moment it was suggested in
+various secret political quarters that a new ordinance was about to be
+introduced, and that Cowperwood was to be the beneficiary.  "Don't you
+let them do that, Mr. Sluss," observed Mr. Hand, who for purposes of
+conference had courteously but firmly bidden his hireling, the mayor,
+to lunch.  "Don't you let them pass that if you can help it." (As
+chairman or president of the city council Mr. Sluss held considerable
+manipulative power over the machinery of procedure.) "Raise such a row
+that they won't try to pass it over your head.  Your political future
+really depends on it--your standing with the people of Chicago.  The
+newspapers and the respectable financial and social elements will fully
+support you in this.  Otherwise they will wholly desert you.  Things
+have come to a handsome pass when men sworn and elected to perform
+given services turn on their backers and betray them in this way!"
+
+Mr. Hand was very wroth.
+
+Mr. Sluss, immaculate in black broadcloth and white linen, was very
+sure that he would fulfil to the letter all of Mr. Hand's suggestions.
+The proposed ordinance should be denounced by him; its legislative
+progress heartily opposed in council.
+
+"They shall get no quarter from me!" he declared, emphatically. "I know
+what the scheme is.  They know that I know it."
+
+He looked at Mr. Hand quite as one advocate of righteousness should
+look at another, and the rich promoter went away satisfied that the
+reins of government were in safe hands.  Immediately afterward Mr.
+Sluss gave out an interview in which he served warning on all aldermen
+and councilmen that no such ordinance as the one in question would ever
+be signed by him as mayor.
+
+At half past ten on the same morning on which the interview
+appeared--the hour at which Mr. Sluss usually reached his office--his
+private telephone bell rang, and an assistant inquired if he would be
+willing to speak with Mr. Frank A. Cowperwood.  Mr. Sluss, somehow
+anticipating fresh laurels of victory, gratified by the front-page
+display given his announcement in the morning papers, and swelling
+internally with civic pride, announced, solemnly: "Yes; connect me."
+
+"Mr. Sluss," began Cowperwood, at the other end, "this is Frank A.
+Cowperwood."
+
+"Yes.  What can I do for you, Mr. Cowperwood?"
+
+"I see by the morning papers that you state that you will have nothing
+to do with any proposed ordinance which looks to giving me a franchise
+for any elevated road on the North or West Side?"
+
+"That is quite true," replied Mr. Sluss, loftily.  "I will not."
+
+"Don't you think it is rather premature, Mr. Sluss, to denounce
+something which has only a rumored existence?" (Cowperwood, smiling
+sweetly to himself, was quite like a cat playing with an unsuspicious
+mouse.) "I should like very much to talk this whole matter over with
+you personally before you take an irrevocable attitude.  It is just
+possible that after you have heard my side you may not be so completely
+opposed to me.  From time to time I have sent to you several of my
+personal friends, but apparently you do not care to receive them."
+
+"Quite true," replied Mr. Sluss, loftily; "but you must remember that I
+am a very busy man, Mr. Cowperwood, and, besides, I do not see how I
+can serve any of your purposes.  You are working for a set of
+conditions to which I am morally and temperamentally opposed. I am
+working for another.  I do not see that we have any common ground on
+which to meet.  In fact, I do not see how I can be of any service to
+you whatsoever."
+
+"Just a moment, please, Mr. Mayor," replied Cowperwood, still very
+sweetly, and fearing that Sluss might choose to hang up the receiver,
+so superior was his tone.  "There may be some common ground of which
+you do not know.  Wouldn't you like to come to lunch at my residence or
+receive me at yours? Or let me come to your office and talk this matter
+over.  I believe you will find it the part of wisdom as well as of
+courtesy to do this."
+
+"I cannot possibly lunch with you to-day," replied Sluss, "and I cannot
+see you, either.  There are a number of things pressing for my
+attention.  I must say also that I cannot hold any back-room
+conferences with you or your emissaries.  If you come you must submit
+to the presence of others."
+
+"Very well, Mr. Sluss," replied Cowperwood, cheerfully.  "I will not
+come to your office.  But unless you come to mine before five o'clock
+this afternoon you will face by noon to-morrow a suit for breach of
+promise, and your letters to Mrs. Brandon will be given to the public.
+I wish to remind you that an election is coming on, and that Chicago
+favors a mayor who is privately moral as well as publicly so.  Good
+morning."
+
+Mr. Cowperwood hung up his telephone receiver with a click, and Mr.
+Sluss sensibly and visibly stiffened and paled.  Mrs. Brandon! The
+charming, lovable, discreet Mrs. Brandon who had so ungenerously left
+him! Why should she be thinking of suing him for breach of promise, and
+how did his letter to her come to be in Cowperwood's hands? Good
+heavens--those mushy letters! His wife! His children! His church and
+the owlish pastor thereof! Chicago! And its conventional, moral,
+religious atmosphere! Come to think of it, Mrs. Brandon had scarcely if
+ever written him a note of any kind. He did not even know her history.
+
+At the thought of Mrs. Sluss--her hard, cold, blue eyes--Mr. Sluss
+arose, tall and distrait, and ran his hand through his hair.  He walked
+to the window, snapping his thumb and middle finger and looking eagerly
+at the floor.  He thought of the telephone switchboard just outside his
+private office, and wondered whether his secretary, a handsome young
+Presbyterian girl, had been listening, as usual. Oh, this sad, sad
+world! If the North Side ever learned of this--Hand, the newspapers,
+young MacDonald--would they protect him? They would not.  Would they
+run him for mayor again? Never! Could the public be induced to vote for
+him with all the churches fulminating against private immorality,
+hypocrites, and whited sepulchers? Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! And he was so
+very, very much respected and looked up to--that was the worst of it
+all.  This terrible demon Cowperwood had descended on him, and he had
+thought himself so secure.  He had not even been civil to Cowperwood.
+What if the latter chose to avenge the discourtesy?
+
+Mr. Sluss went back to his chair, but he could not sit in it.  He went
+for his coat, took it down, hung it up again, took it down, announced
+over the 'phone that he could not see any one for several hours, and
+went out by a private door.  Wearily he walked along North Clark
+Street, looking at the hurly-burly of traffic, looking at the dirty,
+crowded river, looking at the sky and smoke and gray buildings, and
+wondering what he should do.  The world was so hard at times; it was so
+cruel.  His wife, his family, his political career.  He could not
+conscientiously sign any ordinances for Mr. Cowperwood--that would be
+immoral, dishonest, a scandal to the city.  Mr. Cowperwood was a
+notorious traitor to the public welfare. At the same time he could not
+very well refuse, for here was Mrs. Brandon, the charming and
+unscrupulous creature, playing into the hands of Cowperwood.  If he
+could only meet her, beg of her, plead; but where was she? He had not
+seen her for months and months. Could he go to Hand and confess all?
+But Hand was a hard, cold, moral man also.  Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! He
+wondered and thought, and sighed and pondered--all without avail.
+
+Pity the poor earthling caught in the toils of the moral law.  In
+another country, perhaps, in another day, another age, such a situation
+would have been capable of a solution, one not utterly destructive to
+Mr. Sluss, and not entirely favorable to a man like Cowperwood.  But
+here in the United States, here in Chicago, the ethical verities would
+all, as he knew, be lined up against him. What Lake View would think,
+what his pastor would think, what Hand and all his moral associates
+would think--ah, these were the terrible, the incontrovertible
+consequences of his lapse from virtue.
+
+At four o'clock, after Mr. Sluss had wandered for hours in the snow and
+cold, belaboring himself for a fool and a knave, and while Cowperwood
+was sitting at his desk signing papers, contemplating a glowing fire,
+and wondering whether the mayor would deem it advisable to put in an
+appearance, his office door opened and one of his trim stenographers
+entered announcing Mr. Chaffee Thayer Sluss.  Enter Mayor Sluss, sad,
+heavy, subdued, shrunken, a very different gentleman from the one who
+had talked so cavalierly over the wires some five and a half hours
+before.  Gray weather, severe cold, and much contemplation of seemingly
+irreconcilable facts had reduced his spirits greatly.  He was a little
+pale and a little restless.  Mental distress has a reducing, congealing
+effect, and Mayor Sluss seemed somewhat less than his usual self in
+height, weight, and thickness.  Cowperwood had seen him more than once
+on various political platforms, but he had never met him.  When the
+troubled mayor entered he arose courteously and waved him to a chair.
+
+"Sit down, Mr. Sluss," he said, genially.  "It's a disagreeable day
+out, isn't it? I suppose you have come in regard to the matter we were
+discussing this morning?"
+
+Nor was this cordiality wholly assumed.  One of the primal instincts of
+Cowperwood's nature--for all his chicane and subtlety--was to take no
+rough advantage of a beaten enemy.  In the hour of victory he was
+always courteous, bland, gentle, and even sympathetic; he was so
+to-day, and quite honestly, too.
+
+Mayor Sluss put down the high sugar-loaf hat he wore and said,
+grandiosely, as was his manner even in the direst extremity: "Well, you
+see, I am here, Mr. Cowperwood.  What is it you wish me to do, exactly?"
+
+"Nothing unreasonable, I assure you, Mr. Sluss," replied Cowperwood.
+"Your manner to me this morning was a little brusque, and, as I have
+always wanted to have a sensible private talk with you, I took this way
+of getting it.  I should like you to dismiss from your mind at once the
+thought that I am going to take an unfair advantage of you in any way.
+I have no present intention of publishing your correspondence with Mrs.
+Brandon." (As he said this he took from his drawer a bundle of letters
+which Mayor Sluss recognized at once as the enthusiastic missives which
+he had sometime before penned to the fair Claudia.  Mr. Sluss groaned
+as he beheld this incriminating evidence.) "I am not trying," continued
+Cowperwood, "to wreck your career, nor to make you do anything which
+you do not feel that you can conscientiously undertake.  The letters
+that I have here, let me say, have come to me quite by accident. I did
+not seek them.  But, since I do have them, I thought I might as well
+mention them as a basis for a possible talk and compromise between us."
+
+Cowperwood did not smile.  He merely looked thoughtfully at Sluss;
+then, by way of testifying to the truthfulness of what he had been
+saying, thumped the letters up and down, just to show that they were
+real.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Sluss, heavily, "I see."
+
+He studied the bundle--a small, solid affair--while Cowperwood looked
+discreetly elsewhere.  He contemplated his own shoes, the floor.  He
+rubbed his hands and then his knees.
+
+Cowperwood saw how completely he had collapsed.  It was ridiculous,
+pitiable.
+
+"Come, Mr. Sluss," said Cowperwood, amiably, "cheer up.  Things are not
+nearly as desperate as you think.  I give you my word right now that
+nothing which you yourself, on mature thought, could say was unfair
+will be done.  You are the mayor of Chicago.  I am a citizen.  I merely
+wish fair play from you.  I merely ask you to give me your word of
+honor that from now on you will take no part in this fight which is one
+of pure spite against me.  If you cannot conscientiously aid me in what
+I consider to be a perfectly legitimate demand for additional
+franchises, you will, at least, not go out of your way to publicly
+attack me.  I will put these letters in my safe, and there they will
+stay until the next campaign is over, when I will take them out and
+destroy them.  I have no personal feeling against you--none in the
+world.  I do not ask you to sign any ordinance which the council may
+pass giving me elevated-road rights.  What I do wish you to do at this
+time is to refrain from stirring up public sentiment against me,
+especially if the council should see fit to pass an ordinance over your
+veto. Is that satisfactory?"
+
+"But my friends? The public? The Republican party? Don't you see it is
+expected of me that I should wage some form of campaign against you?"
+queried Sluss, nervously.
+
+"No, I don't," replied Cowperwood, succinctly, "and, anyhow, there are
+ways and ways of waging a public campaign.  Go through the motions, if
+you wish, but don't put too much heart in it.  And, anyhow, see some
+one of my lawyers from time to time when they call on you.  Judge
+Dickensheets is an able and fair man.  So is General Van Sickle.  Why
+not confer with them occasionally?--not publicly, of course, but in
+some less conspicuous way.  You will find both of them most helpful."
+
+Cowperwood smiled encouragingly, quite beneficently, and Chaffee Thayer
+Sluss, his political hopes gone glimmering, sat and mused for a few
+moments in a sad and helpless quandary.
+
+"Very well," he said, at last, rubbing his hands feverishly.  "It is
+what I might have expected.  I should have known.  There is no other
+way, but--" Hardly able to repress the hot tears now burning beneath
+his eyelids, the Hon. Mr. Sluss picked up his hat and left the room.
+Needless to add that his preachings against Cowperwood were permanently
+silenced.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLV
+
+Changing Horizons
+
+
+The effect of all this was to arouse in Cowperwood the keenest feelings
+of superiority he had ever yet enjoyed.  Hitherto he had fancied that
+his enemies might worst him, but at last his path seemed clear.  He was
+now worth, all in all, the round sum of twenty million dollars.  His
+art-collection had become the most important in the West--perhaps in
+the nation, public collections excluded.  He began to envision himself
+as a national figure, possibly even an international one.  And yet he
+was coming to feel that, no matter how complete his financial victory
+might ultimately be, the chances were that he and Aileen would never be
+socially accepted here in Chicago.  He had done too many boisterous
+things--alienated too many people.  He was as determined as ever to
+retain a firm grip on the Chicago street-railway situation.  But he was
+disturbed for a second time in his life by the thought that, owing to
+the complexities of his own temperament, he had married unhappily and
+would find the situation difficult of adjustment.  Aileen, whatever
+might be said of her deficiencies, was by no means as tractable or
+acquiescent as his first wife. And, besides, he felt that he owed her a
+better turn.  By no means did he actually dislike her as yet; though
+she was no longer soothing, stimulating, or suggestive to him as she
+had formerly been.  Her woes, because of him, were too many; her
+attitude toward him too censorious.  He was perfectly willing to
+sympathize with her, to regret his own change of feeling, but what
+would you? He could not control his own temperament any more than
+Aileen could control hers.
+
+The worst of this situation was that it was now becoming complicated on
+Cowperwood's part with the most disturbing thoughts concerning Berenice
+Fleming.  Ever since the days when he had first met her mother he had
+been coming more and more to feel for the young girl a soul-stirring
+passion--and that without a single look exchanged or a single word
+spoken.  There is a static something which is beauty, and this may be
+clothed in the habiliments of a ragged philosopher or in the silks and
+satins of pampered coquetry.  It was a suggestion of this beauty which
+is above sex and above age and above wealth that shone in the blowing
+hair and night-blue eyes of Berenice Fleming.  His visit to the Carter
+family at Pocono had been a disappointment to him, because of the
+apparent hopelessness of arousing Berenice's interest, and since that
+time, and during their casual encounters, she had remained politely
+indifferent. Nevertheless, he remained true to his persistence in the
+pursuit of any game he had fixed upon.
+
+Mrs. Carter, whose relations with Cowperwood had in the past been not
+wholly platonic, nevertheless attributed much of his interest in her to
+her children and their vital chance.  Berenice and Rolfe themselves
+knew nothing concerning the nature of their mother's arrangements with
+Cowperwood.  True to his promise of protectorship and assistance, he
+had established her in a New York apartment adjacent to her daughter's
+school, and where he fancied that he himself might spend many happy
+hours were Berenice but near. Proximity to Berenice! The desire to
+arouse her interest and command her favor! Cowperwood would scarcely
+have cared to admit to himself how great a part this played in a
+thought which had recently been creeping into his mind.  It was that of
+erecting a splendid house in New York.
+
+By degrees this idea of building a New York house had grown upon him.
+His Chicago mansion was a costly sepulcher in which Aileen sat brooding
+over the woes which had befallen her.  Moreover, aside from the social
+defeat which it represented, it was becoming merely as a structure, but
+poorly typical of the splendor and ability of his imaginations.  This
+second dwelling, if he ever achieved it, should be resplendent, a
+monument to himself.  In his speculative wanderings abroad he had seen
+many such great palaces, designed with the utmost care, which had
+housed the taste and culture of generations of men.  His
+art-collection, in which he took an immense pride, had been growing,
+until it was the basis if not the completed substance for a very
+splendid memorial.  Already in it were gathered paintings of all the
+important schools; to say nothing of collections of jade, illumined
+missals, porcelains, rugs, draperies, mirror frames, and a beginning at
+rare originals of sculpture.  The beauty of these strange things, the
+patient laborings of inspired souls of various times and places, moved
+him, on occasion, to a gentle awe.  Of all individuals he respected,
+indeed revered, the sincere artist.  Existence was a mystery, but these
+souls who set themselves to quiet tasks of beauty had caught something
+of which he was dimly conscious.  Life had touched them with a vision,
+their hearts and souls were attuned to sweet harmonies of which the
+common world knew nothing.  Sometimes, when he was weary after a
+strenuous day, he would enter--late in the night--his now silent
+gallery, and turning on the lights so that the whole sweet room stood
+revealed, he would seat himself before some treasure, reflecting on the
+nature, the mood, the time, and the man that had produced it.
+Sometimes it would be one of Rembrandt's melancholy heads--the sad
+"Portrait of a Rabbi"--or the sweet introspection of a Rousseau stream.
+A solemn Dutch housewife, rendered with the bold fidelity and resonant
+enameled surfaces of a Hals or the cold elegance of an Ingres,
+commanded his utmost enthusiasm.  So he would sit and wonder at the
+vision and skill of the original dreamer, exclaiming at times: "A
+marvel! A marvel!"
+
+At the same time, so far as Aileen was concerned things were obviously
+shaping up for additional changes.  She was in that peculiar state
+which has befallen many a woman--trying to substitute a lesser ideal
+for a greater, and finding that the effort is useless or nearly so.  In
+regard to her affair with Lynde, aside from the temporary relief and
+diversion it had afforded her, she was beginning to feel that she had
+made a serious mistake.  Lynde was delightful, after his fashion.  He
+could amuse her with a different type of experience from any that
+Cowperwood had to relate.  Once they were intimate he had, with an
+easy, genial air, confessed to all sorts of liaisons in Europe and
+America.  He was utterly pagan--a faun--and at the same time he was
+truly of the smart world.  His open contempt of all but one or two of
+the people in Chicago whom Aileen had secretly admired and wished to
+associate with, and his easy references to figures of importance in the
+East and in Paris and London, raised him amazingly in her estimation;
+it made her feel, sad to relate, that she had by no means lowered
+herself in succumbing so readily to his forceful charms.
+
+Nevertheless, because he was what he was--genial, complimentary,
+affectionate, but a playboy, merely, and a soldier of fortune, with no
+desire to make over her life for her on any new basis--she was now
+grieving over the futility of this romance which had got her nowhere,
+and which, in all probability, had alienated Cowperwood for good.  He
+was still outwardly genial and friendly, but their relationship was now
+colored by a sense of mistake and uncertainty which existed on both
+sides, but which, in Aileen's case, amounted to a subtle species of
+soul-torture.  Hitherto she had been the aggrieved one, the one whose
+loyalty had never been in question, and whose persistent affection and
+faith had been greatly sinned against.  Now all this was changed.  The
+manner in which he had sinned against her was plain enough, but the way
+in which, out of pique, she had forsaken him was in the other balance.
+Say what one will, the loyalty of woman, whether a condition in nature
+or an evolved accident of sociology, persists as a dominating thought
+in at least a section of the race; and women themselves, be it said,
+are the ones who most loudly and openly subscribe to it. Cowperwood
+himself was fully aware that Aileen had deserted him, not because she
+loved him less or Lynde more, but because she was hurt--and deeply so.
+Aileen knew that he knew this.  From one point of view it enraged her
+and made her defiant; from another it grieved her to think she had
+uselessly sinned against his faith in her.  Now he had ample excuse to
+do anything he chose.  Her best claim on him--her wounds--she had
+thrown away as one throws away a weapon.  Her pride would not let her
+talk to him about this, and at the same time she could not endure the
+easy, tolerant manner with which he took it.  His smiles, his
+forgiveness, his sometimes pleasant jesting were all a horrible offense.
+
+To complete her mental quandary, she was already beginning to quarrel
+with Lynde over this matter of her unbreakable regard for Cowperwood.
+With the sufficiency of a man of the world Lynde intended that she
+should succumb to him completely and forget her wonderful husband.
+When with him she was apparently charmed and interested, yielding
+herself freely, but this was more out of pique at Cowperwood's neglect
+than from any genuine passion for Lynde. In spite of her pretensions of
+anger, her sneers, and criticisms whenever Cowperwood's name came up,
+she was, nevertheless, hopelessly fond of him and identified with him
+spiritually, and it was not long before Lynde began to suspect this.
+Such a discovery is a sad one for any master of women to make.  It
+jolted his pride severely.
+
+"You care for him still, don't you?" he asked, with a wry smile, upon
+one occasion.  They were sitting at dinner in a private room at
+Kinsley's, and Aileen, whose color was high, and who was becomingly
+garbed in metallic-green silk, was looking especially handsome.  Lynde
+had been proposing that she should make special arrangements to depart
+with him for a three-months' stay in Europe, but she would have nothing
+to do with the project.  She did not dare.  Such a move would make
+Cowperwood feel that she was alienating herself forever; it would give
+him an excellent excuse to leave her.
+
+"Oh, it isn't that," she had declared, in reply to Lynde's query. "I
+just don't want to go.  I can't.  I'm not prepared.  It's nothing but a
+notion of yours, anyhow.  You're tired of Chicago because it's getting
+near spring.  You go and I'll be here when you come back, or I may
+decide to come over later." She smiled.
+
+Lynde pulled a dark face.
+
+"Hell!" he said.  "I know how it is with you.  You still stick to him,
+even when he treats you like a dog.  You pretend not to love him when
+as a matter of fact you're mad about him.  I've seen it all along.  You
+don't really care anything about me.  You can't. You're too crazy about
+him."
+
+"Oh, shut up!" replied Aileen, irritated greatly for the moment by this
+onslaught.  "You talk like a fool.  I'm not anything of the sort.  I
+admire him.  How could any one help it?" (At this time, of course,
+Cowperwood's name was filling the city.) "He's a very wonderful man.
+He was never brutal to me.  He's a full-sized man--I'll say that for
+him."
+
+By now Aileen had become sufficiently familiar with Lynde to criticize
+him in her own mind, and even outwardly by innuendo, for being a loafer
+and idler who had never created in any way the money he was so freely
+spending.  She had little power to psychologize concerning social
+conditions, but the stalwart constructive persistence of Cowperwood
+along commercial lines coupled with the current American contempt of
+leisure reflected somewhat unfavorably upon Lynde, she thought.
+
+Lynde's face clouded still more at this outburst.  "You go to the
+devil," he retorted.  "I don't get you at all.  Sometimes you talk as
+though you were fond of me.  At other times you're all wrapped up in
+him.  Now you either care for me or you don't.  Which is it? If you're
+so crazy about him that you can't leave home for a month or so you
+certainly can't care much about me."
+
+Aileen, however, because of her long experience with Cowperwood, was
+more than a match for Lynde.  At the same time she was afraid to let go
+of him for fear that she should have no one to care for her.  She liked
+him.  He was a happy resource in her misery, at least for the moment.
+Yet the knowledge that Cowperwood looked upon this affair as a heavy
+blemish on her pristine solidarity cooled her.  At the thought of him
+and of her whole tarnished and troubled career she was very unhappy.
+
+"Hell!" Lynde had repeated, irritably, "stay if you want to.  I'll not
+be trying to over-persuade you--depend on that."
+
+They quarreled still further over this matter, and, though they
+eventually made up, both sensed the drift toward an ultimately
+unsatisfactory conclusion.
+
+It was one morning not long after this that Cowperwood, feeling in a
+genial mood over his affairs, came into Aileen's room, as he still did
+on occasions, to finish dressing and pass the time of day.
+
+"Well," he observed, gaily, as he stood before the mirror adjusting his
+collar and tie, "how are you and Lynde getting along these
+days--nicely?"
+
+"Oh, you go to the devil!" replied Aileen, flaring up and struggling
+with her divided feelings, which pained her constantly.  "If it hadn't
+been for you there wouldn't be any chance for your smarty
+'how-am-I-getting-alongs.' I am getting along all
+right--fine--regardless of anything you may think.  He's as good a man
+as you are any day, and better.  I like him.  At least he's fond of me,
+and that's more than you are.  Why should you care what I do? You
+don't, so why talk about it? I want you to let me alone."
+
+"Aileen, Aileen, how you carry on! Don't flare up so.  I meant nothing
+by it.  I'm sorry as much for myself as for you.  I've told you I'm not
+jealous.  You think I'm critical.  I'm not anything of the kind.  I
+know how you feel.  That's all very good."
+
+"Oh yes, yes," she replied.  "Well, you can keep your feelings to
+yourself.  Go to the devil! Go to the devil, I tell you!" Her eyes
+blazed.
+
+He stood now, fully dressed, in the center of the rug before her, and
+Aileen looked at him, keen, valiant, handsome--her old Frank. Once
+again she regretted her nominal faithlessness, and raged at him in her
+heart for his indifference.  "You dog," she was about to add, "you have
+no heart!" but she changed her mind.  Her throat tightened and her eyes
+filled.  She wanted to run to him and say: "Oh, Frank, don't you
+understand how it all is, how it all came about? Won't you love me
+again--can't you?" But she restrained herself.  It seemed to her that
+he might understand--that he would, in fact--but that he would never
+again be faithful, anyhow.  And she would so gladly have discarded
+Lynde and any and all men if he would only have said the word, would
+only have really and sincerely wished her to do so.
+
+It was one day not long after their morning quarrel in her bedroom that
+Cowperwood broached the matter of living in New York to Aileen,
+pointing out that thereby his art-collection, which was growing
+constantly, might be more suitably housed, and that it would give her a
+second opportunity to enter social life.
+
+"So that you can get rid of me out here," commented Aileen, little
+knowing of Berenice Fleming.
+
+"Not at all," replied Cowperwood, sweetly.  "You see how things are.
+There's no chance of our getting into Chicago society. There's too much
+financial opposition against me here.  If we had a big house in New
+York, such as I would build, it would be an introduction in itself.
+After all, these Chicagoans aren't even a snapper on the real society
+whip.  It's the Easterners who set the pace, and the New-Yorkers most
+of all.  If you want to say the word, I can sell this place and we can
+live down there, part of the time, anyhow.  I could spend as much of my
+time with you there as I have been doing here--perhaps more."
+
+Because of her soul of vanity Aileen's mind ran forward in spite of
+herself to the wider opportunities which his words suggested. This
+house had become a nightmare to her--a place of neglect and bad
+memories.  Here she had fought with Rita Sohlberg; here she had seen
+society come for a very little while only to disappear; here she had
+waited this long time for the renewal of Cowperwood's love, which was
+now obviously never to be restored in its original glamour.  As he
+spoke she looked at him quizzically, almost sadly in her great doubt.
+At the same time she could not help reflecting that in New York where
+money counted for so much, and with Cowperwood's great and growing
+wealth and prestige behind her, she might hope to find herself socially
+at last.  "Nothing venture, nothing have" had always been her motto,
+nailed to her mast, though her equipment for the life she now craved
+had never been more than the veriest make-believe--painted wood and
+tinsel.  Vain, radiant, hopeful Aileen! Yet how was she to know?
+
+"Very well," she observed, finally.  "Do as you like.  I can live down
+there as well as I can here, I presume--alone."
+
+Cowperwood knew the nature of her longings.  He knew what was running
+in her mind, and how futile were her dreams.  Life had taught him how
+fortuitous must be the circumstances which could enable a woman of
+Aileen's handicaps and defects to enter that cold upper world.  Yet for
+all the courage of him, for the very life of him, he could not tell
+her.  He could not forget that once, behind the grim bars in the
+penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, he had cried on
+her shoulder.  He could not be an ingrate and wound her with his inmost
+thoughts any more than he could deceive himself.  A New York mansion
+and the dreams of social supremacy which she might there entertain
+would soothe her ruffled vanity and assuage her disappointed heart; and
+at the same time he would be nearer Berenice Fleming.  Say what one
+will of these ferret windings of the human mind, they are,
+nevertheless, true and characteristic of the average human being, and
+Cowperwood was no exception.  He saw it all, he calculated on it--he
+calculated on the simple humanity of Aileen.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLVI
+
+Depths and Heights
+
+
+The complications which had followed his various sentimental affairs
+left Cowperwood in a quandary at times as to whether there could be any
+peace or satisfaction outside of monogamy, after all. Although Mrs.
+Hand had gone to Europe at the crisis of her affairs, she had returned
+to seek him out.  Cecily Haguenin found many opportunities of writing
+him letters and assuring him of her undying affection.  Florence
+Cochrane persisted in seeing or attempting to see him even after his
+interest in her began to wane.  For another thing Aileen, owing to the
+complication and general degeneracy of her affairs, had recently begun
+to drink.  Owing to the failure of her affair with Lynde--for in spite
+of her yielding she had never had any real heart interest in it--and to
+the cavalier attitude with which Cowperwood took her disloyalty, she
+had reached that state of speculative doldrums where the human animal
+turns upon itself in bitter self-analysis; the end with the more
+sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death.  Woe to him
+who places his faith in illusion--the only reality--and woe to him who
+does not.  In one way lies disillusion with its pain, in the other way
+regret.
+
+After Lynde's departure for Europe, whither she had refused to follow
+him, Aileen took up with a secondary personage by the name of Watson
+Skeet, a sculptor.  Unlike most artists, he was the solitary heir of
+the president of an immense furniture-manufacturing company in which he
+refused to take any interest.  He had studied abroad, but had returned
+to Chicago with a view to propagating art in the West.  A large, blond,
+soft-fleshed man, he had a kind of archaic naturalness and simplicity
+which appealed to Aileen.  They had met at the Rhees Griers'.  Feeling
+herself neglected after Lynde's departure, and dreading loneliness
+above all things, Aileen became intimate with Skeet, but to no intense
+mental satisfaction. That driving standard within--that obsessing ideal
+which requires that all things be measured by it--was still dominant.
+Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better thing? How it
+creeps over the spirit of one's current dreams! Like the specter at the
+banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy
+the makeshift feast.  The what-might-have-been of her life with
+Cowperwood walked side by side with her wherever she went.  Once
+occasionally indulging in cigarettes, she now smoked almost constantly.
+Once barely sipping at wines, cocktails, brandy-and-soda, she now took
+to the latter, or, rather, to a new whisky-and-soda combination known
+as "highball" with a kind of vehemence which had little to do with a
+taste for the thing itself.  True, drinking is, after all, a state of
+mind, and not an appetite.  She had found on a number of occasions when
+she had been quarreling with Lynde or was mentally depressed that in
+partaking of these drinks a sort of warm, speculative indifference
+seized upon her.  She was no longer so sad.  She might cry, but it was
+in a soft, rainy, relieving way.  Her sorrows were as strange, enticing
+figures in dreams.  They moved about and around her, not as things
+actually identical with her, but as ills which she could view at a
+distance.  Sometimes both she and they (for she saw herself also as in
+a kind of mirage or inverted vision) seemed beings of another state,
+troubled, but not bitterly painful. The old nepenthe of the bottle had
+seized upon her.  After a few accidental lapses, in which she found it
+acted as a solace or sedative, the highball visioned itself to her as a
+resource.  Why should she not drink if it relieved her, as it actually
+did, of physical and mental pain? There were apparently no bad
+after-effects. The whisky involved was diluted to an almost watery
+state.  It was her custom now when at home alone to go to the butler's
+pantry where the liquors were stored and prepare a drink for herself,
+or to order a tray with a siphon and bottle placed in her room.
+Cowperwood, noticing the persistence of its presence there and the fact
+that she drank heavily at table, commented upon it.
+
+"You're not taking too much of that, are you, Aileen?" he questioned
+one evening, watching her drink down a tumbler of whisky and water as
+she sat contemplating a pattern of needlework with which the table was
+ornamented.
+
+"Certainly I'm not," she replied, irritably, a little flushed and thick
+of tongue.  "Why do you ask?" She herself had been wondering whether in
+the course of time it might not have a depreciating effect on her
+complexion.  This was the only thing that still concerned her--her
+beauty.
+
+"Well, I see you have that bottle in your room all the time.  I was
+wondering if you might not be forgetting how much you are using it."
+
+Because she was so sensitive he was trying to be tactful.
+
+"Well," she answered, crossly, "what if I am? It wouldn't make any
+particular difference if I did.  I might as well drink as do some other
+things that are done."
+
+It was a kind of satisfaction to her to bait him in this way.  His
+inquiry, being a proof of continued interest on his part, was of some
+value.  At least he was not entirely indifferent to her.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't talk that way, Aileen," he replied.  "I have no
+objection to your drinking some.  I don't suppose it makes any
+difference to you now whether I object or not.  But you are too
+good-looking, too well set up physically, to begin that.  You don't
+need it, and it's such a short road to hell.  Your state isn't so bad.
+Good heavens! many another woman has been in your position. I'm not
+going to leave you unless you want to leave me.  I've told you that
+over and over.  I'm just sorry people change--we all do.  I suppose
+I've changed some, but that's no reason for your letting yourself go to
+pieces.  I wish you wouldn't be desperate about this business.  It may
+come out better than you think in the long run."
+
+He was merely talking to console her.
+
+"Oh! oh! oh!" Aileen suddenly began to rock and cry in a foolish
+drunken way, as though her heart would break, and Cowperwood got up.
+He was horrified after a fashion.
+
+"Oh, don't come near me!" Aileen suddenly exclaimed, sobering in an
+equally strange way.  "I know why you come.  I know how much you care
+about me or my looks.  Don't you worry whether I drink or not.  I'll
+drink if I please, or do anything else if I choose. If it helps me over
+my difficulties, that's my business, not yours," and in defiance she
+prepared another glass and drank it.
+
+Cowperwood shook his head, looking at her steadily and sorrowfully.
+"It's too bad, Aileen," he said.  "I don't know what to do about you
+exactly.  You oughtn't to go on this way.  Whisky won't get you
+anywhere.  It will simply ruin your looks and make you miserable in the
+bargain."
+
+"Oh, to hell with my looks!" she snapped.  "A lot of good they've done
+me." And, feeling contentious and sad, she got up and left the table.
+Cowperwood followed her after a time, only to see her dabbing at her
+eyes and nose with powder.  A half-filled glass of whisky and water was
+on the dressing-table beside her.  It gave him a strange feeling of
+responsibility and helplessness.
+
+Mingled with his anxiety as to Aileen were thoughts of the alternate
+rise and fall of his hopes in connection with Berenice.  She was such a
+superior girl, developing so definitely as an individual. To his
+satisfaction she had, on a few recent occasions when he had seen her,
+unbent sufficiently to talk to him in a friendly and even intimate way,
+for she was by no means hoity-toity, but a thinking, reasoning being of
+the profoundest intellectual, or, rather, the highest artistic
+tendencies.  She was so care-free, living in a high and solitary world,
+at times apparently enwrapt in thoughts serene, at other times sharing
+vividly in the current interests of the social world of which she was a
+part, and which she dignified as much as it dignified her.
+
+One Sunday morning at Pocono, in late June weather, when he had come
+East to rest for a few days, and all was still and airy on the high
+ground which the Carter cottage occupied, Berenice came out on the
+veranda where Cowperwood was sitting, reading a fiscal report of one of
+his companies and meditating on his affairs.  By now they had become
+somewhat more sympatica than formerly, and Berenice had an easy, genial
+way in his presence.  She liked him, rather.  With an indescribable
+smile which wrinkled her nose and eyes, and played about the corners of
+her mouth, she said: "Now I am going to catch a bird."
+
+"A what?" asked Cowperwood, looking up and pretending he had not heard,
+though he had.  He was all eyes for any movement of hers. She was
+dressed in a flouncy morning gown eminently suitable for the world in
+which she was moving.
+
+"A bird," she replied, with an airy toss of her head.  "This is
+June-time, and the sparrows are teaching their young to fly."
+
+Cowperwood, previously engrossed in financial speculations, was
+translated, as by the wave of a fairy wand, into another realm where
+birds and fledglings and grass and the light winds of heaven were more
+important than brick and stone and stocks and bonds. He got up and
+followed her flowing steps across the grass to where, near a clump of
+alder bushes, she had seen a mother sparrow enticing a fledgling to
+take wing.  From her room upstairs, she had been watching this bit of
+outdoor sociology.  It suddenly came to Cowperwood, with great force,
+how comparatively unimportant in the great drift of life were his own
+affairs when about him was operative all this splendid will to
+existence, as sensed by her.  He saw her stretch out her hands
+downward, and run in an airy, graceful way, stooping here and there,
+while before her fluttered a baby sparrow, until suddenly she dived
+quickly and then, turning, her face agleam, cried: "See, I have him! He
+wants to fight, too! Oh, you little dear!"
+
+She was holding "him," as she chose to characterize it, in the hollow
+of her hand, the head between her thumb and forefinger, with the
+forefinger of her free hand petting it the while she laughed and kissed
+it.  It was not so much bird-love as the artistry of life and of
+herself that was moving her.  Hearing the parent bird chirping
+distractedly from a nearby limb, she turned and called: "Don't make
+such a row! I sha'n't keep him long."
+
+Cowperwood laughed--trig in the morning sun.  "You can scarcely blame
+her," he commented.
+
+"Oh, she knows well enough I wouldn't hurt him," Berenice replied,
+spiritedly, as though it were literally true.
+
+"Does she, indeed?" inquired Cowperwood.  "Why do you say that?"
+
+"Because it's true.  Don't you think they know when their children are
+really in danger?"
+
+"But why should they?" persisted Cowperwood, charmed and interested by
+the involute character of her logic.  She was quite deceptive to him.
+He could not be sure what she thought.
+
+She merely fixed him a moment with her cool, slate-blue eyes.  "Do you
+think the senses of the world are only five?" she asked, in the most
+charming and non-reproachful way.  "Indeed, they know well enough.  She
+knows." She turned and waved a graceful hand in the direction of the
+tree, where peace now reigned.  The chirping had ceased.  "She knows I
+am not a cat."
+
+Again that enticing, mocking smile that wrinkled her nose, her
+eye-corners, her mouth.  The word "cat" had a sharp, sweet sound in her
+mouth.  It seemed to be bitten off closely with force and airy spirit.
+Cowperwood surveyed her as he would have surveyed the ablest person he
+knew.  Here was a woman, he saw, who could and would command the utmost
+reaches of his soul in every direction. If he interested her at all, he
+would need them all.  The eyes of her were at once so elusive, so
+direct, so friendly, so cool and keen.  "You will have to be
+interesting, indeed, to interest me," they seemed to say; and yet they
+were by no means averse, apparently, to a hearty camaraderie.  That
+nose-wrinkling smile said as much.  Here was by no means a Stephanie
+Platow, nor yet a Rita Sohlberg.  He could not assume her as he had
+Ella Hubby, or Florence Cochrane, or Cecily Haguenin.  Here was an iron
+individuality with a soul for romance and art and philosophy and life.
+He could not take her as he had those others.  And yet Berenice was
+really beginning to think more than a little about Cowperwood.  He must
+be an extraordinary man; her mother said so, and the newspapers were
+always mentioning his name and noting his movements.
+
+A little later, at Southampton, whither she and her mother had gone,
+they met again.  Together with a young man by the name of Greanelle,
+Cowperwood and Berenice had gone into the sea to bathe. It was a
+wonderful afternoon.
+
+To the east and south and west spread the sea, a crinkling floor of
+blue, and to their left, as they faced it, was a lovely outward-curving
+shore of tawny sand.  Studying Berenice in blue-silk bathing costume
+and shoes, Cowperwood had been stung by the wonder of passing life--how
+youth comes in, ever fresh and fresh, and age goes out.  Here he was,
+long crowded years of conflict and experience behind him, and yet this
+twenty-year-old girl, with her incisive mind and keen tastes, was
+apparently as wise in matters of general import as himself.  He could
+find no flaw in her armor in those matters which they could discuss.
+Her knowledge and comments were so ripe and sane, despite a tendency to
+pose a little, which was quite within her rights.  Because Greanelle
+had bored her a little she had shunted him off and was amusing herself
+talking to Cowperwood, who fascinated her by his compact individuality.
+
+"Do you know," she confided to him, on this occasion, "I get so very
+tired of young men sometimes.  They can be so inane.  I do declare,
+they are nothing more than shoes and ties and socks and canes strung
+together in some unimaginable way.  Vaughn Greanelle is for all the
+world like a perambulating manikin to-day.  He is just an English suit
+with a cane attached walking about."
+
+"Well, bless my soul," commented Cowperwood, "what an indictment!"
+
+"It's true," she replied.  "He knows nothing at all except polo, and
+the latest swimming-stroke, and where everybody is, and who is going to
+marry who.  Isn't it dull?"
+
+She tossed her head back and breathed as though to exhale the fumes of
+the dull and the inane from her inmost being.
+
+"Did you tell him that?" inquired Cowperwood, curiously.
+
+"Certainly I did."
+
+"I don't wonder he looks so solemn," he said, turning and looking back
+at Greanelle and Mrs. Carter; they were sitting side by side in
+sand-chairs, the former beating the sand with his toes.  "You're a
+curious girl, Berenice," he went on, familiarly.  "You are so direct
+and vital at times.
+
+"Not any more than you are, from all I can hear," she replied, fixing
+him with those steady eyes.  "Anyhow, why should I be bored? He is so
+dull.  He follows me around out here all the time, and I don't want
+him."
+
+She tossed her head and began to run up the beach to where bathers were
+fewer and fewer, looking back at Cowperwood as if to say, "Why don't
+you follow?" He developed a burst of enthusiasm and ran quite briskly,
+overtaking her near some shallows where, because of a sandbar offshore,
+the waters were thin and bright.
+
+"Oh, look!" exclaimed Berenice, when he came up.  "See, the fish! O-oh!"
+
+She dashed in to where a few feet offshore a small school of minnows as
+large as sardines were playing, silvery in the sun.  She ran as she had
+for the bird, doing her best to frighten them into a neighboring pocket
+or pool farther up on the shore.  Cowperwood, as gay as a boy of ten,
+joined in the chase.  He raced after them briskly, losing one school,
+but pocketing another a little farther on and calling to her to come.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Berenice at one point.  "Here they are now.  Come
+quick! Drive them in here!"
+
+Her hair was blowy, her face a keen pink, her eyes an electric blue by
+contrast.  She was bending low over the water--Cowperwood also--their
+hands outstretched, the fish, some five in all, nervously dancing
+before them in their efforts to escape.  All at once, having forced
+them into a corner, they dived; Berenice actually caught one.
+Cowperwood missed by a fraction, but drove the fish she did catch into
+her hands.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, jumping up, "how wonderful! It's alive.  I caught
+it."
+
+She danced up and down, and Cowperwood, standing before her, was
+sobered by her charm.  He felt an impulse to speak to her of his
+affection, to tell her how delicious she was to him.
+
+"You," he said, pausing over the word and giving it special
+emphasis--"you are the only thing here that is wonderful to me."
+
+She looked at him a moment, the live fish in her extended hands, her
+eyes keying to the situation.  For the least fraction of a moment she
+was uncertain, as he could see, how to take this.  Many men had been
+approximative before.  It was common to have compliments paid to her.
+But this was different.  She said nothing, but fixed him with a look
+which said quite plainly, "You had better not say anything more just
+now, I think." Then, seeing that he understood, that his manner
+softened, and that he was troubled, she crinkled her nose gaily and
+added: "It's like fairyland.  I feel as though I had caught it out of
+another world." Cowperwood understood.  The direct approach was not for
+use in her case; and yet there was something, a camaraderie, a sympathy
+which he felt and which she felt.  A girls' school, conventions, the
+need of socially placing herself, her conservative friends, and their
+viewpoint--all were working here.  If he were only single now, she told
+herself, she would be willing to listen to him in a very different
+spirit, for he was charming.  But this way-- And he, for his part,
+concluded that here was one woman whom he would gladly marry if she
+would have him.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLVII
+
+American Match
+
+
+Following Cowperwood's coup in securing cash by means of his seeming
+gift of three hundred thousand dollars for a telescope his enemies
+rested for a time, but only because of a lack of ideas wherewith to
+destroy him.  Public sentiment--created by the newspapers--was still
+against him.  Yet his franchises had still from eight to ten years to
+run, and meanwhile he might make himself unassailably powerful.  For
+the present he was busy, surrounded by his engineers and managers and
+legal advisers, constructing his several elevated lines at a whirlwind
+rate.  At the same time, through Videra, Kaffrath, and Addison, he was
+effecting a scheme of loaning money on call to the local Chicago
+banks--the very banks which were most opposed to him--so that in a
+crisis he could retaliate.  By manipulating the vast quantity of stocks
+and bonds of which he was now the master he was making money hand over
+fist, his one rule being that six per cent. was enough to pay any
+holder who had merely purchased his stock as an outsider.  It was most
+profitable to himself.  When his stocks earned more than that he issued
+new ones, selling them on 'change and pocketing the difference.  Out of
+the cash-drawers of his various companies he took immense sums,
+temporary loans, as it were, which later he had charged by his humble
+servitors to "construction," "equipment," or "operation." He was like a
+canny wolf prowling in a forest of trees of his own creation.
+
+The weak note in this whole project of elevated lines was that for some
+time it was destined to be unprofitable.  Its very competition tended
+to weaken the value of his surface-line companies.  His holdings in
+these as well as in elevated-road shares were immense. If anything
+happened to cause them to fall in price immense numbers of these same
+stocks held by others would be thrown on the market, thus still further
+depreciating their value and compelling him to come into the market and
+buy.  With the most painstaking care he began at once to pile up a
+reserve in government bonds for emergency purposes, which he decided
+should be not less than eight or nine million dollars, for he feared
+financial storms as well as financial reprisal, and where so much was
+at stake he did not propose to be caught napping.
+
+At the time that Cowperwood first entered on elevated-road construction
+there was no evidence that any severe depression in the American
+money-market was imminent.  But it was not long before a new difficulty
+began to appear.  It was now the day of the trust in all its watery
+magnificence.  Coal, iron, steel, oil, machinery, and a score of other
+commercial necessities had already been "trustified," and others, such
+as leather, shoes, cordage, and the like, were, almost hourly, being
+brought under the control of shrewd and ruthless men.  Already in
+Chicago Schryhart, Hand, Arneel, Merrill, and a score of others were
+seeing their way to amazing profits by underwriting these ventures
+which required ready cash, and to which lesser magnates, content with a
+portion of the leavings of Dives's table, were glad to bring to their
+attention. On the other hand, in the nation at large there was growing
+up a feeling that at the top there were a set of giants--Titans--who,
+without heart or soul, and without any understanding of or sympathy
+with the condition of the rank and file, were setting forth to enchain
+and enslave them.  The vast mass, writhing in ignorance and poverty,
+finally turned with pathetic fury to the cure-all of a political leader
+in the West.  This latter prophet, seeing gold becoming scarcer and
+scarcer and the cash and credits of the land falling into the hands of
+a few who were manipulating them for their own benefit, had decided
+that what was needed was a greater volume of currency, so that credits
+would be easier and money cheaper to come by in the matter of interest.
+Silver, of which there was a superabundance in the mines, was to be
+coined at the ratio of sixteen dollars of silver for every one of gold
+in circulation, and the parity of the two metals maintained by fiat of
+government.  Never again should the few be able to make a weapon of the
+people's medium of exchange in order to bring about their undoing.
+There was to be ample money, far beyond the control of central banks
+and the men in power over them.  It was a splendid dream worthy of a
+charitable heart, but because of it a disturbing war for political
+control of the government was shortly threatened and soon began.  The
+money element, sensing the danger of change involved in the theories of
+the new political leader, began to fight him and the element in the
+Democratic party which he represented.  The rank and file of both
+parties--the more or less hungry and thirsty who lie ever at the bottom
+on both sides--hailed him as a heaven-sent deliverer, a new Moses come
+to lead them out of the wilderness of poverty and distress.  Woe to the
+political leader who preaches a new doctrine of deliverance, and who,
+out of tenderness of heart, offers a panacea for human ills.  His truly
+shall be a crown of thorns.
+
+Cowperwood, no less than other men of wealth, was opposed to what he
+deemed a crack-brained idea--that of maintaining a parity between gold
+and silver by law.  Confiscation was his word for it--the confiscation
+of the wealth of the few for the benefit of the many. Most of all was
+he opposed to it because he feared that this unrest, which was
+obviously growing, foreshadowed a class war in which investors would
+run to cover and money be locked in strong-boxes. At once he began to
+shorten sail, to invest only in the soundest securities, and to convert
+all his weaker ones into cash.
+
+To meet current emergencies, however, he was compelled to borrow
+heavily here and there, and in doing so he was quick to note that those
+banks representing his enemies in Chicago and elsewhere were willing to
+accept his various stocks as collateral, providing he would accept
+loans subject to call.  He did so gladly, at the same time suspecting
+Hand, Schryhart, Arneel, and Merrill of some scheme to wreck him,
+providing they could get him where the calling of his loans suddenly
+and in concert would financially embarrass him. "I think I know what
+that crew are up to," he once observed to Addison, at this period.
+"Well, they will have to rise very early in the morning if they catch
+me napping."
+
+The thing that he suspected was really true.  Schryhart, Hand, and
+Arneel, watching him through their agents and brokers, had soon
+discovered--in the very earliest phases of the silver agitation and
+before the real storm broke--that he was borrowing in New York, in
+London, in certain quarters of Chicago, and elsewhere.  "It looks to
+me," said Schryhart, one day, to his friend Arneel, "as if our friend
+has gotten in a little too deep.  He has overreached himself.  These
+elevated-road schemes of his have eaten up too much capital.  There is
+another election coming on next fall, and he knows we are going to
+fight tooth and nail.  He needs money to electrify his surface lines.
+If we could trace out exactly where he stands, and where he has
+borrowed, we might know what to do."
+
+"Unless I am greatly mistaken," replied Arneel, "he is in a tight place
+or is rapidly getting there.  This silver agitation is beginning to
+weaken stocks and tighten money.  I suggest that our banks here loan
+him all the money he wants on call.  When the time comes, if he isn't
+ready, we can shut him up tighter than a drum. If we can pick up any
+other loans he's made anywhere else, well and good."
+
+Mr. Arneel said this without a shadow of bitterness or humor.  In some
+tight hour, perhaps, now fast approaching, Mr. Cowperwood would be
+promised salvation--"saved" on condition that he should leave Chicago
+forever.  There were those who would take over his property in the
+interest of the city and upright government and administer it
+accordingly.
+
+Unfortunately, at this very time Messrs. Hand, Schryhart, and Arneel
+were themselves concerned in a little venture to which the threatened
+silver agitation could bode nothing but ill.  This concerned so simple
+a thing as matches, a commodity which at this time, along with many
+others, had been trustified and was yielding a fine profit.  "American
+Match" was a stock which was already listed on every exchange and which
+was selling steadily around one hundred and twenty.
+
+The geniuses who had first planned a combination of all match concerns
+and a monopoly of the trade in America were two men, Messrs. Hull and
+Stackpole--bankers and brokers, primarily.  Mr. Phineas Hull was a
+small, ferret-like, calculating man with a sparse growth of dusty-brown
+hair and an eyelid, the right one, which was partially paralyzed and
+drooped heavily, giving him a characterful and yet at times a sinister
+expression.
+
+His partner, Mr. Benoni Stackpole, had been once a stage-driver in
+Arkansas, and later a horse-trader.  He was a man of great force and
+calculation--large, oleaginous, politic, and courageous. Without the
+ultimate brain capacity of such men as Arneel, Hand, and Merrill, he
+was, nevertheless, resourceful and able.  He had started somewhat late
+in the race for wealth, but now, with all his strength, he was
+endeavoring to bring to fruition this plan which, with the aid of Hull,
+he had formulated.  Inspired by the thought of great wealth, they had
+first secured control of the stock of one match company, and had then
+put themselves in a position to bargain with the owners of others.  The
+patents and processes controlled by one company and another had been
+combined, and the field had been broadened as much as possible.
+
+But to do all this a great deal of money had been required, much more
+than was in possession of either Hull or Stackpole.  Both of them being
+Western men, they looked first to Western capital. Hand, Schryhart,
+Arneel, and Merrill were in turn appealed to, and great blocks of the
+new stock were sold to them at inside figures. By the means thus
+afforded the combination proceeded apace. Patents for exclusive
+processes were taken over from all sides, and the idea of invading
+Europe and eventually controlling the market of the world had its
+inception.  At the same time it occurred to each and all of their
+lordly patrons that it would be a splendid thing if the stock they had
+purchased at forty-five, and which was now selling in open market at
+one hundred and twenty, should go to three hundred, where, if these
+monopolistic dreams were true, it properly belonged.  A little more of
+this stock--the destiny of which at this time seemed sure and
+splendid--would not be amiss. And so there began a quiet campaign on
+the part of each capitalist to gather enough of it to realize a true
+fortune on the rise.
+
+A game of this kind is never played with the remainder of the financial
+community entirely unaware of what is on foot.  In the inner circles of
+brokerage life rumors were soon abroad that a tremendous boom was in
+store for American Match.  Cowperwood heard of it through Addison,
+always at the center of financial rumor, and the two of them bought
+heavily, though not so heavily but that they could clear out at any
+time with at least a slight margin in their favor.  During a period of
+eight months the stock slowly moved upward, finally crossing the
+two-hundred mark and reaching two-twenty, at which figure both Addison
+and Cowperwood sold, realizing nearly a million between them on their
+investment.
+
+In the mean time the foreshadowed political storm was brewing. At first
+a cloud no larger than a man's hand, it matured swiftly in the late
+months of 1895, and by the spring of 1896 it had become portentous and
+was ready to burst.  With the climacteric nomination of the "Apostle of
+Free Silver" for President of the United States, which followed in
+July, a chill settled down over the conservative and financial elements
+of the country.  What Cowperwood had wisely proceeded to do months
+before, others less far-seeing, from Maine to California and from the
+Gulf to Canada, began to do now. Bank-deposits were in part withdrawn;
+feeble or uncertain securities were thrown upon the market.  All at
+once Schryhart, Arneel, Hand, and Merrill realized that they were in
+more or less of a trap in regard to their large holdings in American
+Match.  Having gathered vast quantities of this stock, which had been
+issued in blocks of millions, it was now necessary to sustain the
+market or sell at a loss.  Since money was needed by many holders, and
+this stock was selling at two-twenty, telegraphic orders began to pour
+in from all parts of the country to sell on the Chicago Exchange, where
+the deal was being engineered and where the market obviously existed.
+All of the instigators of the deal conferred, and decided to sustain
+the market.  Messrs. Hull and Stackpole, being the nominal heads of the
+trust, were delegated to buy, they in turn calling on the principal
+investors to take their share, pro rata. Hand, Schryhart, Arneel, and
+Merrill, weighted with this inpouring flood of stock, which they had to
+take at two-twenty, hurried to their favorite banks, hypothecating vast
+quantities at one-fifty and over, and using the money so obtained to
+take care of the additional shares which they were compelled to buy.
+
+At last, however, their favorite banks were full to overflowing and at
+the danger-point.  They could take no more.
+
+"No, no, no!" Hand declared to Phineas Hull over the 'phone.  "I can't
+risk another dollar in this venture, and I won't! It's a perfect
+proposition.  I realize all its merits just as well as you do.  But
+enough is enough.  I tell you a financial slump is coming. That's the
+reason all this stock is coming out now.  I am willing to protect my
+interests in this thing up to a certain point.  As I told you, I agree
+not to throw a single share on the market of all that I now have.  But
+more than that I cannot do.  The other gentlemen in this agreement will
+have to protect themselves as best they can.  I have other things to
+look out for that are just as important to me, and more so, than
+American Match."
+
+It was the same with Mr. Schryhart, who, stroking a crisp, black
+mustache, was wondering whether he had not better throw over what
+holdings he had and clear out; however, he feared the rage of Hand and
+Arneel for breaking the market and thus bringing on a local panic.  It
+was risky business.  Arneel and Merrill finally agreed to hold firm to
+what they had; but, as they told Mr. Hull, nothing could induce them to
+"protect" another share, come what might.
+
+In this crisis naturally Messrs. Hull and Stackpole--estimable
+gentlemen both--were greatly depressed.  By no means so wealthy as
+their lofty patrons, their private fortunes were in much greater
+jeopardy.  They were eager to make any port in so black a storm.
+Witness, then, the arrival of Benoni Stackpole at the office of Frank
+Algernon Cowperwood.  He was at the end of his tether, and Cowperwood
+was the only really rich man in the city not yet involved in this
+speculation.  In the beginning he had heard both Hand and Schryhart say
+that they did not care to become involved if Cowperwood was in any way,
+shape, or manner to be included, but that had been over a year ago, and
+Schryhart and Hand were now, as it were, leaving both him and his
+partner to their fates.  They could have no objection to his dealing
+with Cowperwood in this crisis if he could make sure that the magnate
+would not sell him out.  Mr. Stackpole was six feet one in his socks
+and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds.  Clad in a brown linen suit
+and straw hat (for it was late July), he carried a palm-leaf fan as
+well as his troublesome stocks in a small yellow leather bag.  He was
+wet with perspiration and in a gloomy state of mind.  Failure was
+staring him in the face--giant failure.  If American Match fell below
+two hundred he would have to close his doors as banker and broker and,
+in view of what he was carrying, he and Hull would fail for
+approximately twenty million dollars.  Messrs. Hand, Schryhart, Arneel,
+and Merrill would lose in the neighborhood of six or eight millions
+between them.  The local banks would suffer in proportion, though not
+nearly so severely, for, loaning at one-fifty, they would only
+sacrifice the difference between that and the lowest point to which the
+stock might fall.
+
+Cowperwood eyed the new-comer, when he entered, with an equivocal eye,
+for he knew well now what was coming.  Only a few days before he had
+predicted an eventual smash to Addison.
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood," began Stackpole, "in this bag I have fifteen thousand
+shares of American Match, par value one million five hundred thousand
+dollars, market value three million three hundred thousand at this
+moment, and worth every cent of three hundred dollars a share and more.
+I don't know how closely you have been following the developments of
+American Match.  We own all the patents on labor-saving machines and,
+what's more, we're just about to close contracts with Italy and France
+to lease our machines and processes to them for pretty nearly one
+million dollars a year each.  We're dickering with Austria and England,
+and of course we'll take up other countries later.  The American Match
+Company will yet make matches for the whole world, whether I'm
+connected with it or not.  This silver agitation has caught us right in
+mid-ocean, and we're having a little trouble weathering the storm. I'm
+a perfectly frank man when it comes to close business relations of this
+kind, and I'm going to tell you just how things stand. If we can scull
+over this rough place that has come up on account of the silver
+agitation our stock will go to three hundred before the first of the
+year.  Now, if you want to take it you can have it outright at one
+hundred and fifty dollars--that is, providing you'll agree not to throw
+any of it back on the market before next December; or, if you won't
+promise that" (he paused to see if by any chance he could read
+Cowperwood's inscrutable face) "I want you to loan me one hundred and
+fifty dollars a share on these for thirty days at least at ten or
+fifteen, or whatever rate you care to fix."
+
+Cowperwood interlocked his fingers and twiddled his thumbs as he
+contemplated this latest evidence of earthly difficulty and
+uncertainty.  Time and chance certainly happened to all men, and here
+was one opportunity of paying out those who had been nagging him.  To
+take this stock at one-fifty on loan and peddle it out swiftly and
+fully at two-twenty or less would bring American Match crumbling about
+their ears.  When it was selling at one-fifty or less he could buy it
+back, pocket his profit, complete his deal with Mr. Stackpole, pocket
+his interest, and smile like the well-fed cat in the fable.  It was as
+simple as twiddling his thumbs, which he was now doing.
+
+"Who has been backing this stock here in Chicago besides yourself and
+Mr. Hull?" he asked, pleasantly.  "I think that I already know, but I
+should like to be certain if you have no objection."
+
+"None in the least, none in the least," replied Mr. Stackpole,
+accommodatingly.  "Mr. Hand, Mr. Schryhart, Mr. Arneel, and Mr.
+Merrill."
+
+"That is what I thought," commented Cowperwood, easily.  "They can't
+take this up for you? Is that it? Saturated?"
+
+"Saturated," agreed Mr. Stackpole, dully.  "But there's one thing I'd
+have to stipulate in accepting a loan on these.  Not a share must be
+thrown on the market, or, at least, not before I have failed to respond
+to your call.  I have understood that there is a little feeling between
+you and Mr. Hand and the other gentlemen I have mentioned.  But, as I
+say--and I'm talking perfectly frankly now--I'm in a corner, and it's
+any port in a storm.  If you want to help me I'll make the best terms I
+can, and I won't forget the favor."
+
+He opened the bag and began to take out the securities--long
+greenish-yellow bundles, tightly gripped in the center by thick elastic
+bands.  They were in bundles of one thousand shares each. Since
+Stackpole half proffered them to him, Cowperwood took them in one hand
+and lightly weighed them up and down.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. Stackpole," he said, sympathetically, after a moment of
+apparent reflection, "but I cannot possibly help you in this matter.
+I'm too involved in other things myself, and I do not often indulge in
+stock-peculations of any kind.  I have no particular malice toward any
+one of the gentlemen you mention.  I do not trouble to dislike all who
+dislike me.  I might, of course, if I chose, take these stocks and pay
+them out and throw them on the market to-morrow, but I have no desire
+to do anything of the sort. I only wish I could help you, and if I
+thought I could carry them safely for three or four months I would.  As
+it is--" He lifted his eyebrows sympathetically.  "Have you tried all
+the bankers in town?"
+
+"Practically every one."
+
+"And they can't help you?"
+
+"They are carrying all they can stand now."
+
+"Too bad.  I'm sorry, very.  By the way, do you happen, by any chance,
+to know Mr. Millard Bailey or Mr. Edwin Kaffrath?"
+
+"No, I don't," replied Stackpole, hopefully.
+
+"Well, now, there are two men who are much richer than is generally
+supposed.  They often have very large sums at their disposal.  You
+might look them up on a chance.  Then there's my friend Videra. I don't
+know how he is fixed at present.  You can always find him at the
+Twelfth Ward Bank.  He might be inclined to take a good portion of
+that--I don't know.  He's much better off than most people seem to
+think.  I wonder you haven't been directed to some one of these men
+before." (As a matter of fact, no one of the individuals in question
+would have been interested to take a dollar of this loan except on
+Cowperwood's order, but Stackpole had no reason for knowing this.  They
+were not prominently identified with the magnate.)
+
+"Thank you very much.  I will," observed Stackpole, restoring his
+undesired stocks to his bag.
+
+Cowperwood, with an admirable show of courtesy, called a stenographer,
+and pretended to secure for his guest the home addresses of these
+gentlemen.  He then bade Mr. Stackpole an encouraging farewell. The
+distrait promoter at once decided to try not only Bailey and Kaffrath,
+but Videra; but even as he drove toward the office of the
+first-mentioned Cowperwood was personally busy reaching him by
+telephone.
+
+"I say, Bailey," he called, when he had secured the wealthy lumberman
+on the wire, "Benoni Stackpole, of Hull & Stackpole, was here to see me
+just now."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He has with him fifteen thousand shares of American Match--par value
+one hundred, market value to-day two-twenty."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He is trying to hypothecate the lot or any part of it at one-fifty."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You know what the trouble with American Match is, don't you?"
+
+"No.  I only know it's being driven up to where it is now by a bull
+campaign."
+
+"Well, listen to me.  It's going to break.  American Match is going to
+bust."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But I want you to loan this man five hundred thousand dollars at
+one-twenty or less and then recommend that he go to Edwin Kaffrath or
+Anton Videra for the balance."
+
+"But, Frank, I haven't any five hundred thousand to spare.  You say
+American Match is going to bust."
+
+"I know you haven't, but draw the check on the Chicago Trust, and
+Addison will honor it.  Send the stock to me and forget all about it.
+I will do the rest.  But under no circumstances mention my name, and
+don't appear too eager.  Not more than one-twenty at the outside, do
+you hear? and less if you can get it.  You recognize my voice, do you?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"Drive over afterward if you have time and let me know what happens."
+
+"Very good," commented Mr. Bailey, in a businesslike way.
+
+Cowperwood next called for Mr. Kaffrath.  Conversing to similar effect
+with that individual and with Videra, before three-quarters of an hour
+Cowperwood had arranged completely for Mr. Stackpole's tour.  He was to
+have his total loan at one-twenty or less.  Checks were to be
+forthcoming at once.  Different banks were to be drawn on--banks other
+than the Chicago Trust Company.  Cowperwood would see, in some
+roundabout way, that these checks were promptly honored, whether the
+cash was there or not.  In each case the hypothecated stocks were to be
+sent to him.  Then, having seen to the perfecting of this little
+programme, and that the banks to be drawn upon in this connection
+understood perfectly that the checks in question were guaranteed by him
+or others, he sat down to await the arrival of his henchmen and the
+turning of the stock into his private safe.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLVIII
+
+Panic
+
+
+On August 4, 1896, the city of Chicago, and for that matter the entire
+financial world, was startled and amazed by the collapse of American
+Match, one of the strongest of market securities, and the coincident
+failure of Messrs. Hull and Stackpole, its ostensible promoters, for
+twenty millions.  As early as eleven o'clock of the preceding day the
+banking and brokerage world of Chicago, trading in this stock, was
+fully aware that something untoward was on foot in connection with it.
+Owing to the high price at which the stock was "protected," and the
+need of money to liquidate, blocks of this stock from all parts of the
+country were being rushed to the market with the hope of realizing
+before the ultimate break.  About the stock-exchange, which frowned
+like a gray fortress at the foot of La Salle Street, all was
+excitement--as though a giant anthill had been ruthlessly disturbed.
+Clerks and messengers hurried to and fro in confused and apparently
+aimless directions.  Brokers whose supply of American Match had been
+apparently exhausted on the previous day now appeared on 'change bright
+and early, and at the clang of the gong began to offer the stock in
+sizable lots of from two hundred to five hundred shares.  The agents of
+Hull & Stackpole were in the market, of course, in the front rank of
+the scrambling, yelling throng, taking up whatever stock appeared at
+the price they were hoping to maintain.  The two promoters were in
+touch by 'phone and wire not only with those various important
+personages whom they had induced to enter upon this bull campaign, but
+with their various clerks and agents on 'change.  Naturally, under the
+circumstances both were in a gloomy frame of mind.  This game was no
+longer moving in those large, easy sweeps which characterize the more
+favorable aspects of high finance.  Sad to relate, as in all the
+troubled flumes of life where vast currents are compressed in narrow,
+tortuous spaces, these two men were now concerned chiefly with the
+momentary care of small but none the less heartbreaking burdens.  Where
+to find fifty thousand to take care of this or that burden of stock
+which was momentarily falling upon them? They were as two men called
+upon, with their limited hands and strength, to seal up the
+ever-increasing crevices of a dike beyond which raged a mountainous and
+destructive sea.
+
+At eleven o'clock Mr. Phineas Hull rose from the chair which sat before
+his solid mahogany desk, and confronted his partner.
+
+"I'll tell you, Ben," he said, "I'm afraid we can't make this. We've
+hypothecated so much of this stock around town that we can't possibly
+tell who's doing what.  I know as well as I'm standing on this floor
+that some one, I can't say which one, is selling us out.  You don't
+suppose it could be Cowperwood or any of those people he sent to us, do
+you?"
+
+Stackpole, worn by his experiences of the past few weeks, was inclined
+to be irritable.
+
+"How should I know, Phineas?" he inquired, scowling in troubled
+thought.  "I don't think so.  I didn't notice any signs that they were
+interested in stock-gambling.  Anyhow, we had to have the money in some
+form.  Any one of the whole crowd is apt to get frightened now at any
+moment and throw the whole thing over.  We're in a tight place, that's
+plain."
+
+For the fortieth time he plucked at a too-tight collar and pulled up
+his shirt-sleeves, for it was stifling, and he was coatless and
+waistcoatless.  Just then Mr. Hull's telephone bell rang--the one
+connecting with the firm's private office on 'change, and the latter
+jumped to seize the receiver.
+
+"Yes?" he inquired, irritably.
+
+"Two thousand shares of American offered at two-twenty! Shall I take
+them?"
+
+The man who was 'phoning was in sight of another man who stood at the
+railing of the brokers' gallery overlooking "the pit," or central room
+of the stock-exchange, and who instantly transferred any sign he might
+receive to the man on the floor.  So Mr. Hull's "yea" or "nay" would be
+almost instantly transmuted into a cash transaction on 'change.
+
+"What do you think of that?" asked Hull of Stackpole, putting his hand
+over the receiver's mouth, his right eyelid drooping heavier than ever.
+"Two thousand more to take up! Where d'you suppose they are coming
+from? Tch!"
+
+"Well, the bottom's out, that's all," replied Stackpole, heavily and
+gutturally.  "We can't do what we can't do.  I say this, though:
+support it at two-twenty until three o'clock.  Then we'll figure up
+where we stand and what we owe.  And meanwhile I'll see what I can do.
+If the banks won't help us and Arneel and that crowd want to get from
+under, we'll fail, that's all; but not before I've had one more try, by
+Jericho! They may not help us, but--"
+
+Actually Mr. Stackpole did not see what was to be done unless Messrs.
+Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel were willing to risk much more
+money, but it grieved and angered him to think he and Hull should be
+thus left to sink without a sigh.  He had tried Kaffrath, Videra, and
+Bailey, but they were adamant.  Thus cogitating, Stackpole put on his
+wide-brimmed straw hat and went out.  It was nearly ninety-six in the
+shade.  The granite and asphalt pavements of the down-town district
+reflected a dry, Turkish-bath-room heat. There was no air to speak of.
+The sky was a burning, milky blue, with the sun gleaming feverishly
+upon the upper walls of the tall buildings.
+
+Mr. Hand, in his seventh-story suite of offices in the Rookery
+Building, was suffering from the heat, but much more from mental
+perturbation.  Though not a stingy or penurious man, it was still true
+that of all earthly things he suffered most from a financial loss.  How
+often had he seen chance or miscalculation sweep apparently strong and
+valiant men into the limbo of the useless and forgotten! Since the
+alienation of his wife's affections by Cowperwood, he had scarcely any
+interest in the world outside his large financial holdings, which
+included profitable investments in a half-hundred companies.  But they
+must pay, pay, pay heavily in interest--all of them--and the thought
+that one of them might become a failure or a drain on his resources was
+enough to give him an almost physical sensation of dissatisfaction and
+unrest, a sort of spiritual and mental nausea which would cling to him
+for days and days or until he had surmounted the difficulty.  Mr. Hand
+had no least corner in his heart for failure.
+
+As a matter of fact, the situation in regard to American Match had
+reached such proportions as to be almost numbing.  Aside from the
+fifteen thousand shares which Messrs. Hull and Stackpole had originally
+set aside for themselves, Hand, Arneel, Schryhart, and Merrill had
+purchased five thousand shares each at forty, but had since been
+compelled to sustain the market to the extent of over five thousand
+shares more each, at prices ranging from one-twenty to two-twenty, the
+largest blocks of shares having been bought at the latter figure.
+Actually Hand was caught for nearly one million five hundred thousand
+dollars, and his soul was as gray as a bat's wing.  At fifty-seven
+years of age men who are used only to the most successful financial
+calculations and the credit that goes with unerring judgment dread to
+be made a mark by chance or fate. It opens the way for comment on their
+possibly failing vitality or judgment.  And so Mr. Hand sat on this hot
+August afternoon, ensconced in a large carved mahogany chair in the
+inner recesses of his inner offices, and brooded.  Only this morning,
+in the face of a falling market, he would have sold out openly had he
+not been deterred by telephone messages from Arneel and Schryhart
+suggesting the advisability of a pool conference before any action was
+taken. Come what might on the morrow, he was determined to quit unless
+he saw some clear way out--to be shut of the whole thing unless the
+ingenuity of Stackpole and Hull should discover a way of sustaining the
+market without his aid.  While he was meditating on how this was to be
+done Mr. Stackpole appeared, pale, gloomy, wet with perspiration.
+
+"Well, Mr. Hand," he exclaimed, wearily, "I've done all I can. Hull and
+I have kept the market fairly stable so far.  You saw what happened
+between ten and eleven this morning.  The jig's up. We've borrowed our
+last dollar and hypothecated our last share. My personal fortune has
+gone into the balance, and so has Hull's. Some one of the outside
+stockholders, or all of them, are cutting the ground from under us.
+Fourteen thousand shares since ten o'clock this morning! That tells the
+story.  It can't be done just now--not unless you gentlemen are
+prepared to go much further than you have yet gone.  If we could
+organize a pool to take care of fifteen thousand more shares--"
+
+Mr. Stackpole paused, for Mr. Hand was holding up a fat, pink digit.
+
+"No more of that," he was saying, solemnly.  "It can't be done. I, for
+one, won't sink another dollar in this proposition at this time.  I'd
+rather throw what I have on the market and take what I can get.  I am
+sure the others feel the same way."
+
+Mr. Hand, to play safe, had hypothecated nearly all his shares with
+various banks in order to release his money for other purposes, and he
+knew he would not dare to throw over all his holdings, just as he knew
+he would have to make good at the figure at which they had been
+margined.  But it was a fine threat to make.
+
+Mr. Stackpole stared ox-like at Mr. Hand.
+
+"Very well," he said, "I might as well go back, then, and post a notice
+on our front door.  We bought fourteen thousand shares and held the
+market where it is, but we haven't a dollar to pay for them with.
+Unless the banks or some one will take them over for us we're
+gone--we're bankrupt."
+
+Mr. Hand, who knew that if Mr. Stackpole carried out this decision it
+meant the loss of his one million five hundred thousand, halted
+mentally.  "Have you been to all the banks?" he asked.  "What does
+Lawrence, of the Prairie National, have to say?"
+
+"It's the same with all of them," replied Stackpole, now quite
+desperate, "as it is with you.  They have all they can carry--every
+one.  It's this damned silver agitation--that's it, and nothing else.
+There's nothing the matter with this stock.  It will right itself in a
+few months.  It's sure to."
+
+"Will it?" commented Mr. Hand, sourly.  "That depends on what happens
+next November." (He was referring to the coming national election.)
+
+"Yes, I know," sighed Mr. Stackpole, seeing that it was a condition,
+and not a theory, that confronted him.  Then, suddenly clenching his
+right hand, he exclaimed, "Damn that upstart!" (He was thinking of the
+"Apostle of Free Silver.") "He's the cause of all this. Well, if
+there's nothing to be done I might as well be going. There's all those
+shares we bought to-day which we ought to be able to hypothecate with
+somebody.  It would be something if we could get even a hundred and
+twenty on them."
+
+"Very true," replied Hand.  "I wish it could be done.  I, personally,
+cannot sink any more money.  But why don't you go and see Schryhart and
+Arneel? I've been talking to them, and they seem to be in a position
+similar to my own; but if they are willing to confer, I am.  I don't
+see what's to be done, but it may be that all of us together might
+arrange some way of heading off the slaughter of the stock to-morrow.
+I don't know.  If only we don't have to suffer too great a decline."
+
+Mr. Hand was thinking that Messrs. Hull and Stackpole might be forced
+to part with all their remaining holdings at fifty cents on the dollar
+or less.  Then if it could possibly be taken and carried by the united
+banks for them (Schryhart, himself, Arneel) and sold at a profit later,
+he and his associates might recoup some of their losses.  The local
+banks at the behest of the big quadrumvirate might be coerced into
+straining their resources still further.  But how was this to be done?
+How, indeed?
+
+It was Schryhart who, in pumping and digging at Stackpole when he
+finally arrived there, managed to extract from him the truth in regard
+to his visit to Cowperwood.  As a matter of fact, Schryhart himself had
+been guilty this very day of having thrown two thousand shares of
+American Match on the market unknown to his confreres. Naturally, he
+was eager to learn whether Stackpole or any one else had the least
+suspicion that he was involved.  As a consequence he questioned
+Stackpole closely, and the latter, being anxious as to the outcome of
+his own interests, was not unwilling to make a clean breast.  He had
+the justification in his own mind that the quadrumvirate had been ready
+to desert him anyhow.
+
+"Why did you go to him?" exclaimed Schryhart, professing to be greatly
+astonished and annoyed, as, indeed, in one sense he was. "I thought we
+had a distinct understanding in the beginning that under no
+circumstances was he to be included in any portion of this.  You might
+as well go to the devil himself for assistance as go there." At the
+same time he was thinking "How fortunate!" Here was not only a loophole
+for himself in connection with his own subtle side-plays, but also, if
+the quadrumvirate desired, an excuse for deserting the troublesome
+fortunes of Hull & Stackpole.
+
+"Well, the truth is," replied Stackpole, somewhat sheepishly and yet
+defiantly, "last Thursday I had fifteen thousand shares on which I had
+to raise money.  Neither you nor any of the others wanted any more.
+The banks wouldn't take them.  I called up Rambaud on a chance, and he
+suggested Cowperwood."
+
+As has been related, Stackpole had really gone to Cowperwood direct,
+but a lie under the circumstances seemed rather essential.
+
+"Rambaud!" sneered Schryhart.  "Cowperwood's man--he and all the
+others.  You couldn't have gone to a worse crowd if you had tried. So
+that's where this stock is coming from, beyond a doubt.  That fellow or
+his friends are selling us out.  You might have known he'd do it.  He
+hates us.  So you're through, are you?--not another single trick to
+turn?"
+
+"Not one," replied Stackpole, solemnly.
+
+"Well, that's too bad.  You have acted most unwisely in going to
+Cowperwood; but we shall have to see what can be done."
+
+Schryhart's idea, like that of Hand, was to cause Hull & Stackpole to
+relinquish all their holdings for nothing to the banks in order that,
+under pressure, the latter might carry the stocks he and the others had
+hypothecated with them until such a time as the company might be
+organized at a profit.  At the same time he was intensely resentful
+against Cowperwood for having by any fluke of circumstance reaped so
+large a profit as he must have done.  Plainly, the present crisis had
+something to do with him.  Schryhart was quick to call up Hand and
+Arneel, after Stackpole had gone, suggesting a conference, and
+together, an hour later, at Arneel's office, they foregathered along
+with Merrill to discuss this new and very interesting development.  As
+a matter of fact, during the course of the afternoon all of these
+gentlemen had been growing more and more uneasy.  Not that between them
+they were not eminently capable of taking care of their own losses, but
+the sympathetic effect of such a failure as this (twenty million
+dollars), to say nothing of its reaction upon the honor of themselves
+and the city as a financial center, was a most unsatisfactory if not
+disastrous thing to contemplate, and now this matter of Cowperwood's
+having gained handsomely by it all was added to their misery.  Both
+Hand and Arneel growled in opposition when they heard, and Merrill
+meditated, as he usually did, on the wonder of Cowperwood's subtlety.
+He could not help liking him.
+
+There is a sort of municipal pride latent in the bosoms of most members
+of a really thriving community which often comes to the surface under
+the most trying circumstances.  These four men were by no means an
+exception to this rule.  Messrs. Schryhart, Hand, Arneel, and Merrill
+were concerned as to the good name of Chicago and their united standing
+in the eyes of Eastern financiers.  It was a sad blow to them to think
+that the one great enterprise they had recently engineered--a foil to
+some of the immense affairs which had recently had their genesis in New
+York and elsewhere--should have come to so untimely an end.  Chicago
+finance really should not be put to shame in this fashion if it could
+be avoided. So that when Mr. Schryhart arrived, quite warm and
+disturbed, and related in detail what he had just learned, his friends
+listened to him with eager and wary ears.
+
+It was now between five and six o'clock in the afternoon and still
+blazing outside, though the walls of the buildings on the opposite side
+of the street were a cool gray, picked out with pools of black shadow.
+A newsboy's strident voice was heard here and there calling an extra,
+mingled with the sound of homing feet and street-cars--Cowperwood's
+street-cars.
+
+"I'll tell you what it is," said Schryhart, finally.  "It seems to me
+we have stood just about enough of this man's beggarly interference.
+I'll admit that neither Hull nor Stackpole had any right to go to him.
+They laid themselves and us open to just such a trick as has been
+worked in this case." Mr. Schryhart was righteously incisive, cold,
+immaculate, waspish.  "At the same time," he continued, "any other
+moneyed man of equal standing with ourselves would have had the
+courtesy to confer with us and give us, or at least our banks, an
+opportunity for taking over these securities.  He would have come to
+our aid for Chicago's sake. He had no occasion for throwing these
+stocks on the market, considering the state of things.  He knows very
+well what the effect of their failure will be.  The whole city is
+involved, but it's little he cares.  Mr. Stackpole tells me that he had
+an express understanding with him, or, rather, with the men who it is
+plain have been representing him, that not a single share of this stock
+was to be thrown on the market.  As it is, I venture to say not a
+single share of it is to be found anywhere in any of their safes. I can
+sympathize to a certain extent with poor Stackpole.  His position, of
+course, was very trying.  But there is no excuse--none in the
+world--for such a stroke of trickery on Cowperwood's part. It's just as
+we've known all along--the man is nothing but a wrecker.  We certainly
+ought to find some method of ending his career here if possible."
+
+Mr. Schryhart kicked out his well-rounded legs, adjusted his soft-roll
+collar, and smoothed his short, crisp, wiry, now blackish-gray
+mustache.  His black eyes flashed an undying hate.
+
+At this point Mr. Arneel, with a cogency of reasoning which did not at
+the moment appear on the surface, inquired: "Do any of you happen to
+know anything in particular about the state of Mr. Cowperwood's
+finances at present? Of course we know of the Lake Street 'L' and the
+Northwestern.  I hear he's building a house in New York, and I presume
+that's drawing on him somewhat.  I know he has four hundred thousand
+dollars in loans from the Chicago Central; but what else has he?"
+
+"Well, there's the two hundred thousand he owes the Prairie National,"
+piped up Schrybart, promptly.  "From time to time I've heard of several
+other sums that escape my mind just now."
+
+Mr. Merrill, a diplomatic mouse of a man--gray, Parisian,
+dandified--was twisting in his large chair, surveying the others with
+shrewd though somewhat propitiatory eyes.  In spite of his old grudge
+against Cowperwood because of the latter's refusal to favor him in the
+matter of running street-car lines past his store, he had always been
+interested in the man as a spectacle.  He really disliked the thought
+of plotting to injure Cowperwood.  Just the same, he felt it incumbent
+to play his part in such a council as this.  "My financial agent, Mr.
+Hill, loaned him several hundred thousand not long ago," he
+volunteered, a little doubtfully.  "I presume he has many other
+outstanding obligations."
+
+Mr. Hand stirred irritably.
+
+"Well, he's owing the Third National and the Lake City as much if not
+more," he commented.  "I know where there are five hundred thousand
+dollars of his loans that haven't been mentioned here. Colonel
+Ballinger has two hundred thousand.  He must owe Anthony Ewer all of
+that.  He owes the Drovers and Traders all of one hundred and fifty
+thousand."
+
+On the basis of these suggestions Arneel made a mental calculation, and
+found that Cowperwood was indebted apparently to the tune of about
+three million dollars on call, if not more.
+
+"I haven't all the facts," he said, at last, slowly and distinctly. "If
+we could talk with some of the presidents of our banks to-night, we
+should probably find that there are other items of which we do not
+know.  I do not like to be severe on any one, but our own situation is
+serious.  Unless something is done to-night Hull & Stackpole will
+certainly fail in the morning.  We are, of course, obligated to the
+various banks for our loans, and we are in honor bound to do all we can
+for them.  The good name of Chicago and its rank as a banking center is
+to a certain extent involved.  As I have already told Mr. Stackpole and
+Mr. Hull, I personally have gone as far as I can in this matter.  I
+suppose it is the same with each of you.  The only other resources we
+have under the circumstances are the banks, and they, as I understand
+it, are pretty much involved with stock on hypothecation.  I know at
+least that this is true of the Lake City and the Douglas Trust."
+
+"It's true of nearly all of them," said Hand.  Both Schryhart and
+Merrill nodded assent.
+
+"We are not obligated to Mr. Cowperwood for anything so far as I know,"
+continued Mr. Arneel, after a slight but somewhat portentous pause.
+"As Mr. Schryhart has suggested here to-day, he seems to have a
+tendency to interfere and disturb on every occasion. Apparently he
+stands obligated to the various banks in the sums we have mentioned.
+Why shouldn't his loans be called? It would help strengthen the local
+banks, and possibly permit them to aid in meeting this situation for
+us.  While he might be in a position to retaliate, I doubt it."
+
+Mr. Arneel had no personal opposition to Cowperwood--none, at least, of
+a deep-seated character.  At the same time Hand, Merrill, and Schryhart
+were his friends.  In him, they felt, centered the financial leadership
+of the city.  The rise of Cowperwood, his Napoleonic airs, threatened
+this.  As Mr. Arneel talked he never raised his eyes from the desk
+where he was sitting.  He merely drummed solemnly on the surface with
+his fingers.  The others contemplated him a little tensely, catching
+quite clearly the drift of his proposal.
+
+"An excellent idea--excellent!" exclaimed Schryhart.  "I will join in
+any programme that looks to the elimination of this man.  The present
+situation may be just what is needed to accomplish this. Anyhow, it may
+help to solve our difficulty.  If so, it will certainly be a case of
+good coming out of evil."
+
+"I see no reason why these loans should not be called," Hand commented.
+"I'm willing to meet the situation on that basis."
+
+"And I have no particular objection," said Merrill.  "I think, however,
+it would be only fair to give as much notice as possible of any
+decision we may reach," he added.
+
+"Why not send for the various bankers now," suggested Schryhart, "and
+find out exactly where he stands, and how much it will take to carry
+Hull & Stackpole? Then we can inform Mr. Cowperwood of what we propose
+to do."
+
+To this proposition Mr. Hand nodded an assent, at the same time
+consulting a large, heavily engraved gold watch of the most ponderous
+and inartistic design.  "I think," he said, "that we have found the
+solution to this situation at last.  I suggest that we get Candish and
+Kramer, of the stock-exchange" (he was referring to the president and
+secretary, respectively, of that organization), "and Simmons, of the
+Douglas Trust.  We should soon be able to tell what we can do."
+
+The library of Mr. Arneel's home was fixed upon as the most suitable
+rendezvous.  Telephones were forthwith set ringing and messengers and
+telegrams despatched in order that the subsidiary financial luminaries
+and the watch-dogs of the various local treasuries might come and, as
+it were, put their seal on this secret decision, which it was obviously
+presumed no minor official or luminary would have the temerity to
+gainsay.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLIX
+
+Mount Olympus
+
+
+By eight o'clock, at which hour the conference was set, the principal
+financial personages of Chicago were truly in a great turmoil. Messrs.
+Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel were personally interested! What
+would you? As early as seven-thirty there was a pattering of horses'
+hoofs and a jingle of harness, as splendid open carriages were drawn up
+in front of various exclusive mansions and a bank president, or a
+director at least, issued forth at the call of one of the big
+quadrumvirate to journey to the home of Mr. Arneel.  Such interesting
+figures as Samuel Blackman, once president of the old Chicago Gas
+Company, and now a director of the Prairie National; Hudson Baker, once
+president of the West Chicago Gas Company, and now a director of the
+Chicago Central National; Ormonde Ricketts, publisher of the Chronicle
+and director of the Third National; Norrie Simms, president of the
+Douglas Trust Company; Walter Rysam Cotton, once an active wholesale
+coffee-broker, but now a director principally of various institutions,
+were all en route.  It was a procession of solemn, superior, thoughtful
+gentlemen, and all desirous of giving the right appearance and of
+making the correct impression.  For, be it known, of all men none are
+so proud or vainglorious over the minor trappings of materialism as
+those who have but newly achieved them.  It is so essential apparently
+to fulfil in manner and air, if not in fact, the principle of
+"presence" which befits the role of conservator of society and leader
+of wealth.  Every one of those named and many more--to the number of
+thirty--rode thus loftily forth in the hot, dry evening air and were
+soon at the door of the large and comfortable home of Mr. Timothy
+Arneel.
+
+That important personage was not as yet present to receive his guests,
+and neither were Messrs. Schryhart, Hand, nor Merrill. It would not be
+fitting for such eminent potentates to receive their underlings in
+person on such an occasion.  At the hour appointed these four were
+still in their respective offices, perfecting separately the details of
+the plan upon which they had agreed and which, with a show of
+informality and of momentary inspiration, they would later present.
+For the time being their guests had to make the best of their absence.
+Drinks and liquors were served, but these were of small comfort.  A
+rack provided for straw hats was for some reason not used, every one
+preferring to retain his own head-gear.  Against the background of wood
+panneling and the chairs covered with summer linen the company
+presented a galleryesque variety and interest.  Messrs. Hull and
+Stackpole, the corpses or victims over which this serious gathering
+were about to sit in state, were not actually present within the room,
+though they were within call in another part of the house, where, if
+necessary, they could be reached and their advice or explanations
+heard.  This presumably brilliant assemblage of the financial weight
+and intelligence of the city appeared as solemn as owls under the
+pressure of a rumored impending financial crisis.  Before Arneel's
+appearance there was a perfect buzz of minor financial gossip, such as:
+
+"You don't say?"
+
+"Is it as serious as that?"
+
+"I knew things were pretty shaky, but I was by no means certain how
+shaky."
+
+"Fortunately, we are not carrying much of that stock." (This from one
+of the few really happy bankers.)
+
+"This is a rather serious occasion, isn't it?"
+
+"You don't tell me!"
+
+"Dear, dear!"
+
+Never a word in criticism from any source of either Hand or Schryhart
+or Arneel or Merrill, though the fact that they were back of the pool
+was well known.  Somehow they were looked upon as benefactors who were
+calling this conference with a view of saving others from disaster
+rather than for the purpose of assisting themselves. Such phrases as,
+"Oh, Mr. Hand! Marvelous man! Marvelous!" or, "Mr. Schryhart--very
+able--very able indeed!" or, "You may depend on it these men are not
+going to allow anything serious to overtake the affairs of the city at
+this time," were heard on every hand. The fact that immense quantities
+of cash or paper were involved in behalf of one or other of these four
+was secretly admitted by one banker to another.  No rumor that
+Cowperwood or his friends had been profiting or were in any way
+involved had come to any one present--not as yet.
+
+At eight-thirty exactly Mr. Arneel first ambled in quite informally,
+Hand, Schryhart, and Merrill appearing separately very shortly after.
+Rubbing their hands and mopping their faces with their handkerchiefs,
+they looked about them, making an attempt to appear as nonchalant and
+cheerful as possible under such trying circumstances. There were many
+old acquaintances and friends to greet, inquiries to be made as to the
+health of wives and children.  Mr. Arneel, clad in yellowish linen,
+with a white silk shirt of lavender stripe, and carrying a palm-leaf
+fan, seemed quite refreshed; his fine expanse of neck and bosom looked
+most paternal, and even Abrahamesque. His round, glistening pate exuded
+beads of moisture.  Mr. Schryhart, on the contrary, for all the heat,
+appeared quite hard and solid, as though he might be carved out of some
+dark wood.  Mr. Hand, much of Mr. Arneel's type, but more solid and
+apparently more vigorous, had donned for the occasion a blue serge coat
+with trousers of an almost gaudy, bright stripe.  His ruddy, archaic
+face was at once encouraging and serious, as though he were saying, "My
+dear children, this is very trying, but we will do the best we can."
+Mr. Merrill was as cool and ornate and lazy as it was possible for a
+great merchant to be.  To one person and another he extended a cool,
+soft hand, nodding and smiling half the time in silence.  To Mr. Arneel
+as the foremost citizen and the one of largest wealth fell the duty (by
+all agreed as most appropriate) of assuming the chair--which in this
+case was an especially large one at the head of the table.
+
+There was a slight stir as he finally, at the suggestion of Schryhart,
+went forward and sat down.  The other great men found seats.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," began Mr. Arneel, dryly (he had a low, husky voice),
+"I'll be as brief as I can.  This is a very unusual occasion which
+brings us together.  I suppose you all know how it is with Mr. Hull and
+Mr. Stackpole.  American Match is likely to come down with a crash in
+the morning if something very radical isn't done to-night.  It is at
+the suggestion of a number of men and banks that this meeting is
+called."
+
+Mr. Arneel had an informal, tete-a-tete way of speaking as if he were
+sitting on a chaise-longue with one other person.
+
+"The failure," he went on, firmly, "if it comes, as I hope it won't,
+will make a lot of trouble for a number of banks and private
+individuals which we would like to avoid, I am sure.  The principal
+creditors of American Match are our local banks and some private
+individuals who have loaned money on the stock.  I have a list of them
+here, along with the amounts for which they are responsible. It is in
+the neighborhood of ten millions of dollars."
+
+Mr. Arneel, with the unconscious arrogance of wealth and power, did not
+trouble to explain how he got the list, neither did he show the
+slightest perturbation.  He merely fished down in one pocket in a heavy
+way and produced it, spreading it out on the table before him.  The
+company wondered whose names and what amounts were down, and whether it
+was his intention to read it.
+
+"Now," resumed Mr. Arneel, seriously, "I want to say here that Mr.
+Stackpole, Mr. Merrill, Mr. Hand, and myself have been to a certain
+extent investors in this stock, and up to this afternoon we felt it to
+be our duty, not so much to ourselves as to the various banks which
+have accepted this stock as collateral and to the city at large, to
+sustain it as much as possible.  We believed in Mr. Hull and Mr.
+Stackpole.  We might have gone still further if there had been any hope
+that a number of others could carry the stock without seriously
+injuring themselves; but in view of recent developments we know that
+this can't be done.  For some time Mr. Hull and Mr. Stackpole and the
+various bank officers have had reason to think that some one has been
+cutting the ground from under them, and now they know it.  It is
+because of this, and because only concerted action on the part of banks
+and individuals can save the financial credit of the city at this time,
+that this meeting is called. Stocks are going to continue to be thrown
+on the market.  It is possible that Hull & Stackpole may have to
+liquidate in some way. One thing is certain: unless a large sum of
+money is gathered to meet the claim against them in the morning, they
+will fail.  The trouble is due indirectly, of course, to this silver
+agitation; but it is due a great deal more, we believe, to a piece of
+local sharp dealing which has just come to light, and which has really
+been the cause of putting the financial community in the tight place
+where it stands to-night.  I might as well speak plainly as to this
+matter.  It is the work of one man--Mr. Cowperwood.  American Match
+might have pulled through and the city been have spared the danger
+which now confronts it if Mr. Hull and Mr. Stackpole had not made the
+mistake of going to this man."
+
+Mr. Arneel paused, and Mr. Norrie Simms, more excitable than most by
+temperament, chose to exclaim, bitterly: "The wrecker!" A stir of
+interest passed over the others accompanied by murmurs of disapproval.
+
+"The moment he got the stock in his hands as collateral," continued Mr.
+Arneel, solemnly, "and in the face of an agreement not to throw a share
+on the market, he has been unloading steadily.  That is what has been
+happening yesterday and to-day.  Over fifteen thousand shares of this
+stock, which cannot very well be traced to outside sources, have been
+thrown on the market, and we have every reason to believe that all of
+it comes from the same place.  The result is that American Match, and
+Mr. Hull and Mr. Stackpole, are on the verge of collapse."
+
+"The scoundrel!" repeated Mr. Norrie Simms, bitterly, almost rising to
+his feet.  The Douglas Trust Company was heavily interested in American
+Match.
+
+"What an outrage!" commented Mr. Lawrence, of the Prairie National,
+which stood to lose at least three hundred thousand dollars in
+shrinkage of values on hypothecated stock alone.  To this bank that
+Cowperwood owed at least three hundred thousand dollars on call.
+
+"Depend on it to find his devil's hoof in it somewhere," observed
+Jordan Jules, who had never been able to make any satisfactory progress
+in his fight on Cowperwood in connection with the city council and the
+development of the Chicago General Company.  The Chicago Central, of
+which he was now a director, was one of the banks from which Cowperwood
+had judiciously borrowed.
+
+"It's a pity he should be allowed to go on bedeviling the town in this
+fashion," observed Mr. Sunderland Sledd to his neighbor, Mr. Duane
+Kingsland, who was a director in a bank controlled by Mr. Hand.
+
+The latter, as well as Schryhart, observed with satisfaction the effect
+of Mr. Arneel's words on the company.
+
+Mr. Arneel now again fished in his pocket laboriously, and drew forth a
+second slip of paper which he spread out before him.  "This is a time
+when frankness must prevail," he went on, solemnly, "if anything is to
+be done, and I am in hopes that we can do something. I have here a
+memorandum of some of the loans which the local banks have made to Mr.
+Cowperwood and which are still standing on their books.  I want to know
+if there are any further loans of which any of you happen to know and
+which you are willing to mention at this time."
+
+He looked solemnly around.
+
+Immediately several loans were mentioned by Mr. Cotton and Mr. Osgood
+which had not been heard of previously.  The company was now very well
+aware, in a general way, of what was coming.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," continued Mr. Arneel, "I have, previous to this
+meeting, consulted with a number of our leading men.  They agree with
+me that, since so many banks are in need of funds to carry this
+situation, and since there is no particular obligation on anybody's
+part to look after the interests of Mr. Cowperwood, it might be just as
+well if these loans of his, which are outstanding, were called and the
+money used to aid the banks and the men who have been behind Mr. Hull
+and Mr. Stackpole.  I have no personal feeling against Mr.
+Cowperwood--that is, he has never done me any direct injury--but
+naturally I cannot approve of the course he has seen fit to take in
+this case.  Now, if there isn't money available from some source to
+enable you gentlemen to turn around, there will be a number of other
+failures.  Runs may be started on a half-dozen banks.  Time is the
+essence of a situation like this, and we haven't any time."
+
+Mr. Arneel paused and looked around.  A slight buzz of conversation
+sprang up, mostly bitter and destructive criticism of Cowperwood.
+
+"It would be only just if he could be made to pay for this," commented
+Mr. Blackman to Mr. Sledd.  "He has been allowed to play fast and loose
+long enough.  It is time some one called a halt on him."
+
+"Well, it looks to me as though it would be done tonight," Mr. Sledd
+returned.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Schryhart was again rising to his feet.  "I think," he
+was saying, "if there is no objection on any one's part, Mr. Arneel, as
+chairman, might call for a formal expression of opinion from the
+different gentlemen present which will be on record as the sense of
+this meeting."
+
+At this point Mr. Kingsland, a tall, whiskered gentleman, arose to
+inquire exactly how it came that Cowperwood had secured these stocks,
+and whether those present were absolutely sure that the stock has been
+coming from him or from his friends.  "I would not like to think we
+were doing any man an injustice," he concluded.
+
+In reply to this Mr. Schryhart called in Mr. Stackpole to corroborate
+him.  Some of the stocks had been positively identified.  Stackpole
+related the full story, which somehow seemed to electrify the company,
+so intense was the feeling against Cowperwood.
+
+"It is amazing that men should be permitted to do things like this and
+still hold up their heads in the business world," said one, Mr. Vasto,
+president of the Third National, to his neighbor.
+
+"I should think there would be no difficulty in securing united action
+in a case of this kind," said Mr. Lawrence, president of the Prairie
+National, who was very much beholden to Hand for past and present
+favors.
+
+"Here is a case," put in Schryhart, who was merely waiting for an
+opportunity to explain further, "in which an unexpected political
+situation develops an unexpected crisis, and this man uses it for his
+personal aggrandizement and to the detriment of every other person.
+The welfare of the city is nothing to him.  The stability of the very
+banks he borrows from is nothing.  He is a pariah, and if this
+opportunity to show him what we think of him and his methods is not
+used we will be doing less than our duty to the city and to one
+another."
+
+"Gentlemen," said Mr. Arneel, finally, after Cowperwood's different
+loans had been carefully tabulated, "don't you think it would be wise
+to send for Mr. Cowperwood and state to him directly the decision we
+have reached and the reasons for it? I presume all of us would agree
+that he should be notified."
+
+"I think he should be notified," said Mr. Merrill, who saw behind this
+smooth talk the iron club that was being brandished.
+
+Both Hand and Schryhart looked at each other and Arneel while they
+politely waited for some one else to make a suggestion.  When no one
+ventured, Hand, who was hoping this would prove a ripping blow to
+Cowperwood, remarked, viciously:
+
+"He might as well be told--if we can reach him.  It's sufficient
+notice, in my judgment.  He might as well understand that this is the
+united action of the leading financial forces of the city."
+
+"Quite so," added Mr. Schryhart.  "It is time he understood, I think,
+what the moneyed men of this community think of him and his crooked
+ways."
+
+A murmur of approval ran around the room.
+
+"Very well," said Mr. Arneel.  "Anson, you know him better than some of
+the rest of us.  Perhaps you had better see if you can get him on the
+telephone and ask him to call.  Tell him that we are here in executive
+session."
+
+"I think he might take it more seriously if you spoke to him, Timothy,"
+replied Merrill.
+
+Arneel, being always a man of action, arose and left the room, seeking
+a telephone which was located in a small workroom or office den on the
+same floor, where he could talk without fear of being overheard.
+
+Sitting in his library on this particular evening, and studying the
+details of half a dozen art-catalogues which had accumulated during the
+week, Cowperwood was decidedly conscious of the probable collapse of
+American Match on the morrow.  Through his brokers and agents he was
+well aware that a conference was on at this hour at the house of
+Arneel.  More than once during the day he had seen bankers and brokers
+who were anxious about possible shrinkage in connection with various
+hypothecated securities, and to-night his valet had called him to the
+'phone half a dozen times to talk with Addison, with Kaffrath, with a
+broker by the name of Prosser who had succeeded Laughlin in active
+control of his private speculations, and also, be it said, with several
+of the banks whose presidents were at this particular conference.  If
+Cowperwood was hated, mistrusted, or feared by the overlords of these
+institutions, such was by no means the case with the underlings, some
+of whom, through being merely civil, were hopeful of securing material
+benefits from him at some future time.  With a feeling of amused
+satisfaction he was meditating upon how heavily and neatly he had
+countered on his enemies.  Whereas they were speculating as to how to
+offset their heavy losses on the morrow, he was congratulating himself
+on corresponding gains.  When all his deals should be closed up he
+would clear within the neighborhood of a million dollars.  He did not
+feel that he had worked Messrs. Hull and Stackpole any great injustice.
+They were at their wit's end.  If he had not seized this opportunity to
+undercut them Schryhart or Arneel would have done so, anyhow.
+
+Mingled with thoughts of a forthcoming financial triumph were others of
+Berenice Fleming.  There are such things as figments of the brain, even
+in the heads of colossi.  He thought of Berenice early and late; he
+even dreamed of her.  He laughed at himself at times for thus being
+taken in the toils of a mere girl--the strands of her ruddy hair--but
+working in Chicago these days he was always conscious of her, of what
+she was doing, of where she was going in the East, of how happy he
+would be if they were only together, happily mated.
+
+It had so happened, unfortunately, that in the course of this summer's
+stay at Narragansett Berenice, among other diversions, had assumed a
+certain interest in one Lieutenant Lawrence Braxmar, U.S.N., whom she
+found loitering there, and who was then connected with the naval
+station at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Cowperwood, coming East at this
+time for a few days' stay in order to catch another glimpse of his
+ideal, had been keenly disturbed by the sight of Braxmar and by what
+his presence might signify.  Up to this time he had not given much
+thought to younger men in connection with her.  Engrossed in her
+personality, he could think of nothing as being able to stand long
+between him and the fulfilment of his dreams.  Berenice must be his.
+That radiant spirit, enwrapt in so fair an outward seeming, must come
+to see and rejoice in him. Yet she was so young and airy in her mood
+that he sometimes wondered.  How was he to draw near? What say exactly?
+What do? Berenice was in no way hypnotized by either his wealth or
+fame. She was accustomed (she little knew to what extent by his
+courtesy) to a world more resplendent in its social security than his
+own. Surveying Braxmar keenly upon their first meeting, Cowperwood had
+liked his face and intelligence, had judged him to be able, but had
+wondered instantly how he could get rid of him.  Viewing Berenice and
+the Lieutenant as they strolled off together along a summery seaside
+veranda, he had been for once lonely, and had sighed.  These uncertain
+phases of affection could become very trying at times.  He wished he
+were young again, single.
+
+To-night, therefore, this thought was haunting him like a gloomy
+undertone, when at half past eleven the telephone rang once more, and
+he heard a low, even voice which said:
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood? This is Mr. Arneel."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A number of the principal financial men of the city are gathered here
+at my house this evening.  The question of ways and means of preventing
+a panic to-morrow is up for discussion.  As you probably know, Hull &
+Stackpole are in trouble.  Unless something is done for them tonight
+they will certainly fail to-morrow for twenty million dollars.  It
+isn't so much their failure that we are considering as it is the effect
+on stocks in general, and on the banks.  As I understand it, a number
+of your loans are involved. The gentlemen here have suggested that I
+call you up and ask you to come here, if you will, to help us decide
+what ought to be done. Something very drastic will have to be decided
+on before morning."
+
+During this speech Cowperwood's brain had been reciprocating like a
+well-oiled machine.
+
+"My loans?" he inquired, suavely.  "What have they to do with the
+situation? I don't owe Hull & Stackpole anything."
+
+"Very true.  But a number of the banks are carrying securities for you.
+The idea is that a number of these will have to be called--the majority
+of them--unless some other way can be devised to-night.  We thought you
+might possibly wish to come and talk it over, and that you might be
+able to suggest some other way out."
+
+"I see," replied Cowperwood, caustically.  "The idea is to sacrifice me
+in order to save Hull & Stackpole.  Is that it?"
+
+His eyes, quite as though Arneel were before him, emitted malicious
+sparks.
+
+"Well, not precisely that," replied Arneel, conservatively; "but
+something will have to be done.  Don't you think you had better come
+over?"
+
+"Very good.  I'll come," was the cheerful reply.  "It isn't anything
+that can be discussed over the 'phone, anyhow."
+
+He hung up the receiver and called for his runabout.  On the way over
+he thanked the prevision which had caused him, in anticipation of some
+such attack as this, to set aside in the safety vaults of the Chicago
+Trust Company several millions in low-interest-bearing government
+bonds.  Now, if worst came to worst, these could be drawn on and
+hypothecated.  These men should see at last how powerful he was and how
+secure.
+
+As he entered the home of Arneel he was a picturesque and truly
+representative figure of his day.  In a light summer suit of cream and
+gray twill, with a straw hat ornamented by a blue-and-white band, and
+wearing yellow quarter-shoes of the softest leather, he appeared a very
+model of trig, well-groomed self-sufficiency.  As he was ushered into
+the room he gazed about him in a brave, leonine way.
+
+"A fine night for a conference, gentlemen," he said, walking toward a
+chair indicated by Mr. Arneel.  "I must say I never saw so many straw
+hats at a funeral before.  I understand that my obsequies are
+contemplated.  What can I do?"
+
+He beamed in a genial, sufficient way, which in any one else would have
+brought a smile to the faces of the company.  In him it was an
+implication of basic power which secretly enraged and envenomed nearly
+all those present.  They merely stirred in a nervous and wholly
+antagonistic way.  A number of those who knew him personally
+nodded--Merrill, Lawrence, Simms; but there was no friendly light in
+their eyes.
+
+"Well, gentlemen?" he inquired, after a moment or two of ominous
+silence, observing Hand's averted face and Schryhart's eyes, which were
+lifted ceilingward.
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood," began Mr. Arneel, quietly, in no way disturbed by
+Cowperwood's jaunty air, "as I told you over the 'phone, this meeting
+is called to avert, if possible, what is likely to be a very serious
+panic in the morning.  Hull & Stackpole are on the verge of failure.
+The outstanding loans are considerable--in the neighborhood of seven or
+eight million here in Chicago.  On the other hand, there are assets in
+the shape of American Match stocks and other properties sufficient to
+carry them for a while longer if the banks can only continue their
+loans.  As you know, we are all facing a falling market, and the banks
+are short of ready money.  Something has to be done.  We have canvassed
+the situation here to-night as thoroughly as possible, and the general
+conclusion is that your loans are among the most available assets which
+can be reached quickly.  Mr. Schryhart, Mr. Merrill, Mr. Hand, and
+myself have done all we can thus far to avert a calamity, but we find
+that some one with whom Hull & Stackpole have been hypothecating stocks
+has been feeding them out in order to break the market. We shall know
+how to avoid that in the future" (and he looked hard at Cowperwood),
+"but the thing at present is immediate cash, and your loans are the
+largest and the most available.  Do you think you can find the means to
+pay them back in the morning?"
+
+Arneel blinked his keen, blue eyes solemnly, while the rest, like a
+pack of genial but hungry wolves, sat and surveyed this apparently
+whole but now condemned scapegoat and victim.  Cowperwood, who was
+keenly alive to the spirit of the company, looked blandly and
+fearlessly around.  On his knee he held his blue--banded straw hat
+neatly balanced on one edge.  His full mustache curled upward in a
+jaunty, arrogant way.
+
+"I can meet my loans," he replied, easily.  "But I would not advise you
+or any of the gentlemen present to call them." His voice, for all its
+lightness, had an ominous ring.
+
+"Why not?" inquired Hand, grimly and heavily, turning squarely about
+and facing him.  "It doesn't appear that you have extended any
+particular courtesy to Hull or Stackpole." His face was red and
+scowling.
+
+"Because," replied Cowperwood, smiling, and ignoring the reference to
+his trick, "I know why this meeting was called.  I know that these
+gentlemen here, who are not saying a word, are mere catspaws and rubber
+stamps for you and Mr. Schryhart and Mr. Arneel and Mr. Merrill.  I
+know how you four gentlemen have been gambling in this stock, and what
+your probable losses are, and that it is to save yourselves from
+further loss that you have decided to make me the scapegoat.  I want to
+tell you here"--and he got up, so that in his full stature he loomed
+over the room--"you can't do it.  You can't make me your catspaw to
+pull your chestnuts out of the fire, and no rubber-stamp conference can
+make any such attempt successful. If you want to know what to do, I'll
+tell you--close the Chicago Stock Exchange to-morrow morning and keep
+it closed.  Then let Hull & Stackpole fail, or if not you four put up
+the money to carry them.  If you can't, let your banks do it.  If you
+open the day by calling a single one of my loans before I am ready to
+pay it, I'll gut every bank from here to the river.  You'll have panic,
+all the panic you want.  Good evening, gentlemen."
+
+He drew out his watch, glanced at it, and quickly walked to the door,
+putting on his hat as he went.  As he bustled jauntily down the wide
+interior staircase, preceded by a footman to open the door, a murmur of
+dissatisfaction arose in the room he had just left.
+
+"The wrecker!" re-exclaimed Norrie Simms, angrily, astounded at this
+demonstration of defiance.
+
+"The scoundrel!" declared Mr. Blackman.  "Where does he get the wealth
+to talk like that?"
+
+"Gentlemen," said Mr. Arneel, stung to the quick by this amazing
+effrontery, and yet made cautious by the blazing wrath of Cowperwood,
+"it is useless to debate this question in anger.  Mr. Cowperwood
+evidently refers to loans which can be controlled in his favor, and of
+which I for one know nothing.  I do not see what can be done until we
+do know.  Perhaps some of you can tell us what they are."
+
+But no one could, and after due calculation advice was borrowed of
+caution.  The loans of Frank Algernon Cowperwood were not called.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter L
+
+A New York Mansion
+
+
+The failure of American Match the next morning was one of those events
+that stirred the city and the nation and lingered in the minds of men
+for years.  At the last moment it was decided that in lieu of calling
+Cowperwood's loans Hull & Stackpole had best be sacrificed, the
+stock-exchange closed, and all trading ended. This protected stocks
+from at least a quotable decline and left the banks free for several
+days (ten all told) in which to repair their disrupted finances and
+buttress themselves against the eventual facts.  Naturally, the minor
+speculators throughout the city--those who had expected to make a
+fortune out of this crash--raged and complained, but, being faced by an
+adamantine exchange directorate, a subservient press, and the alliance
+between the big bankers and the heavy quadrumvirate, there was nothing
+to be done. The respective bank presidents talked solemnly of "a mere
+temporary flurry," Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel went still
+further into their pockets to protect their interests, and Cowperwood,
+triumphant, was roundly denounced by the smaller fry as a "bucaneer," a
+"pirate," a "wolf"--indeed, any opprobrious term that came into their
+minds.  The larger men faced squarely the fact that here was an enemy
+worthy of their steel.  Would he master them? Was he already the
+dominant money power in Chicago? Could he thus flaunt their
+helplessness and his superiority in their eyes and before their
+underlings and go unwhipped?
+
+"I must give in!" Hosmer Hand had declared to Arneel and Schryhart, at
+the close of the Arneel house conference and as they stood in
+consultation after the others had departed.  "We seem to be beaten
+to-night, but I, for one, am not through yet.  He has won to-night, but
+he won't win always.  This is a fight to a finish between me and him.
+The rest of you can stay in or drop out, just as you wish."
+
+"Hear, hear!" exclaimed Schryhart, laying a fervently sympathetic hand
+on his shoulder.  "Every dollar that I have is at your service, Hosmer.
+This fellow can't win eventually.  I'm with you to the end."
+
+Arneel, walking with Merrill and the others to the door, was silent and
+dour.  He had been cavalierly affronted by a man who, but a few short
+years before, he would have considered a mere underling. Here was
+Cowperwood bearding the lion in his den, dictating terms to the
+principal financial figures of the city, standing up trig and resolute,
+smiling in their faces and telling them in so many words to go to the
+devil.  Mr. Arneel glowered under lowering brows, but what could he do?
+"We must see," he said to the others, "what time will bring.  Just now
+there is nothing much to do. This crisis has been too sudden.  You say
+you are not through with him, Hosmer, and neither am I.  But we must
+wait.  We shall have to break him politically in this city, and I am
+confident that in the end we can do it." The others were grateful for
+his courage even though to-morrow he and they must part with millions
+to protect themselves and the banks.  For the first time Merrill
+concluded that he would have to fight Cowperwood openly from now on,
+though even yet he admired his courage.  "But he is too defiant, too
+cavalier! A very lion of a man," he said to himself.  "A man with the
+heart of a Numidian lion."
+
+It was true.
+
+From this day on for a little while, and because there was no immediate
+political contest in sight, there was comparative peace in Chicago,
+although it more resembled an armed camp operating under the terms of
+some agreed neutrality than it did anything else.  Schryhart, Hand,
+Arneel, and Merrill were quietly watchful. Cowperwood's chief concern
+was lest his enemies might succeed in their project of worsting him
+politically in one or all three of the succeeding elections which were
+due to occur every two years between now and 1903, at which time his
+franchises would have to be renewed.  As in the past they had made it
+necessary for him to work against them through bribery and perjury, so
+in ensuing struggles they might render it more and more difficult for
+him or his agents to suborn the men elected to office.  The subservient
+and venal councilmen whom he now controlled might be replaced by men
+who, if no more honest, would be more loyal to the enemy, thus blocking
+the extension of his franchises.  Yet upon a renewal period of at least
+twenty and preferably fifty years depended the fulfilment of all the
+colossal things he had begun--his art-collection, his new mansion, his
+growing prestige as a financier, his rehabilitation socially, and the
+celebration of his triumph by a union, morganatic or otherwise, with
+some one who would be worthy to share his throne.
+
+It is curious how that first and most potent tendency of the human
+mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating.  Here was Cowperwood at
+fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man,
+celebrated in a local and in some respects in a national way, who was
+nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been achieved.
+He was not yet all-powerful as were divers Eastern magnates, or even
+these four or five magnificently moneyed men here in Chicago who, by
+plodding thought and labor in many dreary fields such as Cowperwood
+himself frequently scorned, had reaped tremendous and uncontended
+profits.  How was it, he asked himself, that his path had almost
+constantly been strewn with stormy opposition and threatened calamity?
+Was it due to his private immorality? Other men were immoral; the mass,
+despite religious dogma and fol-de-rol theory imposed from the top, was
+generally so.  Was it not rather due to his inability to control
+without dominating personally--without standing out fully and clearly
+in the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so.  The humdrum
+conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his
+constant desire to call a spade a spade.  His genial sufficiency was a
+taunt and a mockery to many.  The hard implication of his eye was
+dreaded by the weaker as fire is feared by a burnt child. Dissembling
+enough, he was not sufficiently oily and make-believe.
+
+Well, come what might, he did not need to be or mean to be so, and
+there the game must lie; but he had not by any means attained the
+height of his ambition.  He was not yet looked upon as a money prince.
+He could not rank as yet with the magnates of the East--the serried
+Sequoias of Wall Street.  Until he could stand with these men, until he
+could have a magnificent mansion, acknowledged as such by all, until he
+could have a world-famous gallery, Berenice, millions--what did it
+avail?
+
+The character of Cowperwood's New York house, which proved one of the
+central achievements of his later years, was one of those
+flowerings--out of disposition which eventuate in the case of men quite
+as in that of plants.  After the passing of the years neither a
+modified Gothic (such as his Philadelphia house had been), nor a
+conventionalized Norman-French, after the style of his Michigan Avenue
+home, seemed suitable to him.  Only the Italian palaces of medieval or
+Renaissance origin which he had seen abroad now appealed to him as
+examples of what a stately residence should be.  He was really seeking
+something which should not only reflect his private tastes as to a
+home, but should have the more enduring qualities of a palace or even a
+museum, which might stand as a monument to his memory.  After much
+searching Cowperwood had found an architect in New York who suited him
+entirely--one Raymond Pyne, rake, raconteur, man-about-town--who was
+still first and foremost an artist, with an eye for the exceptional and
+the perfect.  These two spent days and days together meditating on the
+details of this home museum.  An immense gallery was to occupy the west
+wing of the house and be devoted to pictures; a second gallery should
+occupy the south wing and be given over to sculpture and large whorls
+of art; and these two wings were to swing as an L around the house
+proper, the latter standing in the angle between them. The whole
+structure was to be of a rich brownstone, heavily carved. For its
+interior decoration the richest woods, silks, tapestries, glass, and
+marbles were canvassed.  The main rooms were to surround a great
+central court with a colonnade of pink-veined alabaster, and in the
+center there would be an electrically lighted fountain of alabaster and
+silver.  Occupying the east wall a series of hanging baskets of
+orchids, or of other fresh flowers, were to give a splendid glow of
+color, a morning-sun effect, to this richly artificial realm.  One
+chamber--a lounge on the second floor--was to be entirely lined with
+thin-cut transparent marble of a peach-blow hue, the lighting coming
+only through these walls and from without. Here in a perpetual
+atmosphere of sunrise were to be racks for exotic birds, a trellis of
+vines, stone benches, a central pool of glistening water, and an echo
+of music.  Pyne assured him that after his death this room would make
+an excellent chamber in which to exhibit porcelains, jades, ivories,
+and other small objects of value.
+
+Cowperwood was now actually transferring his possessions to New York,
+and had persuaded Aileen to accompany him.  Fine compound of tact and
+chicane that he was, he had the effrontery to assure her that they
+could here create a happier social life.  His present plan was to
+pretend a marital contentment which had no basis solely in order to
+make this transition period as undisturbed as possible. Subsequently he
+might get a divorce, or he might make an arrangement whereby his life
+would be rendered happy outside the social pale.
+
+Of all this Berenice Fleming knew nothing at all.  At the same time the
+building of this splendid mansion eventually awakened her to an
+understanding of the spirit of art that occupied the center of
+Cowperwood's iron personality and caused her to take a real interest in
+him.  Before this she had looked on him as a kind of Western interloper
+coming East and taking advantage of her mother's good nature to scrape
+a little social courtesy.  Now, however, all that Mrs. Carter had been
+telling her of his personality and achievements was becoming
+crystallized into a glittering chain of facts.  This house, the papers
+were fond of repeating, would be a jewel of rare workmanship.
+Obviously the Cowperwoods were going to try to enter society.  "What a
+pity it is," Mrs. Carter once said to Berenice, "that he couldn't have
+gotten a divorce from his wife before he began all this.  I am so
+afraid they will never be received.  He would be if he only had the
+right woman; but she--" Mrs. Carter, who had once seen Aileen in
+Chicago, shook her head doubtfully.  "She is not the type," was her
+comment.  "She has neither the air nor the understanding."
+
+"If he is so unhappy with her," observed Berenice, thoughtfully, "why
+doesn't he leave her? She can be happy without him.  It is so
+silly--this cat-and-dog existence.  Still I suppose she values the
+position he gives her," she added, "since she isn't so interesting
+herself."
+
+"I suppose," said Mrs. Carter, "that he married her twenty years ago,
+when he was a very different man from what he is to-day.  She is not
+exactly coarse, but not clever enough.  She cannot do what he would
+like to see done.  I hate to see mismatings of this kind, and yet they
+are so common.  I do hope, Bevy, that when you marry it will be some
+one with whom you can get along, though I do believe I would rather see
+you unhappy than poor."
+
+This was delivered as an early breakfast peroration in Central Park
+South, with the morning sun glittering on one of the nearest park
+lakes.  Bevy, in spring-green and old-gold, was studying the social
+notes in one of the morning papers.
+
+"I think I should prefer to be unhappy with wealth than to be without
+it," she said, idly, without looking up.
+
+Her mother surveyed her admiringly, conscious of her imperious mood.
+What was to become of her? Would she marry well? Would she marry in
+time? Thus far no breath of the wretched days in Louisville had
+affected Berenice.  Most of those with whom Mrs. Carter had found
+herself compelled to deal would be kind enough to keep her secret.  But
+there were others.  How near she had been to drifting on the rocks when
+Cowperwood had appeared!
+
+"After all," observed Berenice, thoughtfully, "Mr. Cowperwood isn't a
+mere money-grabber, is he? So many of these Western moneyed men are so
+dull."
+
+"My dear," exclaimed Mrs. Carter, who by now had become a confirmed
+satellite of her secret protector, "you don't understand him at all.
+He is a very astonishing man, I tell you.  The world is certain to hear
+a lot more of Frank Cowperwood before he dies. You can say what you
+please, but some one has to make the money in the first place.  It's
+little enough that good breeding does for you in poverty.  I know,
+because I've seen plenty of our friends come down."
+
+In the new house, on a scaffold one day, a famous sculptor and his
+assistants were at work on a Greek frieze which represented dancing
+nymphs linked together by looped wreaths.  Berenice and her mother
+happened to be passing.  They stopped to look, and Cowperwood joined
+them.  He waved his hand at the figures of the frieze, and said to
+Berenice, with his old, gay air, "If they had copied you they would
+have done better."
+
+"How charming of you!" she replied, with her cool, strange, blue eyes
+fixed on him.  "They are beautiful." In spite of her earlier prejudices
+she knew now that he and she had one god in common--Art; and that his
+mind was fixed on things beautiful as on a shrine.
+
+He merely looked at her.
+
+"This house can be little more than a museum to me," he remarked,
+simply, when her mother was out of hearing; "but I shall build it as
+perfectly as I can.  Perhaps others may enjoy it if I do not."
+
+She looked at him musingly, understandingly, and he smiled.  She
+realized, of course, that he was trying to convey to her that he was
+lonely.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LI
+
+The Revival of Hattie Starr
+
+
+Engrossed in the pleasures and entertainments which Cowperwood's money
+was providing, Berenice had until recently given very little thought to
+her future.  Cowperwood had been most liberal.  "She is young," he once
+said to Mrs. Carter, with an air of disinterested liberality, when they
+were talking about Berenice and her future. "She is an exquisite.  Let
+her have her day.  If she marries well she can pay you back, or me.
+But give her all she needs now." And he signed checks with the air of a
+gardener who is growing a wondrous orchid.
+
+The truth was that Mrs. Carter had become so fond of Berenice as an
+object of beauty, a prospective grande dame, that she would have sold
+her soul to see her well placed; and as the money to provide the
+dresses, setting, equipage had to come from somewhere, she had placed
+her spirit in subjection to Cowperwood and pretended not to see the
+compromising position in which she was placing all that was near and
+dear to her.
+
+"Oh, you're so good," she more than once said to him a mist of
+gratitude commingled with joy in her eyes.  "I would never have
+believed it of any one.  But Bevy--"
+
+"An esthete is an esthete," Cowperwood replied.  "They are rare enough.
+I like to see a spirit as fine as hers move untroubled. She will make
+her way."
+
+Seeing Lieutenant Braxmar in the foreground of Berenice's affairs, Mrs.
+Carter was foolish enough to harp on the matter in a friendly,
+ingratiating way.  Braxmar was really interesting after his fashion. He
+was young, tall, muscular, and handsome, a graceful dancer; but, better
+yet, he represented in his moods lineage, social position, a number of
+the things which engaged Berenice most.  He was intelligent, serious,
+with a kind of social grace which was gay, courteous, wistful.
+Berenice met him first at a local dance, where a new step was being
+practised--"dancing in the barn," as it was called--and so airily did
+he tread it with her in his handsome uniform that she was half smitten
+for the moment.
+
+"You dance delightfully," she said.  "Is this a part of your life on
+the ocean wave?"
+
+"Deep-sea-going dancing," he replied, with a heavenly smile.  "All
+battles are accompanied by balls, don't you know?"
+
+"Oh, what a wretched jest!" she replied.  "It's unbelievably bad."
+
+"Not for me.  I can make much worse ones."
+
+"Not for me," she replied, "I can't stand them." And they went prancing
+on.  Afterward he came and sat by her; they walked in the moonlight, he
+told her of naval life, his Southern home and connections.
+
+Mrs. Carter, seeing him with Berenice, and having been introduced,
+observed the next morning, "I like your Lieutenant, Bevy.  I know some
+of his relatives well.  They come from the Carolinas.  He's sure to
+come into money.  The whole family is wealthy.  Do you think he might
+be interested in you?"
+
+"Oh, possibly--yes, I presume so," replied Berenice, airily, for she
+did not take too kindly to this evidence of parental interest. She
+preferred to see life drift on in some nebulous way at present, and
+this was bringing matters too close to home.  "Still, he has so much
+machinery on his mind I doubt whether he could take any serious
+interest in a woman.  He is almost more of a battle-ship than he is a
+man."
+
+She made a mouth, and Mrs. Carter commented gaily: "You rogue! All the
+men take an interest in you.  You don't think you could care for him,
+then, at all?"
+
+"Why, mother, what a question! Why do you ask? Is it so essential that
+I should?"
+
+"Oh, not that exactly," replied Mrs. Carter, sweetly, bracing herself
+for a word which she felt incumbent upon her; "but think of his
+position.  He comes of such a good family, and he must be heir to a
+considerable fortune in his own right.  Oh, Bevy, I don't want to hurry
+or spoil your life in any way, but do keep in mind the future.  With
+your tastes and instincts money is so essential, and unless you marry
+it I don't know where you are to get it.  Your father was so
+thoughtless, and Rolfe's was even worse."
+
+She sighed.
+
+Berenice, for almost the first time in her life, took solemn heed of
+this thought.  She pondered whether she could endure Braxmar as a life
+partner, follow him around the world, perhaps retransferring her abode
+to the South; but she could not make up her mind.  This suggestion on
+the part of her mother rather poisoned the cup for her.  To tell the
+truth, in this hour of doubt her thoughts turned vaguely to Cowperwood
+as one who represented in his avid way more of the things she truly
+desired.  She remembered his wealth, his plaint that his new house
+could be only a museum, the manner in which he approached her with
+looks and voiceless suggestions.  But he was old and married--out of
+the question, therefore--and Braxmar was young and charming.  To think
+her mother should have been so tactless as to suggest the necessity for
+consideration in his case! It almost spoiled him for her.  And was
+their financial state, then, as uncertain as her mother indicated?
+
+In this crisis some of her previous social experiences became
+significant.  For instance, only a few weeks previous to her meeting
+with Braxmar she had been visiting at the country estate of the
+Corscaden Batjers, at Redding Hills, Long Island, and had been sitting
+with her hostess in the morning room of Hillcrest, which commanded a
+lovely though distant view of Long Island Sound.
+
+Mrs. Fredericka Batjer was a chestnut blonde, fair, cool, quiescent--a
+type out of Dutch art.  Clad in a morning gown of gray and silver, her
+hair piled in a Psyche knot, she had in her lap on this occasion a Java
+basket filled with some attempt at Norwegian needlework.
+
+"Bevy," she said, "you remember Kilmer Duelma, don't you? Wasn't he at
+the Haggertys' last summer when you were there?"
+
+Berenice, who was seated at a small Chippendale writing-desk penning
+letters, glanced up, her mind visioning for the moment the youth in
+question.  Kilmer Duelma--tall, stocky, swaggering, his clothes the
+loose, nonchalant perfection of the season, his walk ambling, studied,
+lackadaisical, aimless, his color high, his cheeks full, his eyes a
+little vacuous, his mind acquiescing in a sort of genial,
+inconsequential way to every query and thought that was put to him.
+The younger of the two sons of Auguste Duelma, banker, promoter,
+multimillionaire, he would come into a fortune estimated roughly at
+between six and eight millions.  At the Haggertys' the year before he
+had hung about her in an aimless fashion.
+
+Mrs. Batjer studied Berenice curiously for a moment, then returned to
+her needlework.  "I've asked him down over this week-end," she
+suggested.
+
+"Yes?" queried Berenice, sweetly.  "Are there others?"
+
+"Of course," assented Mrs. Batjer, remotely.  "Kilmer doesn't interest
+you, I presume."
+
+Berenice smiled enigmatically.
+
+"You remember Clarissa Faulkner, don't you, Bevy?" pursued Mrs. Batjer.
+"She married Romulus Garrison."
+
+"Perfectly.  Where is she now?"
+
+"They have leased the Chateau Brieul at Ars for the winter.  Romulus is
+a fool, but Clarissa is so clever.  You know she writes that she is
+holding a veritable court there this season.  Half the smart set of
+Paris and London are dropping in.  It is so charming for her to be able
+to do those things now.  Poor dear! At one time I was quite troubled
+over her."
+
+Without giving any outward sign Berenice did not fail to gather the
+full import of the analogy.  It was all true.  One must begin early to
+take thought of one's life.  She suffered a disturbing sense of duty.
+Kilmer Duelma arrived at noon Friday with six types of bags, a special
+valet, and a preposterous enthusiasm for polo and hunting (diseases
+lately acquired from a hunting set in the Berkshires).  A cleverly
+contrived compliment supposed to have emanated from Miss Fleming and
+conveyed to him with tact by Mrs. Batjer brought him ambling into
+Berenice's presence suggesting a Sunday drive to Saddle Rock.
+
+"Haw! haw! You know, I'm delighted to see you again.  Haw! haw! It's
+been an age since I've seen the Haggertys.  We missed you after you
+left.  Haw! haw! I did, you know.  Since I saw you I have taken up
+polo--three ponies with me all the time now--haw! haw!--a regular
+stable nearly."
+
+Berenice strove valiantly to retain a serene interest.  Duty was in her
+mind, the Chateau Brieul, the winter court of Clarissa Garrison, some
+first premonitions of the flight of time.  Yet the drive was a bore,
+conversation a burden, the struggle to respond titanic, impossible.
+When Monday came she fled, leaving three days between that and a
+week-end at Morristown.  Mrs. Batjer--who read straws most
+capably--sighed.  Her own Corscaden was not much beyond his money, but
+life must be lived and the ambitious must inherit wealth or gather it
+wisely.  Some impossible scheming silly would soon collect Duelma, and
+then-- She considered Berenice a little difficult.
+
+Berenice could not help piecing together the memory of this incident
+with her mother's recent appeal in behalf of Lieutenant Braxmar. A
+great, cloying, disturbing, disintegrating factor in her life was
+revealed by the dawning discovery that she and her mother were without
+much money, that aside from her lineage she was in a certain sense an
+interloper in society.  There were never rumors of great wealth in
+connection with her--no flattering whispers or public notices regarding
+her station as an heiress.  All the smug minor manikins of the social
+world were on the qui vive for some cotton-headed doll of a girl with
+an endless bank-account.  By nature sybaritic, an intense lover of art
+fabrics, of stately functions, of power and success in every form, she
+had been dreaming all this while of a great soul-freedom and
+art-freedom under some such circumstances as the greatest individual
+wealth of the day, and only that, could provide.  Simultaneously she
+had vaguely cherished the idea that if she ever found some one who was
+truly fond of her, and whom she could love or even admire
+intensely--some one who needed her in a deep, sincere way--she would
+give herself freely and gladly.  Yet who could it be? She had been
+charmed by Braxmar, but her keen, analytic intelligence required some
+one harder, more vivid, more ruthless, some one who would appeal to her
+as an immense force.  Yet she must be conservative, she must play what
+cards she had to win.
+
+During his summer visit at Narragansett Cowperwood had not been long
+disturbed by the presence of Braxmar, for, having received special
+orders, the latter was compelled to hurry away to Hampton Roads.  But
+the following November, forsaking temporarily his difficult affairs in
+Chicago for New York and the Carter apartment in Central Park South,
+Cowperwood again encountered the Lieutenant, who arrived one evening
+brilliantly arrayed in full official regalia in order to escort
+Berenice to a ball.  A high military cap surmounting his handsome face,
+his epaulets gleaming in gold, the lapels of his cape thrown back to
+reveal a handsome red silken lining, his sword clanking by his side, he
+seemed a veritable singing flame of youth.  Cowperwood, caught in the
+drift of circumstance--age, unsuitableness, the flaring
+counter-attractions of romance and vigor--fairly writhed in pain.
+
+Berenice was so beautiful in a storm of diaphanous clinging garments.
+He stared at them from an adjacent room, where he pretended to be
+reading, and sighed.  Alas, how was his cunning and foresight--even
+his--to overcome the drift of life itself? How was he to make himself
+appealing to youth? Braxmar had the years, the color, the bearing.
+Berenice seemed to-night, as she prepared to leave, to be fairly
+seething with youth, hope, gaiety.  He arose after a few moments and,
+giving business as an excuse, hurried away.  But it was only to sit in
+his own rooms in a neighboring hotel and meditate.  The logic of the
+ordinary man under such circumstances, compounded of the age-old
+notions of chivalry, self-sacrifice, duty to higher impulses, and the
+like, would have been to step aside in favor of youth, to give
+convention its day, and retire in favor of morality and virtue.
+Cowperwood saw things in no such moralistic or altruistic light.  "I
+satisfy myself," had ever been his motto, and under that, however much
+he might sympathize with Berenice in love or with love itself, he was
+not content to withdraw until he was sure that the end of hope for him
+had really come. There had been moments between him and
+Berenice--little approximations toward intimacy--which had led him to
+believe that by no means was she seriously opposed to him.  At the same
+time this business of the Lieutenant, so Mrs. Carter confided to him a
+little later, was not to be regarded lightly.  While Berenice might not
+care so much, obviously Braxmar did.
+
+"Ever since he has been away he has been storming her with letters,"
+she remarked to Cowperwood, one afternoon.  "I don't think he is the
+kind that can be made to take no for an answer.
+
+"A very successful kind," commented Cowperwood, dryly.  Mrs. Carter was
+eager for advice in the matter.  Braxmar was a man of parts. She knew
+his connections.  He would inherit at least six hundred thousand
+dollars at his father's death, if not more.  What about her Louisville
+record? Supposing that should come out later? Would it not be wise for
+Berenice to marry, and have the danger over with?
+
+"It is a problem, isn't it?" observed Cowperwood, calmly.  "Are you
+sure she's in love?"
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't say that, but such things so easily turn into love. I
+have never believed that Berenice could be swept off her feet by any
+one--she is so thoughtful--but she knows she has her own way to make in
+the world, and Mr. Braxmar is certainly eligible. I know his cousins,
+the Clifford Porters, very well."
+
+Cowperwood knitted his brows.  He was sick to his soul with this worry
+over Berenice.  He felt that he must have her, even at the cost of
+inflicting upon her a serious social injury.  Better that she should
+surmount it with him than escape it with another.  It so happened,
+however, that the final grim necessity of acting on any such idea was
+spared him.
+
+Imagine a dining-room in one of the principal hotels of New York, the
+hour midnight, after an evening at the opera, to which Cowperwood, as
+host, had invited Berenice, Lieutenant Braxmar, and Mrs. Carter. He was
+now playing the role of disinterested host and avuncular mentor.
+
+His attitude toward Berenice, meditating, as he was, a course which
+should be destructive to Braxmar, was gentle, courteous, serenely
+thoughtful.  Like a true Mephistopheles he was waiting, surveying Mrs.
+Carter and Berenice, who were seated in front chairs clad in such
+exotic draperies as opera-goers affect--Mrs. Carter in pale-lemon silk
+and diamonds; Berenice in purple and old-rose, with a jeweled comb in
+her hair.  The Lieutenant in his dazzling uniform smiled and talked
+blandly, complimented the singers, whispered pleasant nothings to
+Berenice, descanted at odd moments to Cowperwood on naval personages
+who happened to be present. Coming out of the opera and driving through
+blowy, windy streets to the Waldorf, they took the table reserved for
+them, and Cowperwood, after consulting with regard to the dishes and
+ordering the wine, went back reminiscently to the music, which had been
+"La Boheme." The death of Mimi and the grief of Rodolph, as voiced by
+the splendid melodies of Puccini, interested him.
+
+"That makeshift studio world may have no connection with the genuine
+professional artist, but it's very representative of life," he remarked.
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure," said Braxmar, seriously.
+
+"All I know of Bohemia is what I have read in books--Trilby, for
+instance, and--" He could think of no other, and stopped.  "I suppose
+it is that way in Paris."
+
+He looked at Berenice for confirmation and to win a smile.  Owing to
+her mobile and sympathetic disposition, she had during the opera been
+swept from period to period by surges of beauty too gay or pathetic for
+words, but clearly comprehended of the spirit.  Once when she had been
+lost in dreamy contemplation, her hands folded on her knees, her eyes
+fixed on the stage, both Braxmar and Cowperwood had studied her parted
+lips and fine profile with common impulses of emotion and enthusiasm.
+Realizing after the mood was gone that they had been watching her,
+Berenice had continued the pose for a moment, then had waked as from a
+dream with a sigh. This incident now came back to her as well as her
+feeling in regard to the opera generally.
+
+"It is very beautiful," she said; "I do not know what to say. People
+are like that, of course.  It is so much better than just dull comfort.
+Life is really finest when it's tragic, anyhow."
+
+She looked at Cowperwood, who was studying her; then at Braxmar, who
+saw himself for the moment on the captain's bridge of a battle-ship
+commanding in time of action.  To Cowperwood came back many of his
+principal moments of difficulty.  Surely his life had been sufficiently
+dramatic to satisfy her.
+
+"I don't think I care so much for it," interposed Mrs. Carter. "One
+gets tired of sad happenings.  We have enough drama in real life."
+
+Cowperwood and Braxmar smiled faintly.  Berenice looked contemplatively
+away.  The crush of diners, the clink of china and glass, the bustling
+to and fro of waiters, and the strumming of the orchestra diverted her
+somewhat, as did the nods and smiles of some entering guests who
+recognized Braxmar and herself, but not Cowperwood.
+
+Suddenly from a neighboring door, opening from the men's cafe and
+grill, there appeared the semi-intoxicated figure of an ostensibly
+swagger society man, his clothing somewhat awry, an opera-coat hanging
+loosely from one shoulder, a crush-opera-hat dangling in one hand, his
+eyes a little bloodshot, his under lip protruding slightly and
+defiantly, and his whole visage proclaiming that devil-may-care,
+superior, and malicious aspect which the drunken rake does not so much
+assume as achieve.  He looked sullenly, uncertainly about; then,
+perceiving Cowperwood and his party, made his way thither in the
+half-determined, half-inconsequential fashion of one not quite sound
+after his cups.  When he was directly opposite Cowperwood's table--the
+cynosure of a number of eyes--he suddenly paused as if in recognition,
+and, coming over, laid a genial and yet condescending hand on Mrs.
+Carter's bare shoulder.
+
+"Why, hello, Hattie!" he called, leeringly and jeeringly.  "What are
+you doing down here in New York? You haven't given up your business in
+Louisville, have you, eh, old sport? Say, lemme tell you something.  I
+haven't had a single decent girl since you left--not one.  If you open
+a house down here, let me know, will you?"
+
+He bent over her smirkingly and patronizingly the while he made as if
+to rummage in his white waistcoat pocket for a card.  At the same
+moment Cowperwood and Braxmar, realizing quite clearly the import of
+his words, were on their feet.  While Mrs. Carter was pulling and
+struggling back from the stranger, Braxmar's hand (he being the
+nearest) was on him, and the head waiter and two assistants had
+appeared.
+
+"What is the trouble here? What has he done?" they demanded.
+
+Meanwhile the intruder, leering contentiously at them all, was
+exclaiming in very audible tones: "Take your hands off.  Who are you?
+What the devil have you got to do with this? Don't you think I know
+what I'm about? She knows me--don't you, Hattie? That's Hattie Starr,
+of Louisville--ask her! She kept one of the swellest ever run in
+Louisville.  What do you people want to be so upset about? I know what
+I'm doing.  She knows me."
+
+He not only protested, but contested, and with some vehemence.
+Cowperwood, Braxmar, and the waiters forming a cordon, he was shoved
+and hustled out into the lobby and the outer entranceway, and an
+officer was called.
+
+"This man should be arrested," Cowperwood protested, vigorously, when
+the latter appeared.  "He has grossly insulted lady guests of mine.  He
+is drunk and disorderly, and I wish to make that charge.  Here is my
+card.  Will you let me know where to come?" He handed it over, while
+Braxmar, scrutinizing the stranger with military care, added: "I should
+like to thrash you within an inch of your life.  If you weren't drunk I
+would.  If you are a gentleman and have a card I want you to give it to
+me.  I want to talk to you later." He leaned over and presented a cold,
+hard face to that of Mr. Beales Chadsey, of Louisville, Kentucky.
+
+"Tha's all right, Captain," leered Chadsey, mockingly.  "I got a card.
+No harm done.  Here you are.  You c'n see me any time you want--Hotel
+Buckingham, Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street.  I got a right to speak
+to anybody I please, where I please, when I please. See?"
+
+He fumbled and protested while the officer stood by read to take him in
+charge.  Not finding a card, he added: "Tha's all right. Write it down.
+Beales Chadsey, Hotel Buckingham, or Louisville, Kentucky.  See me any
+time you want to.  Tha's Hattie Starr.  She knows me.  I couldn't make
+a mistake about her--not once in a million.  Many's the night I spent
+in her house."
+
+Braxmar was quite ready to lunge at him had not the officer intervened.
+
+Back in the dining-room Berenice and her mother were sitting, the
+latter quite flustered, pale, distrait, horribly taken aback--by far
+too much distressed for any convincing measure of deception.
+
+"Why, the very idea!" she was saying.  "That dreadful man! How
+terrible! I never saw him before in my life."
+
+Berenice, disturbed and nonplussed, was thinking of the familiar and
+lecherous leer with which the stranger had addressed her mother--the
+horror, the shame of it.  Could even a drunken man, if utterly
+mistaken, be so defiant, so persistent, so willing to explain? What
+shameful things had she been hearing?
+
+"Come, mother," she said, gently, and with dignity; "never mind, it is
+all right.  We can go home at once.  You will feel better when you are
+out of here."
+
+She called a waiter and asked him to say to the gentlemen that they had
+gone to the women's dressing-room.  She pushed an intervening chair out
+of the way and gave her mother her arm.
+
+"To think I should be so insulted," Mrs. Carter mumbled on, "here in a
+great hotel, in the presence of Lieutenant Braxmar and Mr. Cowperwood!
+This is too dreadful.  Well, I never."
+
+She half whimpered as she walked; and Berenice, surveying the room with
+dignity, a lofty superiority in her face, led solemnly forth, a
+strange, lacerating pain about her heart.  What was at the bottom of
+these shameful statements? Why should this drunken roisterer have
+selected her mother, of all other women in the dining-room, for the
+object of these outrageous remarks? Why should her mother be stricken,
+so utterly collapsed, if there were not some truth in what he had said?
+It was very strange, very sad, very grim, very horrible.  What would
+that gossiping, scandal-loving world of which she knew so much say to a
+scene like this? For the first time in her life the import and horror
+of social ostracism flashed upon her.
+
+The following morning, owing to a visit paid to the Jefferson Market
+Police Court by Lieutenant Braxmar, where he proposed, if satisfaction
+were not immediately guaranteed, to empty cold lead into Mr. Beales
+Chadsey's stomach, the following letter on Buckingham stationery was
+written and sent to Mrs. Ira George Carter--36 Central Park South:
+
+DEAR MADAM:
+
+Last evening, owing to a drunken debauch, for which I have no
+satisfactory or suitable explanation to make, I was the unfortunate
+occasion of an outrage upon your feelings and those of your daughter
+and friends, for which I wish most humbly to apologize.  I cannot tell
+you how sincerely I regret whatever I said or did, which I cannot now
+clearly recall.  My mental attitude when drinking is both contentious
+and malicious, and while in this mood and state I was the author of
+statements which I know to be wholly unfounded. In my drunken stupor I
+mistook you for a certain notorious woman of Louisville--why, I have
+not the slightest idea.  For this wholly shameful and outrageous
+conduct I sincerely ask your pardon--beg your forgiveness.  I do not
+know what amends I can make, but anything you may wish to suggest I
+shall gladly do.  In the mean while I hope you will accept this letter
+in the spirit in which it is written and as a slight attempt at
+recompense which I know can never fully be made.
+
+Very sincerely,
+
+BEALES CHADSEY.
+
+At the same time Lieutenant Braxmar was fully aware before this letter
+was written or sent that the charges implied against Mrs. Carter were
+only too well founded.  Beales Chadsey had said drunk what twenty men
+in all sobriety and even the police at Louisville would corroborate.
+Chadsey had insisted on making this clear to Braxmar before writing the
+letter.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LII
+
+Behind the Arras
+
+
+Berenice, perusing the apology from Beales Chadsey, which her
+mother--very much fagged and weary--handed her the next morning,
+thought that it read like the overnight gallantry of some one who was
+seeking to make amends without changing his point of view. Mrs. Carter
+was too obviously self-conscious.  She protested too much.  Berenice
+knew that she could find out for herself if she chose, but would she
+choose? The thought sickened her, and yet who was she to judge too
+severely?
+
+Cowperwood came in bright and early to put as good a face on the matter
+as he could.  He explained how he and Braxmar had gone to the police
+station to make a charge; how Chadsey, sobered by arrest, had abandoned
+his bravado and humbly apologized.  When viewing the letter handed him
+by Mrs. Carter he exclaimed:
+
+"Oh yes.  He was very glad to promise to write that if we would let him
+off.  Braxmar seemed to think it was necessary that he should.  I
+wanted the judge to impose a fine and let it go at that. He was drunk,
+and that's all there was to it."
+
+He assumed a very unknowing air when in the presence of Berenice and
+her mother, but when alone with the latter his manner changed
+completely.
+
+"Brazen it out," he commanded.  "It doesn't amount to anything. Braxmar
+doesn't believe that this man really knows anything.  This letter is
+enough to convince Berenice.  Put a good face on it; more depends on
+your manner than on anything else.  You're much too upset.  That won't
+do at all; you'll tell the whole story that way."
+
+At the same time he privately regarded this incident as a fine windfall
+of chance--in all likelihood the one thing which would serve to scare
+the Lieutenant away.  Outwardly, however, he demanded effrontery,
+assumption; and Mrs. Carter was somewhat cheered, but when she was
+alone she cried.  Berenice, coming upon her accidentally and finding
+her eyes wet, exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, mother, please don't be foolish.  How can you act this way? We had
+better go up in the country and rest a little while if you are so
+unstrung."
+
+Mrs. Carter protested that it was merely nervous reaction, but to
+Berenice it seemed that where there was so much smoke there must be
+some fire.
+
+Her manner in the aftermath toward Braxmar was gracious, but remote. He
+called the next day to say how sorry he was, and to ask her to a new
+diversion.  She was sweet, but distant.  In so far as she was concerned
+it was plain that the Beales Chadsey incident was closed, but she did
+not accept his invitation.
+
+"Mother and I are planning to go to the country for a few days," she
+observed, genially.  "I can't say just when we shall return, but if you
+are still here we shall meet, no doubt.  You must be sure and come to
+see us."  She turned to an east court-window, where the morning sun was
+gleaming on some flowers in a window-box, and began to pinch off a dead
+leaf here and there.
+
+Braxmar, full of the tradition of American romance, captivated by her
+vibrant charm, her poise and superiority under the circumstances, her
+obvious readiness to dismiss him, was overcome, as the human mind
+frequently is, by a riddle of the spirit, a chemical reaction as
+mysterious to its victim as to one who is its witness.  Stepping
+forward with a motion that was at once gallant, reverent, eager,
+unconscious, he exclaimed:
+
+"Berenice! Miss Fleming! Please don't send me away like this. Don't
+leave me.  It isn't anything I have done, is it? I am mad about you.  I
+can't bear to think that anything that has happened could make any
+difference between you and me.  I haven't had the courage to tell you
+before, but I want to tell you now.  I have been in love with you from
+the very first night I saw you.  You are such a wonderful girl! I don't
+feel that I deserve you, but I love you.  I love you with all the honor
+and force in me.  I admire and respect you.  Whatever may or may not be
+true, it is all one and the same to me.  Be my wife, will you? Marry
+me, please! Oh, I'm not fit to be the lacer of your shoes, but I have
+position and I'll make a name for myself, I hope.  Oh, Berenice!" He
+extended his arms in a dramatic fashion, not outward, but downward,
+stiff and straight, and declared: "I don't know what I shall do without
+you.  Is there no hope for me at all?"
+
+An artist in all the graces of sex--histrionic, plastic,
+many-faceted--Berenice debated for the fraction of a minute what she
+should do and say.  She did not love the Lieutenant as he loved her by
+any means, and somehow this discovery concerning her mother shamed her
+pride, suggesting an obligation to save herself in one form or another,
+which she resented bitterly.  She was sorry for his tactless proposal
+at this time, although she knew well enough the innocence and virtue of
+the emotion from which it sprung.
+
+"Really, Mr. Braxmar," she replied, turning on him with solemn eyes,
+"you mustn't ask me to decide that now.  I know how you feel. I'm
+afraid, though, that I may have been a little misleading in my manner.
+I didn't mean to be.  I'm quite sure you'd better forget your interest
+in me for the present anyhow.  I could only make up my mind in one way
+if you should insist.  I should have to ask you to forget me entirely.
+I wonder if you can see how I feel--how it hurts me to say this?"
+
+She paused, perfectly poised, yet quite moved really, as charming a
+figure as one would have wished to see--part Greek, part
+Oriental--contemplative, calculating.
+
+In that moment, for the first time, Braxmar realized that he was
+talking to some one whom he could not comprehend really.  She was
+strangely self-contained, enigmatic, more beautiful perhaps because
+more remote than he had ever seen her before.  In a strange flash this
+young American saw the isles of Greece, Cytherea, the lost Atlantis,
+Cyprus, and its Paphian shrine.  His eyes burned with a strange,
+comprehending luster; his color, at first high, went pale.
+
+"I can't believe you don't care for me at all, Miss Berenice," he went
+on, quite strainedly.  "I felt you did care about me.  But here," he
+added, all at once, with a real, if summoned, military force, "I won't
+bother you.  You do understand me.  You know how I feel.  I won't
+change.  Can't we be friends, anyhow?"
+
+He held out his hand, and she took it, feeling now that she was putting
+an end to what might have been an idyllic romance.
+
+"Of course we can," she said.  "I hope I shall see you again soon."
+
+After he was gone she walked into the adjoining room and sat down in a
+wicker chair, putting her elbows on her knees and resting her chin in
+her hands.  What a denouement to a thing so innocent, so charming! And
+now he was gone.  She would not see him any more, would not want to see
+him--not much, anyhow.  Life had sad, even ugly facts.  Oh yes, yes,
+and she was beginning to perceive them clearly.
+
+Some two days later, when Berenice had brooded and brooded until she
+could endure it no longer, she finally went to Mrs. Carter and said:
+"Mother, why don't you tell me all about this Louisville matter so that
+I may really know? I can see something is worrying you.  Can't you
+trust me? I am no longer a child by any means, and I am your daughter.
+It may help me to straighten things out, to know what to do."
+
+Mrs. Carter, who had always played a game of lofty though loving
+motherhood, was greatly taken aback by this courageous attitude. She
+flushed and chilled a little; then decided to lie.
+
+"I tell you there was nothing at all," she declared, nervously and
+pettishly.  "It is all an awful mistake.  I wish that dreadful man
+could be punished severely for what he said to me.  To be outraged and
+insulted this way before my own child!"
+
+"Mother," questioned Berenice, fixing her with those cool, blue eyes,
+"why don't you tell me all about Louisville? You and I shouldn't have
+things between us.  Maybe I can help you."
+
+All at once Mrs. Carter, realizing that her daughter was no longer a
+child nor a mere social butterfly, but a woman superior, cool,
+sympathetic, with intuitions much deeper than her own, sank into a
+heavily flowered wing-chair behind her, and, seeking a small
+pocket-handkerchief with one hand, placed the other over her eyes and
+began to cry.
+
+"I was so driven, Bevy, I didn't know which way to turn.  Colonel
+Gillis suggested it.  I wanted to keep you and Rolfe in school and give
+you a chance.  It isn't true--anything that horrible man said.  It
+wasn't anything like what he suggested.  Colonel Gillis and several
+others wanted me to rent them bachelor quarters, and that's the way it
+all came about.  It wasn't my fault; I couldn't help myself, Bevy."
+
+"And what about Mr. Cowperwood?" inquired Berenice curiously.  She had
+begun of late to think a great deal about Cowperwood.  He was so cool,
+deep, dynamic, in a way resourceful, like herself.
+
+"There's nothing about him," replied Mrs. Carter, looking up
+defensively.  Of all her men friends she best liked Cowperwood. He had
+never advised her to evil ways or used her house as a convenience to
+himself alone.  "He never did anything but help me out.  He advised me
+to give up my house in Louisville and come East and devote myself to
+looking after you and Rolfe.  He offered to help me until you two
+should be able to help yourselves, and so I came.  Oh, if I had only
+not been so foolish--so afraid of life! But your father and Mr. Carter
+just ran through everything."
+
+She heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh.
+
+"Then we really haven't anything at all, have we, mother--property or
+anything else?"
+
+Mrs. Carter shook her head, meaning no.
+
+"And the money we have been spending is Mr. Cowperwood's?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Berenice paused and looked out the window over the wide stretch of park
+which it commanded.  Framed in it like a picture were a small lake, a
+hill of trees, with a Japanese pagoda effect in the foreground.  Over
+the hill were the yellow towering walls of a great hotel in Central
+Park West.  In the street below could be heard the jingle of
+street-cars.  On a road in the park could be seen a moving line of
+pleasure vehicles--society taking an airing in the chill November
+afternoon.
+
+"Poverty, ostracism," she thought.  And should she marry rich? Of
+course, if she could.  And whom should she marry? The Lieutenant?
+Never.  He was really not masterful enough mentally, and he had
+witnessed her discomfiture.  And who, then? Oh, the long line of
+sillies, light-weights, rakes, ne'er-do-wells, who, combined with
+sober, prosperous, conventional, muddle-headed oofs, constituted
+society.  Here and there, at far jumps, was a real man, but would he be
+interested in her if he knew the whole truth about her?
+
+"Have you broken with Mr. Braxmar?" asked her mother, curiously,
+nervously, hopefully, hopelessly.
+
+"I haven't seen him since," replied Berenice, lying conservatively. "I
+don't know whether I shall or not.  I want to think." She arose.  "But
+don't you mind, mother.  Only I wish we had some other way of living
+besides being dependent on Mr. Cowperwood."
+
+She walked into her boudoir, and before her mirror began to dress for a
+dinner to which she had been invited.  So it was Cowperwood's money
+that had been sustaining them all during the last few years; and she
+had been so liberal with his means--so proud, vain, boastful, superior.
+And he had only fixed her with those inquiring, examining eyes.  Why?
+But she did not need to ask herself why.  She knew now.  What a game he
+had been playing, and what a silly she had been not to see it.  Did her
+mother in any way suspect? She doubted it.  This queer, paradoxical,
+impossible world! The eyes of Cowperwood burned at her as she thought.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LIII
+
+A Declaration of Love
+
+
+For the first time in her life Berenice now pondered seriously what she
+could do.  She thought of marriage, but decided that instead of sending
+for Braxmar or taking up some sickening chase of an individual even
+less satisfactory it might be advisable to announce in a simple social
+way to her friends that her mother had lost her money, and that she
+herself was now compelled to take up some form of employment--the
+teaching of dancing, perhaps, or the practice of it professionally.
+She suggested this calmly to her mother one day.  Mrs. Carter, who had
+been long a parasite really, without any constructive monetary notions
+of real import, was terrified.  To think that she and "Bevy," her
+wonderful daughter, and by reaction her son, should come to anything so
+humdrum and prosaic as ordinary struggling life, and after all her
+dreams. She sighed and cried in secret, writing Cowperwood a cautious
+explanation and asking him to see her privately in New York when he
+returned.
+
+"Don't you think we had best go on a little while longer?" she
+suggested to Berenice.  "It just wrings my heart to think that you,
+with your qualifications, should have to stoop to giving
+dancing-lessons.  We had better do almost anything for a while yet.
+You can make a suitable marriage, and then everything will be all right
+for you.  It doesn't matter about me.  I can live. But you--" Mrs.
+Carter's strained eyes indicated the misery she felt.  Berenice was
+moved by this affection for her, which she knew to be genuine; but what
+a fool her mother had been, what a weak reed, indeed, she was to lean
+upon! Cowperwood, when he conferred with Mrs. Carter, insisted that
+Berenice was quixotic, nervously awry, to wish to modify her state, to
+eschew society and invalidate her wondrous charm by any sort of
+professional life. By prearrangement with Mrs. Carter he hurried to
+Pocono at a time when he knew that Berenice was there alone.  Ever
+since the Beales Chadsey incident she had been evading him.
+
+When he arrived, as he did about one in the afternoon of a crisp
+January day, there was snow on the ground, and the surrounding
+landscape was bathed in a crystalline light that gave back to the eye
+endless facets of luster--jewel beams that cut space with a flash.  The
+automobile had been introduced by now, and he rode in a touring-car of
+eighty horse-power that gave back from its dark-brown, varnished
+surface a lacquered light.  In a great fur coat and cap of round, black
+lamb's-wool he arrived at the door.
+
+"Well, Bevy," he exclaimed, pretending not to know of Mrs. Carter's
+absence, "how are you? How's your mother? Is she in?"
+
+Berenice fixed him with her cool, steady-gazing eyes, as frank and
+incisive as they were daring, and smiled him an equivocal welcome. She
+wore a blue denim painter's apron, and a palette of many colors
+glistened under her thumb.  She was painting and thinking--thinking
+being her special occupation these days, and her thoughts had been of
+Braxmar, Cowperwood, Kilmer Duelma, a half-dozen others, as well as of
+the stage, dancing, painting.  Her life was in a melting-pot, as it
+were, before her; again it was like a disarranged puzzle, the pieces of
+which might be fitted together into some interesting picture if she
+could but endure.
+
+"Do come in," she said.  "It's cold, isn't it? Well, there's a nice
+fire here for you.  No, mother isn't here.  She went down to New York.
+I should think you might have found her at the apartment. Are you in
+New York for long?"
+
+She was gay, cheerful, genial, but remote.  Cowperwood felt the
+protective gap that lay between him and her.  It had always been there.
+He felt that, even though she might understand and like him, yet there
+was something--convention, ambition, or some deficiency on his
+part--that was keeping her from him, keeping her eternally distant.
+
+He looked about the room, at the picture she was attempting (a
+snow-scape, of a view down a slope), at the view itself which he
+contemplated from the window, at some dancing sketches she had recently
+executed and hung on the wall for the time being--lovely, short tunic
+motives.  He looked at her in her interesting and becoming painter's
+apron.  "Well, Berenice," he said, "always the artist first.  It is
+your world.  You will never escape it.  These things are beautiful." He
+waved an ungloved hand in the direction of a choric line.  "It wasn't
+your mother I came to see, anyhow. It is you.  I had such a curious
+letter from her.  She tells me you want to give up society and take to
+teaching or something of that sort.  I came because I wanted to talk to
+you about that. Don't you think you are acting rather hastily?"
+
+He spoke now as though there were some reason entirely disassociated
+from himself that was impelling him to this interest in her.
+
+Berenice, brush in hand, standing by her picture, gave him a look that
+was cool, curious, defiant, equivocal.
+
+"No, I don't think so," she replied, quietly.  "You know how things
+have been, so I may speak quite frankly.  I know that mother's
+intentions were always of the best."
+
+Her mouth moved with the faintest touch of sadness.  "Her heart, I am
+afraid, is better than her head.  As for your motives, I am satisfied
+to believe that they have been of the best also.  I know that they have
+been, in fact--it would be ungenerous of me to suggest anything else."
+(Cowperwood's fixed eyes, it seemed to her, had moved somewhere in
+their deepest depths.) "Yet I don't feel we can go on as we have been
+doing.  We have no money of our own.  Why shouldn't I do something?
+What else can I really do?"
+
+She paused, and Cowperwood gazed at her, quite still.  In her informal,
+bunchy painter's apron, and with her blue eyes looking out at him from
+beneath her loose red hair, it seemed to him she was the most perfect
+thing he had ever known.  Such a keen, fixed, enthroned mind.  She was
+so capable, so splendid, and, like his own, her eyes were unafraid.
+Her spiritual equipoise was undisturbed.
+
+"Berenice," he said, quietly, "let me tell you something.  You did me
+the honor just now to speak of my motives ingiving your mother money as
+of the best.  They were--from my own point of view--the best I have
+ever known.  I will not say what I thought they were in the beginning.
+I know what they were now.  I am going to speak quite frankly with you,
+if you will let me, as long as we are here together.  I don't know
+whether you know this or not, but when I first met your mother I only
+knew by chance that she had a daughter, and it was of no particular
+interest to me then.  I went to her house as the guest of a financial
+friend of mine who admired her greatly.  From the first I myself
+admired her, because I found her to be a lady to the manner born--she
+was interesting.  One day I happened to see a photograph of you in her
+home, and before I could mention it she put it away.  Perhaps you
+recall the one.  It is in profile--taken when you were about sixteen."
+
+"Yes, I remember," replied Berenice, simply--as quietly as though she
+were hearing a confession.
+
+"Well, that picture interested me intensely.  I inquired about you, and
+learned all I could.  After that I saw another picture of you,
+enlarged, in a Louisville photographer's window.  I bought it.  It is
+in my office now--my private office--in Chicago.  You are standing by a
+mantelpiece."
+
+"I remember," replied Berenice, moved, but uncertain.
+
+"Let me tell you a little something about my life, will you? It won't
+take long.  I was born in Philadelphia.  My family had always belonged
+there.  I have been in the banking and street-railway business all my
+life.  My first wife was a Presbyterian girl, religious, conventional.
+She was older than I by six or seven years.  I was happy for a
+while--five or six years.  We had two children--both still living.
+Then I met my present wife.  She was younger than myself--at least ten
+years, and very good-looking. She was in some respects more intelligent
+than my first wife--at least less conventional, more generous, I
+thought.  I fell in love with her, and when I eventually left
+Philadelphia I got a divorce and married her.  I was greatly in love
+with her at the time.  I thought she was an ideal mate for me, and I
+still think she has many qualities which make her attractive.  But my
+own ideals in regard to women have all the time been slowly changing.
+I have come to see, through various experiments, that she is not the
+ideal woman for me at all.  She does not understand me.  I don't
+pretend to understand myself, but it has occurred to me that there
+might be a woman somewhere who would understand me better than I
+understand myself, who would see the things that I don't see about
+myself, and would like me, anyhow.  I might as well tell you that I
+have been a lover of women always.  There is just one ideal thing in
+this world to me, and that is the woman that I would like to have."
+
+"I should think it would make it rather difficult for any one woman to
+discover just which woman you would like to have?" smiled Berenice,
+whimsically.  Cowperwood was unabashed.
+
+"It would, I presume, unless she should chance to be the very one woman
+I am talking about," he replied, impressively.
+
+"I should think she would have her work cut out for her under any
+circumstances," added Berenice, lightly, but with a touch of sympathy
+in her voice.
+
+"I am making a confession," replied Cowperwood, seriously and a little
+heavily.  "I am not apologizing for myself.  The women I have known
+would make ideal wives for some men, but not for me. Life has taught me
+that much.  It has changed me."
+
+"And do you think the process has stopped by any means?" she replied,
+quaintly, with that air of superior banter which puzzled, fascinated,
+defied him.
+
+"No, I will not say that.  My ideal has become fixed, though,
+apparently.  I have had it for a number of years now.  It spoils other
+matters for me.  There is such a thing as an ideal.  We do have a
+pole-star in physics."
+
+As he said this Cowperwood realized that for him he was making a very
+remarkable confession.  He had come here primarily to magnetize her and
+control her judgment.  As a matter of fact, it was almost the other way
+about.  She was almost dominating him.  Lithe, slender, resourceful,
+histrionic, she was standing before him making him explain himself,
+only he did not see her so much in that light as in the way of a large,
+kindly, mothering intelligence which could see, feel, and understand.
+She would know how it was, he felt sure.  He could make himself
+understood if he tried. Whatever he was or had been, she would not take
+a petty view.  She could not.  Her answers thus far guaranteed as much.
+
+"Yes," she replied, "we do have a pole-star, but you do not seem able
+to find it.  Do you expect to find your ideal in any living woman?"
+
+"I have found it," he answered, wondering at the ingenuity and
+complexity of her mind--and of his own, for that matter--of all mind
+indeed.  Deep below deep it lay, staggering him at times by its
+fathomless reaches.  "I hope you will take seriously what I am going to
+say, for it will explain so much.  When I began to be interested in
+your picture I was so because it coincided with the ideal I had in
+mind--the thing that you think changes swiftly. That was nearly seven
+years ago.  Since then it has never changed. When I saw you at your
+school on Riverside Drive I was fully convinced.  Although I have said
+nothing, I have remained so. Perhaps you think I had no right to any
+such feelings.  Most people would agree with you.  I had them and do
+have them just the same, and it explains my relation to your mother.
+When she came to me once in Louisville and told me of her difficulties
+I was glad to help her for your sake.  That has been my reason ever
+since, although she does not know that.  In some respects, Berenice,
+your mother is a little dull.  All this while I have been in love with
+you--intensely so.  As you stand there now you seem to me amazingly
+beautiful--the ideal I have been telling you about.  Don't be
+disturbed; I sha'n't press any attentions on you." (Berenice had moved
+very slightly.  She was concerned as much for him as for herself.  His
+power was so wide, his power so great.  She could not help taking him
+seriously when he was so serious.) "I have done whatever I have done in
+connection with you and your mother because I have been in love with
+you and because I wanted you to become the splendid thing I thought you
+ought to become.  You have not known it, but you are the cause of my
+building the house on Fifth Avenue--the principal reason.  I wanted to
+build something worthy of you.  A dream? Certainly.  Everything we do
+seems to have something of that quality.  Its beauty, if there is any,
+is due to you.  I made it beautiful thinking of you."
+
+He paused, and Berenice gave no sign.  Her first impulse had been to
+object, but her vanity, her love of art, her love of power--all were
+touched.  At the same time she was curious now as to whether he had
+merely expected to take her as his mistress or to wait until he could
+honor her as his wife.
+
+"I suppose you are wondering whether I ever expected to marry you or
+not," he went on, getting the thought out of her mind.  "I am no
+different from many men in that respect, Berenice.  I will be frank.  I
+wanted you in any way that I could get you.  I was living in the hope
+all along that you would fall in love with me--as I had with you.  I
+hated Braxmar here, not long ago, when he appeared on the scene, but I
+could never have thought of interfering.  I was quite prepared to give
+you up.  I have envied every man I have ever seen with you--young and
+old.  I have even envied your mother for being so close to you when I
+could not be.  At the same time I have wanted you to have everything
+that would help you in any way.  I did not want to interfere with you
+in case you found some one whom you could truly love if I knew that you
+could not love me.  There is the whole story outside of anything you
+may know. But it is not because of this that I came to-day.  Not to
+tell you this."
+
+He paused, as if expecting her to say something, though she made no
+comment beyond a questioning "Yes?"
+
+"The thing that I have come to say is that I want you to go on as you
+were before.  Whatever you may think of me or of what I have just told
+you, I want you to believe that I am sincere and disinterested in what
+I am telling you now.  My dream in connection with you is not quite
+over.  Chance might make me eligible if you should happen to care.  But
+I want you to go on and be happy, regardless of me.  I have dreamed,
+but I dare say it has been a mistake.  Hold your head high--you have a
+right to.  Be a lady. Marry any one you really love.  I will see that
+you have a suitable marriage portion.  I love you, Berenice, but I will
+make it a fatherly affection from now on.  When I die I will put you in
+my will.  But go on now in the spirit you were going before.  I really
+can't be happy unless I think you are going to be."
+
+He paused, still looking at her, believing for the time being what he
+said.  If he should die she would find herself in his will. If she were
+to go on and socialize and seek she might find some one to love, but
+also she might think of him more kindly before she did so.  What would
+be the cost of her as a ward compared to his satisfaction and delight
+in having her at least friendly and sympathetic and being in her good
+graces and confidence?
+
+Berenice, who had always been more or less interested in him,
+temperamentally biased, indeed, in his direction because of his
+efficiency, simplicity, directness, and force, was especially touched
+in this instance by his utter frankness and generosity. She might
+question his temperamental control over his own sincerity in the
+future, but she could scarcely question that at present he was sincere.
+Moreover, his long period of secret love and admiration, the thought of
+so powerful a man dreaming of her in this fashion, was so flattering.
+It soothed her troubled vanity and shame in what had gone before.  His
+straightforward confession had a kind of nobility which was electric,
+moving.  She looked at him as he stood there, a little gray about the
+temples--the most appealing ornament of some men to some women--and for
+the life of her she could not help being moved by a kind of tenderness,
+sympathy, mothering affection.  Obviously he did need the woman his
+attitude seemed to show that he needed, some woman of culture, spirit,
+taste, amorousness; or, at least, he was entitled to dream of her. As
+he stood before her he seemed a kind of superman, and yet also a bad
+boy--handsome, powerful, hopeful, not so very much older than herself
+now, impelled by some blazing internal force which harried him on and
+on.  How much did he really care for her? How much could he? How much
+could he care for any one? Yet see all he had done to interest her.
+What did that mean? To say all this? To do all this? Outside was his
+car brown and radiant in the snow. He was the great Frank Algernon
+Cowperwood, of Chicago, and he was pleading with her, a mere chit of a
+girl, to be kind to him, not to put him out of her life entirely.  It
+touched her intellect, her pride, her fancy.
+
+Aloud she said: "I like you better now.  I really believe in you. I
+never did, quite, before.  Not that I think I ought to let you spend
+your money on me or mother--I don't.  But I admire you.  You make me.
+I understand how it is, I think.  I know what your ambitions are.  I
+have always felt that I did, in part.  But you mustn't talk to me any
+more now.  I want to think.  I want to think over what you have said.
+I don't know whether I can bring myself to it or not." (She noticed
+that his eyes seemed to move somehow in their deepest depths again.)
+"But we won't talk about it any more at present."
+
+"But, Berenice," he added, with a real plea in his voice, "I wonder if
+you do understand.  I have been so lonely--I am--"
+
+"Yes, I do," she replied, holding out her hand.  "We are going to be
+friends, whatever happens, from now on, because I really like you.  You
+mustn't ask me to decide about the other, though, to-day. I can't do
+it.  I don't want to.  I don't care to."
+
+"Not when I would so gladly give you everything--when I need it so
+little?"
+
+"Not until I think it out for myself.  I don't think so, though. No,"
+she replied, with an air.  "There, Mr. Guardian Father," she laughed,
+pushing his hand away.
+
+Cowperwood's heart bounded.  He would have given millions to take her
+close in his arms.  As it was he smiled appealingly.
+
+"Don't you want to jump in and come to New York with me? If your mother
+isn't at the apartment you could stop at the Netherland."
+
+"No, not to-day.  I expect to be in soon.  I will let you know, or
+mother will."
+
+He bustled out and into the machine after a moment of parley, waving to
+her over the purpling snow of the evening as his machine tore eastward,
+planning to make New York by dinner-time.  If he could just keep her in
+this friendly, sympathetic attitude.  If he only could!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LIV
+
+Wanted--Fifty-year Franchises
+
+
+Whatever his momentary satisfaction in her friendly acceptance of his
+confession, the uncertain attitude of Berenice left Cowperwood about
+where he was before.  By a strange stroke of fate Braxmar, his young
+rival, had been eliminated, and Berenice had been made to see him,
+Cowperwood, in his true colors of love and of service for her.  Yet
+plainly she did not accept them at his own valuation. More than ever
+was he conscious of the fact that he had fallen in tow of an amazing
+individual, one who saw life from a distinct and peculiar point of view
+and who was not to be bent to his will. That fact more than anything
+else--for her grace and beauty merely emblazoned it--caused him to fall
+into a hopeless infatuation.
+
+He said to himself over and over, "Well, I can live without her if I
+must," but at this stage the mere thought was an actual stab in his
+vitals.  What, after all, was life, wealth, fame, if you couldn't have
+the woman you wanted--love, that indefinable, unnamable coddling of the
+spirit which the strongest almost more than the weakest crave? At last
+he saw clearly, as within a chalice-like nimbus, that the ultimate end
+of fame, power, vigor was beauty, and that beauty was a compound of the
+taste, the emotion, the innate culture, passion, and dreams of a woman
+like Berenice Fleming.  That was it: that was it.  And beyond was
+nothing save crumbling age, darkness, silence.
+
+In the mean time, owing to the preliminary activity and tact of his
+agents and advisers, the Sunday newspapers were vying with one another
+in describing the wonders of his new house in New York--its cost, the
+value of its ground, the wealthy citizens with whom the Cowperwoods
+would now be neighbors.  There were double-column pictures of Aileen
+and Cowperwood, with articles indicating them as prospective
+entertainers on a grand scale who would unquestionably be received
+because of their tremendous wealth.  As a matter of fact, this was
+purely newspaper gossip and speculation.  While the general columns
+made news and capital of his wealth, special society columns, which
+dealt with the ultra-fashionable, ignored him entirely.  Already the
+machination of certain Chicago social figures in distributing
+information as to his past was discernible in the attitude of those
+clubs, organizations, and even churches, membership in which
+constitutes a form of social passport to better and higher earthly, if
+not spiritual, realms.  His emissaries were active enough, but soon
+found that their end was not to be gained in a day.  Many were waiting
+locally, anxious enough to get in, and with social equipments which the
+Cowperwoods could scarcely boast. After being blackballed by one or two
+exclusive clubs, seeing his application for a pew at St. Thomas's
+quietly pigeon-holed for the present, and his invitations declined by
+several multimillionaires whom he met in the course of commercial
+transactions, he began to feel that his splendid home, aside from its
+final purpose as an art-museum, could be of little value.
+
+At the same time Cowperwood's financial genius was constantly being
+rewarded by many new phases of materiality chiefly by an offensive and
+defensive alliance he was now able to engineer between himself and the
+house of Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb & Co.  Seeing the iron manner in which
+he had managed to wrest victory out of defeat after the first seriously
+contested election, these gentlemen had experienced a change of heart
+and announced that they would now gladly help finance any new
+enterprise which Cowperwood might undertake.  Among many other
+financiers, they had heard of his triumph in connection with the
+failure of American Match.
+
+"Dot must be a right cleffer man, dot Cowperwood," Mr. Gotloeb told
+several of his partners, rubbing his hands and smiling.  "I shouldt
+like to meet him."
+
+And so Cowperwood was manoeuvered into the giant banking office, where
+Mr. Gotloeb extended a genial hand.
+
+"I hear much of Chicawkgo," he explained, in his semi-German,
+semi-Hebraic dialect, "but almozd more uff you.  Are you goink to
+swallow up all de street-railwaiss unt elefated roats out dere?"
+
+Cowperwood smiled his most ingenuous smile.
+
+"Why? Would you like me to leave a few for you?"
+
+"Not dot exzagly, but I might not mint sharink in some uff dem wit you."
+
+"You can join with me at any time, Mr. Gotloeb, as you must know. The
+door is always very, very wide open for you."
+
+"I musd look into dot some more.  It loogs very promising to me. I am
+gladt to meet you."
+
+The great external element in Cowperwood's financial success--and one
+which he himself had foreseen from the very beginning--was the fact
+that Chicago was developing constantly.  What had been when he arrived
+a soggy, messy plain strewn with shanties, ragged sidewalks, a
+higgledy-piggledy business heart, was now truly an astounding
+metropolis which had passed the million mark in population and which
+stretched proud and strong over the greater part of Cook County.  Where
+once had been a meager, makeshift financial section, with here and
+there only a splendid business building or hotel or a public office of
+some kind, there were now canon-like streets lined with fifteen and
+even eighteen story office buildings, from the upper stories of which,
+as from watch-towers, might be surveyed the vast expanding regions of
+simple home life below.  Farther out were districts of mansions, parks,
+pleasure resorts, great worlds of train-yards and manufacturing areas.
+In the commercial heart of this world Frank Algernon Cowperwood had
+truly become a figure of giant significance.  How wonderful it is that
+men grow until, like colossi, they bestride the world, or, like
+banyan-trees, they drop roots from every branch and are themselves a
+forest--a forest of intricate commercial life, of which a thousand
+material aspects are the evidence.  His street-railway properties were
+like a net--the parasite Gold Thread--linked together as they were, and
+draining two of the three important "sides" of the city.
+
+In 1886, when he had first secured a foothold, they had been
+capitalized at between six and seven millions (every device for issuing
+a dollar on real property having been exhausted).  To-day, under his
+management, they were capitalized at between sixty and seventy
+millions.  The majority of the stock issued and sold was subject to a
+financial device whereby twenty per cent. controlled eighty per cent.,
+Cowperwood holding that twenty per cent. and borrowing money on it as
+hypothecated collateral.  In the case of the West Side corporation, a
+corporate issue of over thirty millions had been made, and these
+stocks, owing to the tremendous carrying power of the roads and the
+swelling traffic night and morning of poor sheep who paid their
+hard-earned nickels, had a market value which gave the road an assured
+physical value of about three times the sum for which it could have
+been built.  The North Chicago company, which in 1886 had a physical
+value of little more than a million, could not now be duplicated for
+less than seven millions, and was capitalized at nearly fifteen
+millions.  The road was valued at over one hundred thousand dollars
+more per mile than the sum for which it could actually have been
+replaced.  Pity the poor groveling hack at the bottom who has not the
+brain-power either to understand or to control that which his very
+presence and necessities create.
+
+These tremendous holdings, paying from ten to twelve per cent. on every
+hundred-dollar share, were in the control, if not in the actual
+ownership, of Cowperwood.  Millions in loans that did not appear on the
+books of the companies he had converted into actual cash, wherewith he
+had bought houses, lands, equipages, paintings, government bonds of the
+purest gold value, thereby assuring himself to that extent of a fortune
+vaulted and locked, absolutely secure. After much toiling and moiling
+on the part of his overworked legal department he had secured a
+consolidation, under the title of the Consolidated Traction Company of
+Illinois, of all outlying lines, each having separate franchises and
+capitalized separately, yet operated by an amazing hocus-pocus of
+contracts and agreements in single, harmonious union with all his other
+properties.  The North and West Chicago companies he now proposed to
+unite into a third company to be called the Union Traction Company.  By
+taking up the ten and twelve per cent. issues of the old North and West
+companies and giving two for one of the new six-per-cent
+one-hundred-dollar-share Union Traction stocks in their stead, he could
+satisfy the current stockholders, who were apparently made somewhat
+better off thereby, and still create and leave for himself a handsome
+margin of nearly eighty million dollars.  With a renewal of his
+franchises for twenty, fifty, or one hundred years he would have
+fastened on the city of Chicago the burden of yielding interest on this
+somewhat fictitious value and would leave himself personally worth in
+the neighborhood of one hundred millions.
+
+This matter of extending his franchises was a most difficult and
+intricate business, however.  It involved overcoming or outwitting a
+recent and very treacherous increase of local sentiment against him.
+This had been occasioned by various details which related to his
+elevated roads.  To the two lines already built he now added a third
+property, the Union Loop.  This he prepared to connect not only with
+his own, but with other outside elevated properties, chief among which
+was Mr. Schryhart's South Side "L." He would then farm out to his
+enemies the privilege of running trains on this new line.  However
+unwillingly, they would be forced to avail themselves of the proffered
+opportunity, because within the region covered by the new loop was the
+true congestion--here every one desired to come either once or twice
+during the day or night.  By this means Cowperwood would secure to his
+property a paying interest from the start.
+
+This scheme aroused a really unprecedented antagonism in the breasts of
+Cowperwood's enemies.  By the Arneel-Hand-Schryhart contingent it was
+looked upon as nothing short of diabolical.  The newspapers, directed
+by such men as Haguenin, Hyssop, Ormonde Ricketts, and Truman Leslie
+MacDonald (whose father was now dead, and whose thoughts as editor of
+the Inquirer were almost solely directed toward driving Cowperwood out
+of Chicago), began to shout, as a last resort, in the interests of
+democracy.  Seats for everybody (on Cowperwood's lines), no more straps
+in the rush hours, three-cent fares for workingmen, morning and
+evening, free transfers from all of Cowperwood's lines north to west
+and west to north, twenty per cent. of the gross income of his lines to
+be paid to the city. The masses should be made cognizant of their
+individual rights and privileges.  Such a course, while decidedly
+inimical to Cowperwood's interests at the present time, and as such
+strongly favored by the majority of his opponents, had nevertheless its
+disturbing elements to an ultra-conservative like Hosmer Hand.
+
+"I don't know about this, Norman," he remarked to Schryhart, on one
+occasion.  "I don't know about this.  It's one thing to stir up the
+public, but it's another to make them forget.  This is a restless,
+socialistic country, and Chicago is the very hotbed and center of it.
+Still, if it will serve to trip him up I suppose it will do for the
+present.  The newspapers can probably smooth it all over later.  But I
+don't know."
+
+Mr. Hand was of that order of mind that sees socialism as a horrible
+importation of monarchy-ridden Europe.  Why couldn't the people be
+satisfied to allow the strong, intelligent, God-fearing men of the
+community to arrange things for them? Wasn't that what democracy meant?
+Certainly it was--he himself was one of the strong.  He could not help
+distrusting all this radical palaver.  Still, anything to hurt
+Cowperwood--anything.
+
+Cowperwood was not slow to realize that public sentiment was now in
+danger of being thoroughly crystallized against him by newspaper
+agitation.  Although his franchises would not expire--the large
+majority of them--before January 1, 1903, yet if things went on at this
+rate it would be doubtful soon whether ever again he would be able to
+win another election by methods legitimate or illegitimate. Hungry
+aldermen and councilmen might be venal and greedy enough to do anything
+he should ask, provided he was willing to pay enough, but even the
+thickest-hided, the most voracious and corrupt politician could
+scarcely withstand the searching glare of publicity and the infuriated
+rage of a possibly aroused public opinion.  By degrees this last, owing
+to the untiring efforts of the newspapers, was being whipped into a
+wild foam.  To come into council at this time and ask for a twenty-year
+extension of franchises not destined to expire for seven years was too
+much.  It could not be done. Even suborned councilmen would be
+unwilling to undertake it just now.  There are some things which even
+politically are impossible.
+
+To make matters worse, the twenty-year-franchise limit was really not
+at all sufficient for his present needs.  In order to bring about the
+consolidation of his North and West surface lines, which he was now
+proposing and on the strength of which he wished to issue at least two
+hundred million dollars' worth of one-hundred-dollar-six-per-cent.
+shares in place of the seventy million dollars current of ten and
+twelve per cents., it was necessary for him to secure a much more
+respectable term of years than the brief one now permitted by the state
+legislature, even providing that this latter could be obtained.
+
+"Peeble are not ferry much indrested in tees short-time frangizes,"
+observed Mr. Gotloeb once, when Cowperwood was talking the matter over
+with him.  He wanted Haeckelheimer & Co. to underwrite the whole issue.
+"Dey are so insigure.  Now if you couldt get, say, a frangize for fifty
+or one hunnert years or something like dot your stocks wouldt go off
+like hot cakes.  I know where I couldt dispose of fifty million dollars
+off dem in Cermany alone."
+
+He was most unctuous and pleading.
+
+Cowperwood understood this quite as well as Gotloeb, if not better. He
+was not at all satisfied with the thought of obtaining a beggarly
+twenty-year extension for his giant schemes when cities like
+Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Pittsburg were apparently glad to
+grant their corporations franchises which would not expire for
+ninety-nine years at the earliest, and in most cases were given in
+perpetuity.  This was the kind of franchise favored by the great
+moneyed houses of New York and Europe, and which Gotloeb, and even
+Addison, locally, were demanding.
+
+"It is certainly important that we get these franchises renewed for
+fifty years," Addison used to say to him, and it was seriously and
+disagreeably true.
+
+The various lights of Cowperwood's legal department, constantly on the
+search for new legislative devices, were not slow to grasp the import
+of the situation.  It was not long before the resourceful Mr. Joel
+Avery appeared with a suggestion.
+
+"Did you notice what the state legislature of New York is doing in
+connection with the various local transit problems down there?" asked
+this honorable gentleman of Cowperwood, one morning, ambling in when
+announced and seating himself in the great presence.  A half-burned
+cigar was between his fingers, and a little round felt hat looked
+peculiarly rakish above his sinister, intellectual, constructive face
+and eyes.
+
+"No, I didn't," replied Cowperwood, who had actually noted and pondered
+upon the item in question, but who did not care to say so.  "I saw
+something about it, but I didn't pay much attention to it.  What of it?"
+
+"Well, it plans to authorize a body of four or five men--one branch in
+New York, one in Buffalo, I presume--to grant all new franchises and
+extend old ones with the consent of the various local communities
+involved.  They are to fix the rate of compensation to be paid to the
+state or the city, and the rates of fare.  They can regulate transfers,
+stock issues, and all that sort of thing.  I was thinking if at any
+time we find this business of renewing the franchises too uncertain
+here we might go into the state legislature and see what can be done
+about introducing a public-service commission of that kind into this
+state.  We are not the only corporation that would welcome it.  Of
+course, it would be better if there were a general or special demand
+for it outside of ourselves.  It ought not to originate with us."
+
+He stared at Cowperwood heavily, the latter returning a reflective gaze.
+
+"I'll think it over," he said.  "There may be something in that."
+
+Henceforth the thought of instituting such a commission never left
+Cowperwood's mind.  It contained the germ of a solution--the
+possibility of extending his franchises for fifty or even a hundred
+years.
+
+This plan, as Cowperwood was subsequently to discover, was a thing more
+or less expressly forbidden by the state constitution of Illinois.  The
+latter provided that no special or exclusive privilege, immunity, or
+franchise whatsoever should be granted to any corporation, association,
+or individual.  Yet, "What is a little matter like the constitution
+between friends, anyhow?" some one had already asked.  There are fads
+in legislation as well as dusty pigeonholes in which phases of older
+law are tucked away and forgotten.  Many earlier ideals of the
+constitution-makers had long since been conveniently obscured or
+nullified by decisions, appeals to the federal government, appeals to
+the state government, communal contracts, and the like--fine cobwebby
+figments, all, but sufficient, just the same, to render inoperative the
+original intention.  Besides, Cowperwood had but small respect for
+either the intelligence or the self-protective capacity of such men as
+constituted the rural voting element of the state.  From his lawyers
+and from others he had heard innumerable droll stories of life in the
+state legislature, and the state counties and towns--on the bench, at
+the rural huskings where the state elections were won, in country
+hotels, on country roads and farms.  "One day as I was getting on the
+train at Petunkey," old General Van Sickle, or Judge Dickensheets, or
+ex-Judge Avery would begin--and then would follow some amazing
+narration of rural immorality or dullness, or political or social
+misconception.  Of the total population of the state at this time over
+half were in the city itself, and these he had managed to keep in
+control.  For the remaining million, divided between twelve small
+cities and an agricultural population, he had small respect.  What did
+this handful of yokels amount to, anyhow?--dull, frivoling,
+barn-dancing boors.
+
+The great state of Illinois--a territory as large as England proper and
+as fertile as Egypt, bordered by a great lake and a vast river, and
+with a population of over two million free-born Americans--would
+scarcely seem a fit subject for corporate manipulation and control.
+Yet a more trade-ridden commonwealth might not have been found anywhere
+at this time within the entire length and breadth of the universe.
+Cowperwood personally, though contemptuous of the bucolic mass when
+regarded as individuals, had always been impressed by this great
+community of his election.  Here had come Marquette and Joliet, La
+Salle and Hennepin, dreaming a way to the Pacific.  Here Lincoln and
+Douglas, antagonist and protagonist of slavery argument, had contested;
+here had arisen "Joe" Smith, propagator of that strange American dogma
+of the Latter-Day Saints. What a state, Cowperwood sometimes thought;
+what a figment of the brain, and yet how wonderful! He had crossed it
+often on his way to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Denver, and had been
+touched by its very simplicity--the small, new wooden towns, so
+redolent of American tradition, prejudice, force, and illusion.  The
+white-steepled church, the lawn-faced, tree-shaded village streets, the
+long stretches of flat, open country where corn grew in serried rows or
+where in winter the snow bedded lightly--it all reminded him a little
+of his own father and mother, who had been in many respects suited to
+such a world as this.  Yet none the less did he hesitate to press on
+the measure which was to adjust his own future, to make profitable his
+issue of two hundred million dollars' worth of Union Traction, to
+secure him a fixed place in the financial oligarchy of America and of
+the world.
+
+The state legislature at this time was ruled over by a small group of
+wire-pulling, pettifogging, corporation-controlled individuals who came
+up from the respective towns, counties, and cities of the state, but
+who bore the same relation to the communities which they represented
+and to their superiors and equals in and out of the legislative halls
+at Springfield that men do to such allies anywhere in any given field.
+Why do we call them pettifogging and dismiss them? Perhaps they were
+pettifogging, but certainly no more so than any other shrewd rat or
+animal that burrows its way onward--and shall we say upward? The
+deepest controlling principle which animated these individuals was the
+oldest and first, that of self-preservation.  Picture, for example, a
+common occurrence--that of Senator John H. Southack, conversing with,
+perhaps, Senator George Mason Wade, of Gallatin County, behind a
+legislative door in one of the senate conference chambers toward the
+close of a session--Senator Southack, blinking, buttonholing his
+well-dressed colleague and drawing very near; Senator Wade, curious,
+confidential, expectant (a genial, solid, experienced, slightly paunchy
+but well-built Senator Wade--and handsome, too).
+
+"You know, George, I told you there would be something eventually in
+the Quincy water-front improvement if it ever worked out.  Well, here
+it is.  Ed Truesdale was in town yesterday." (This with a knowing eye,
+as much as to say, "Mum's the word.") "Here's five hundred; count it."
+
+A quick flashing out of some green and yellow bills from a vest pocket,
+a light thumbing and counting on the part of Senator Wade. A flare of
+comprehension, approval, gratitude, admiration, as though to signify,
+"This is something like." "Thanks, John.  I had pretty near forgot all
+about it.  Nice people, eh? If you see Ed again give him my regards.
+When that Bellville contest comes up let me know."
+
+Mr. Wade, being a good speaker, was frequently in request to stir up
+the populace to a sense of pro or con in connection with some
+legislative crisis impending, and it was to some such future
+opportunity that he now pleasantly referred.  O life, O politics, O
+necessity, O hunger, O burning human appetite and desire on every hand!
+
+Mr. Southack was an unobtrusive, pleasant, quiet man of the type that
+would usually be patronized as rural and pettifogging by men high in
+commercial affairs.  He was none the less well fitted to his task, a
+capable and diligent beneficiary and agent.  He was well dressed,
+middle-aged,--only forty-five--cool, courageous, genial, with eyes that
+were material, but not cold or hard, and a light, springy, energetic
+step and manner.  A holder of some C. W. & I. R.R. shares, a director
+of one of his local county banks, a silent partner in the Effingham
+Herald, he was a personage in his district, one much revered by local
+swains.  Yet a more game and rascally type was not to be found in all
+rural legislation.
+
+It was old General Van Sickle who sought out Southack, having
+remembered him from his earlier legislative days.  It was Avery who
+conducted the negotiations.  Primarily, in all state scheming at
+Springfield, Senator Southack was supposed to represent the C. W. I.,
+one of the great trunk-lines traversing the state, and incidentally
+connecting Chicago with the South, West, and East. This road, having a
+large local mileage and being anxious to extend its franchises in
+Chicago and elsewhere, was deep in state politics. By a curious
+coincidence it was mainly financed by Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb & Co., of
+New York, though Cowperwood's connection with that concern was not as
+yet known.  Going to Southack, who was the Republican whip in the
+senate, Avery proposed that he, in conjunction with Judge Dickensheets
+and one Gilson Bickel, counsel for the C. W. I., should now undertake
+to secure sufficient support in the state senate and house for a scheme
+introducing the New York idea of a public-service commission into the
+governing machinery of the state of Illinois.  This measure, be it
+noted, was to be supplemented by one very interesting and important
+little proviso to the effect that all franchise-holding corporations
+should hereby, for a period of fifty years from the date of the
+enactment of the bill into law, be assured of all their rights,
+privileges, and immunities--including franchises, of course.  This was
+justified on the ground that any such radical change as that involved
+in the introduction of a public-service commission might disturb the
+peace and well-being of corporations with franchises which still had
+years to run.
+
+Senator Southack saw nothing very wrong with this idea, though he
+naturally perceived what it was all about and whom it was truly
+designed to protect.
+
+"Yes," he said, succinctly, "I see the lay of that land, but what do I
+get out of it?"
+
+"Fifty thousand dollars for yourself if it's successful, ten thousand
+if it isn't--provided you make an honest effort; two thousand dollars
+apiece for any of the boys who see fit to help you if we win.  Is that
+perfectly satisfactory?"
+
+"Perfectly," replied Senator Southack.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LV
+
+Cowperwood and the Governor
+
+
+A Public-service-commission law might, ipso facto, have been quietly
+passed at this session, if the arbitrary franchise-extending proviso
+had not been introduced, and this on the thin excuse that so novel a
+change in the working scheme of the state government might bring about
+hardship to some.  This redounded too obviously to the benefit of one
+particular corporation.  The newspaper men--as thick as flies about the
+halls of the state capitol at Springfield, and essentially watchful and
+loyal to their papers--were quick to sense the true state of affairs.
+Never were there such hawks as newspapermen.  These wretches (employed
+by sniveling, mud-snouting newspapers of the opposition) were not only
+in the councils of politicians, in the pay of rival corporations, in
+the confidence of the governor, in the secrets of the senators and
+local representatives, but were here and there in one another's
+confidence. A piece of news--a rumor, a dream, a fancy--whispered by
+Senator Smith to Senator Jones, or by Representative Smith to
+Representative Jones, and confided by him in turn to Charlie White, of
+the Globe, or Eddie Burns, of the Democrat, would in turn be
+communicated to Robert Hazlitt, of the Press, or Harry Emonds, of the
+Transcript.
+
+All at once a disturbing announcement in one or other of the papers, no
+one knowing whence it came.  Neither Senator Smith nor Senator Jones
+had told any one.  No word of the confidence imposed in Charlie White
+or Eddie Burns had ever been breathed.  But there you were--the thing
+was in the papers, the storm of inquiry, opinion, opposition was on.
+No one knew, no one was to blame, but it was on, and the battle had
+henceforth to be fought in the open.
+
+Consider also the governor who presided at this time in the executive
+chamber at Springfield.  He was a strange, tall, dark, osseous man who,
+owing to the brooding, melancholy character of his own disposition, had
+a checkered and a somewhat sad career behind him. Born in Sweden, he
+had been brought to America as a child, and allowed or compelled to
+fight his own way upward under all the grinding aspects of poverty.
+Owing to an energetic and indomitable temperament, he had through years
+of law practice and public labors of various kinds built up for himself
+a following among Chicago Swedes which amounted to adoration.  He had
+been city tax-collector, city surveyor, district attorney, and for six
+or eight years a state circuit judge.  In all these capacities he had
+manifested a tendency to do the right as he saw it and play
+fair--qualities which endeared him to the idealistic.  Honest, and with
+a hopeless brooding sympathy for the miseries of the poor, he had as
+circuit judge, and also as district attorney, rendered various
+decisions which had made him very unpopular with the rich and
+powerful--decisions in damage cases, fraud cases, railroad claim cases,
+where the city or the state was seeking to oust various powerful
+railway corporations from possession of property--yards,
+water-frontages, and the like, to which they had no just claim. At the
+same time the populace, reading the news items of his doings and
+hearing him speak on various and sundry occasions, conceived a great
+fancy for him.  He was primarily soft-hearted, sweet-minded, fiery, a
+brilliant orator, a dynamic presence.  In addition he was
+woman-hungry--a phase which homely, sex-starved intellectuals the world
+over will understand, to the shame of a lying age, that because of
+quixotic dogma belies its greatest desire, its greatest sorrow, its
+greatest joy.  All these factors turned an ultra-conservative element
+in the community against him, and he was considered dangerous.  At the
+same time he had by careful economy and investment built up a fair
+sized fortune.  Recently, however, owing to the craze for sky-scrapers,
+he had placed much of his holdings in a somewhat poorly constructed and
+therefore unprofitable office building.  Because of this error
+financial wreck was threatening him.  Even now he was knocking at the
+doors of large bonding companies for assistance.
+
+This man, in company with the antagonistic financial element and the
+newspapers, constituted, as regards Cowperwood's
+public-service-commission scheme, a triumvirate of difficulties not
+easy to overcome.  The newspapers, in due time, catching wind of the
+true purport of the plan, ran screaming to their readers with the
+horrible intelligence.  In the offices of Schryhart, Arneel, Hand, and
+Merrill, as well as in other centers of finance, there was considerable
+puzzling over the situation, and then a shrewd, intelligent deduction
+was made.
+
+"Do you see what he's up to, Hosmer?" inquired Schryhart of Hand. "He
+sees that we have him scotched here in Chicago.  As things stand now he
+can't go into the city council and ask for a franchise for more than
+twenty years under the state law, and he can't do that for three or
+four years yet, anyhow.  His franchises don't expire soon enough.  He
+knows that by the time they do expire we will have public sentiment
+aroused to such a point that no council, however crooked it may be,
+will dare to give him what he asks unless he is willing to make a heavy
+return to the city.  If he does that it will end his scheme of selling
+any two hundred million dollars of Union Traction at six per cent.  The
+market won't back him up.  He can't pay twenty per cent. to the city
+and give universal transfers and pay six per cent. on two hundred
+million dollars, and everybody knows it.  He has a fine scheme of
+making a cool hundred million out of this.  Well, he can't do it.  We
+must get the newspapers to hammer this legislative scheme of his to
+death.  When he comes into the local council he must pay twenty or
+thirty per cent. of the gross receipts of his roads to the city. He
+must give free transfers from every one of his lines to every other
+one.  Then we have him.  I dislike to see socialistic ideas fostered,
+but it can't be helped.  We have to do it.  If we ever get him out of
+here we can hush up the newspapers, and the public will forget about
+it; at least we can hope so."
+
+In the mean time the governor had heard the whisper of "boodle"--a word
+of the day expressive of a corrupt legislative fund.  Not at all a
+small-minded man, nor involved in the financial campaign being waged
+against Cowperwood, nor inclined to be influenced mentally or
+emotionally by superheated charges against the latter, he nevertheless
+speculated deeply.  In a vague way he sensed the dreams of Cowperwood.
+The charge of seducing women so frequently made against the
+street-railway magnate, so shocking to the yoked conventionalists, did
+not disturb him at all.  Back of the onward sweep of the generations he
+himself sensed the mystic Aphrodite and her magic.  He realized that
+Cowperwood had traveled fast--that he was pressing to the utmost a
+great advantage in the face of great obstacles.  At the same time he
+knew that the present street-car service of Chicago was by no means
+bad.  Would he be proving unfaithful to the trust imposed on him by the
+great electorate of Illinois if he were to advantage Cowperwood's
+cause? Must he not rather in the sight of all men smoke out the
+animating causes here--greed, over-weening ambition, colossal
+self-interest as opposed to the selflessness of a Christian ideal and
+of a democratic theory of government?
+
+Life rises to a high plane of the dramatic, and hence of the artistic,
+whenever and wherever in the conflict regarding material possession
+there enters a conception of the ideal.  It was this that lit forever
+the beacon fires of Troy, that thundered eternally in the horses' hoofs
+at Arbela and in the guns at Waterloo.  Ideals were here at stake--the
+dreams of one man as opposed perhaps to the ultimate dreams of a city
+or state or nation--the grovelings and wallowings of a democracy
+slowly, blindly trying to stagger to its feet.  In this
+conflict--taking place in an inland cottage-dotted state where men were
+clowns and churls, dancing fiddlers at country fairs--were opposed, as
+the governor saw it, the ideals of one man and the ideals of men.
+
+Governor Swanson decided after mature deliberation to veto the bill.
+Cowperwood, debonair as ever, faithful as ever to his logic and his
+conception of individuality, was determined that no stone should be
+left unturned that would permit him to triumph, that would carry him
+finally to the gorgeous throne of his own construction. Having first
+engineered the matter through the legislature by a tortuous process,
+fired upon at every step by the press, he next sent various
+individuals--state legislators, representatives of the C. W. & I.,
+members of outside corporations to see the governor, but Swanson was
+adamant.  He did not see how he could conscientiously sanction the
+bill.  Finally, one day, as he was seated in his Chicago business
+office--a fateful chamber located in the troublesome building which was
+subsequently to wreck his fortune and which was the raison d'etre of a
+present period of care and depression--enter the smug, comfortable
+presence of Judge Nahum Dickensheets, at present senior counsel of the
+North Chicago Street Railway.  He was a very mountain of a man
+physically--smooth-faced, agreeably clothed, hard and yet ingratiating
+of eye, a thinker, a reasoner. Swanson knew much of him by reputation
+and otherwise, although personally they were no more than speaking
+acquaintances.
+
+"How are you, Governor? I'm glad to see you again.  I heard you were
+back in Chicago.  I see by the morning papers that you have that
+Southack public-service bill up before you.  I thought I would come
+over and have a few words with you about it if you have no objection.
+I've been trying to get down to Springfield for the last three weeks to
+have a little chat with you before you reached a conclusion one way or
+the other.  Do you mind if I inquire whether you have decided to veto
+it?"
+
+The ex-judge, faintly perfumed, clean and agreeable, carried in his
+hand a large-sized black hand-satchel which he put down beside him on
+the floor.
+
+"Yes, Judge," replied Swanson, "I've practically decided to veto it.  I
+can see no practical reason for supporting it.  As I look at it now,
+it's specious and special, not particularly called for or necessary at
+this time."
+
+The governor talked with a slight Swedish accent, intellectual,
+individual.
+
+A long, placid, philosophic discussion of all the pros and cons of the
+situation followed.  The governor was tired, distrait, but ready to
+listen in a tolerant way to more argument along a line with which he
+was already fully familiar.  He knew, of course, that Dickensheets was
+counsel for the North Chicago Street Railway Company.
+
+"I'm very glad to have heard what you have to say, Judge," finally
+commented the governor.  I don't want you to think I haven't given this
+matter serious thought--I have.  I know most of the things that have
+been done down at Springfield.  Mr. Cowperwood is an able man; I don't
+charge any more against him than I do against twenty other agencies
+that are operating down there at this very moment.  I know what his
+difficulties are.  I can hardly be accused of sympathizing with his
+enemies, for they certainly do not sympathize with me.  I am not even
+listening to the newspapers. This is a matter of faith in democracy--a
+difference in ideals between myself and many other men.  I haven't
+vetoed the bill yet. I don't say that something may not arise to make
+me sign it.  My present intention, unless I hear something much more
+favorable in its behalf than I have already heard, is to veto it.
+
+"Governor," said Dickensheets, rising, "let me thank you for your
+courtesy.  I would be the last person in the world to wish to influence
+you outside the line of your private convictions and your personal
+sense of fair play.  At the same time I have tried to make plain to you
+how essential it is, how only fair and right, that this local
+street-railway-franchise business should be removed out of the realm of
+sentiment, emotion, public passion, envy, buncombe, and all the other
+influences that are at work to frustrate and make difficult the work of
+Mr. Cowperwood.  All envy, I tell you.  His enemies are willing to
+sacrifice every principle of justice and fair play to see him
+eliminated.  That sums it up.
+
+"That may all be true," replied Swanson.  "Just the same, there is
+another principle involved here which you do not seem to see or do not
+care to consider--the right of the people under the state constitution
+to a consideration, a revaluation, of their contracts at the time and
+in the manner agreed upon under the original franchise.  What you
+propose is sumptuary legislation; it makes null and void an agreement
+between the people and the street-railway companies at a time when the
+people have a right to expect a full and free consideration of this
+matter aside from state legislative influence and control.  To persuade
+the state legislature, by influence or by any other means, to step in
+at this time and interfere is unfair.  The propositions involved in
+those bills should be referred to the people at the next election for
+approval or not, just as they see fit.  That is the way this matter
+should be arranged.  It will not do to come into the legislature and
+influence or buy votes, and then expect me to write my signature under
+the whole matter as satisfactory."
+
+Swanson was not heated or antipathetic.  He was cool, firm,
+well-intentioned.
+
+Dickensheets passed his hand over a wide, high temple.  He seemed to be
+meditating something--some hitherto untried statement or course of
+action.
+
+"Well, Governor," he repeated, "I want to thank you, anyhow.  You have
+been exceedingly kind.  By the way, I see you have a large, roomy safe
+here." He had picked up the bag he was carrying.  "I wonder if I might
+leave this here for a day or two in your care? It contains some papers
+that I do not wish to carry into the country with me.  Would you mind
+locking it up in your safe and letting me have it when I send for it?"
+
+"With pleasure," replied the governor.
+
+He took it, placed it in lower storage space, and closed and locked the
+door.  The two men parted with a genial hand-shake.  The governor
+returned to his meditations, the judge hurried to catch a car.
+
+About eleven o'clock the next morning Swanson was still working in his
+office, worrying greatly over some method whereby he could raise one
+hundred thousand dollars to defray interest charges, repairs, and other
+payments, on a structure that was by no means meeting expenses and was
+hence a drain.  At this juncture his office door opened, and his very
+youthful office-boy presented him the card of F. A. Cowperwood.  The
+governor had never seen him before.  Cowperwood entered brisk, fresh,
+forceful.  He was as crisp as a new dollar bill--as clean, sharp,
+firmly limned.
+
+"Governor Swanson, I believe?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+The two were scrutinizing each other defensively.
+
+"I am Mr. Cowperwood.  I come to have a very few words with you. I will
+take very little of your time.  I do not wish to go over any of the
+arguments that have been gone over before.  I am satisfied that you
+know all about them."
+
+"Yes, I had a talk with Judge Dickensheets yesterday."
+
+"Just so, Governor.  Knowing all that you do, permit me to put one more
+matter before you.  I know that you are, comparatively, a poor
+man--that every dollar you have is at present practically tied in this
+building.  I know of two places where you have applied for a loan of
+one hundred thousand dollars and have been refused because you haven't
+sufficient security to offer outside of this building, which is
+mortgaged up to its limit as it stands.  The men, as you must know, who
+are fighting you are fighting me.  I am a scoundrel because I am
+selfish and ambitious--a materialist. You are not a scoundrel, but a
+dangerous person because you are an idealist.  Whether you veto this
+bill or not, you will never again be elected Governor of Illinois if
+the people who are fighting me succeed, as they will succeed, in
+fighting you."
+
+Swanson's dark eyes burned illuminatively.  He nodded his head in
+assent.
+
+"Governor, I have come here this morning to bribe you, if I can. I do
+not agree with your ideals; in the last analysis I do not believe that
+they will work.  I am sure I do not believe in most of the things that
+you believe in.  Life is different at bottom perhaps from what either
+you or I may think.  Just the same, as compared with other men, I
+sympathize with you.  I will loan you that one hundred thousand dollars
+and two or three or four hundred thousand dollars more besides if you
+wish.  You need never pay me a dollar--or you can if you wish.  Suit
+yourself.  In that black bag which Judge Dickensheets brought here
+yesterday, and which is in your safe, is three hundred thousand dollars
+in cash.  He did not have the courage to mention it.  Sign the bill and
+let me beat the men who are trying to beat me.  I will support you in
+the future with any amount of money or influence that I can bring to
+bear in any political contest you may choose to enter, state or
+national."
+
+Cowperwood's eyes glowed like a large, genial collie's.  There was a
+suggestion of sympathetic appeal in them, rich and deep, and, even more
+than that, a philosophic perception of ineffable things. Swanson arose.
+"You really don't mean to say that you are trying to bribe me openly,
+do you?" he inquired.  In spite of a conventional impulse to burst
+forth in moralistic denunciation, solemnly phrased, he was compelled
+for the moment to see the other man's viewpoint. They were working in
+different directions, going different ways, to what ultimate end?
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood," continued the governor, his face a physiognomy out of
+Goya, his eye alight with a kind of understanding sympathy, "I suppose
+I ought to resent this, but I can't.  I see your point of view.  I'm
+sorry, but I can't help you nor myself.  My political belief, my
+ideals, compel me to veto this bill; when I forsake these I am done
+politically with myself.  I may not be elected governor again, but that
+does not matter, either.  I could use your money, but I won't.  I shall
+have to bid you good morning."
+
+He moved toward the safe, slowly, opened it, took out the bag and
+brought it over.
+
+"You must take that with you," he added.
+
+The two men looked at each other a moment curiously, sadly--the one
+with a burden of financial, political, and moral worry on his spirit,
+the other with an unconquerable determination not to be worsted even in
+defeat.
+
+"Governor," concluded Cowperwood, in the most genial, contented,
+undisturbed voice, "you will live to see another legislature pass and
+another governor sign some such bill.  It will not be done this
+session, apparently, but it will be done.  I am not through, because my
+case is right and fair.  Just the same, after you have vetoed the bill,
+come and see me, and I will loan you that one hundred thousand if you
+want it."
+
+Cowperwood went out.  Swanson vetoed the bill.  It is on record that
+subsequently he borrowed one hundred thousand dollars from Cowperwood
+to stay him from ruin.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LVI
+
+The Ordeal of Berenice
+
+
+At the news that Swanson had refused to sign the bill and that the
+legislature lacked sufficient courage to pass it over his veto both
+Schryhart and Hand literally rubbed their hands in comfortable
+satisfaction.
+
+"Well, Hosmer," said Schryhart the next day, when they met at their
+favorite club--the Union League--"it looks as though we were making
+some little progress, after all, doesn't it? Our friend didn't succeed
+in turning that little trick, did he?"
+
+He beamed almost ecstatically upon his solid companion.
+
+"Not this time.  I wonder what move he will decide to make next."
+
+"I don't see very well what it can be.  He knows now that he can't get
+his franchises without a compromise that will eat into his profits, and
+if that happens he can't sell his Union Traction stock.  This
+legislative scheme of his must have cost him all of three hundred
+thousand dollars, and what has he to show for it? The new legislature,
+unless I'm greatly mistaken, will be afraid to touch anything in
+connection with him.  It's hardly likely that any of the Springfield
+politicians will want to draw the fire of the newspapers again."
+
+Schryhart felt very powerful, imposing--sleek, indeed--now that his
+theory of newspaper publicity as a cure was apparently beginning to
+work.  Hand, more saturnine, more responsive to the uncertainty of
+things mundane--the shifty undercurrents that are perpetually sapping
+and mining below--was agreeable, but not sure.  Perhaps so.
+
+In regard to his Eastern life during this interlude, Cowperwood had
+been becoming more and more keenly alive to the futility of the attempt
+to effect a social rescue for Aileen.  "What was the use?" he often
+asked himself, as he contemplated her movements, thoughts, plans, as
+contrasted with the natural efficiency, taste, grace, and subtlety of a
+woman like Berenice.  He felt that the latter could, if she would,
+smooth over in an adroit way all the silly social antagonisms which
+were now afflicting him.  It was a woman's game, he frequently told
+himself, and would never be adjusted till he had the woman.
+
+Simultaneously Aileen, looking at the situation from her own point of
+view and nonplussed by the ineffectiveness of mere wealth when not
+combined with a certain social something which she did not appear to
+have, was, nevertheless, unwilling to surrender her dream.  What was
+it, she asked herself over and over, that made this great difference
+between women and women? The question contained its own answer, but she
+did not know that.  She was still good-looking--very--and an adept in
+self-ornamentation, after her manner and taste.  So great had been the
+newspaper palaver regarding the arrival of a new multimillionaire from
+the West and the palace he was erecting that even tradesmen, clerks,
+and hall-boys knew of her.  Almost invariably, when called upon to
+state her name in such quarters, she was greeted by a slight start of
+recognition, a swift glance of examination, whispers, even open
+comment.  That was something.  Yet how much more, and how different
+were those rarefied reaches of social supremacy to which popular repute
+bears scarcely any relationship at all.  How different, indeed? From
+what Cowperwood had said in Chicago she had fancied that when they took
+up their formal abode in New York he would make an attempt to
+straighten out his life somewhat, to modify the number of his
+indifferent amours and to present an illusion of solidarity and unity.
+Yet, now that they had actually arrived, she noticed that he was more
+concerned with his heightened political and financial complications in
+Illinois and with his art-collection than he was with what might happen
+to be going on in the new home or what could be made to happen there.
+As in the days of old, she was constantly puzzled by his persistent
+evenings out and his sudden appearances and disappearances.  Yet,
+determine as she might, rage secretly or openly as she would, she could
+not cure herself of the infection of Cowperwood, the lure that
+surrounded and substantiated a mind and spirit far greater than any
+other she had ever known.  Neither honor, virtue, consistent charity,
+nor sympathy was there, but only a gay, foamy, unterrified sufficiency
+and a creative, constructive sense of beauty that, like sunlit spray,
+glowing with all the irradiative glories of the morning, danced and
+fled, spun driftwise over a heavy sea of circumstance.  Life, however
+dark and somber, could never apparently cloud his soul.  Brooding and
+idling in the wonder palace of his construction, Aileen could see what
+he was like.  The silver fountain in the court of orchids, the
+peach-like glow of the pink marble chamber, with its birds and flowers,
+the serried brilliance of his amazing art-collections were all like
+him, were really the color of his soul.  To think that after all she
+was not the one to bind him to subjection, to hold him by golden yet
+steely threads of fancy to the hem of her garment! To think that he
+should no longer walk, a slave of his desire, behind the chariot of her
+spiritual and physical superiority. Yet she could not give up.
+
+By this time Cowperwood had managed through infinite tact and a stoic
+disregard of his own aches and pains to re-establish at least a
+temporary working arrangement with the Carter household.  To Mrs.
+Carter he was still a Heaven-sent son of light.  Actually in a mournful
+way she pleaded for Cowperwood, vouching for his disinterestedness and
+long-standing generosity.  Berenice, on the other hand, was swept
+between her craving for a great state for herself--luxury, power--and
+her desire to conform to the current ethics and morals of life.
+Cowperwood was married, and because of his attitude of affection for
+her his money was tainted.  She had long speculated on his relation to
+Aileen, the basis of their differences, had often wondered why neither
+she nor her mother had ever been introduced.  What type of woman was
+the second Mrs. Cowperwood? Beyond generalities Cowperwood had never
+mentioned her.  Berenice actually thought to seek her out in some
+inconspicuous way, but, as it chanced, one night her curiosity was
+rewarded without effort.  She was at the opera with friends, and her
+escort nudged her arm.
+
+"Have you noticed Box 9--the lady in white satin with the green lace
+shawl?"
+
+"Yes." Berenice raised her glasses.
+
+"Mrs. Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the wife of the Chicago millionaire.
+They have just built that house at 68th Street.  He has part lease of
+number 9, I believe."
+
+Berenice almost started, but retained her composure, giving merely an
+indifferent glance.  A little while after, she adjusted her glasses
+carefully and studied Mrs. Cowperwood.  She noted curiously that
+Aileen's hair was somewhat the color of her own--more carroty red.  She
+studied her eyes, which were slightly ringed, her smooth cheeks and
+full mouth, thickened somewhat by drinking and dissipation. Aileen was
+good-looking, she thought--handsome in a material way, though so much
+older than herself.  Was it merely age that was alienating Cowperwood,
+or was it some deep-seated intellectual difference? Obviously Mrs.
+Cowperwood was well over forty--a fact which did not give Berenice any
+sense of satisfaction or of advantage.  She really did not care enough.
+It did occur to her, however, that this woman whom she was observing
+had probably given the best years of her life to Cowperwood--the
+brilliant years of her girlhood.  And now he was tired of her! There
+were small carefully powdered lines at the tails of Aileen's eyes and
+at the corners of her mouth.  At the same time she seemed
+preternaturally gay, kittenish, spoiled.  With her were two men--one a
+well-known actor, sinisterly handsome, a man with a brutal, unclean
+reputation, the other a young social pretender--both unknown to
+Berenice.  Her knowledge was to come from her escort, a loquacious
+youth, more or less versed, as it happened, in the gay life of the city.
+
+"I hear that she is creating quite a stir in Bohemia," he observed. "If
+she expects to enter society it's a poor way to begin, don't you think?"
+
+"Do you know that she expects to?"
+
+"All the usual signs are out--a box here, a house on Fifth Avenue."
+
+This study of Aileen puzzled and disturbed Berenice a little.
+Nevertheless, she felt immensely superior.  Her soul seemed to soar
+over the plain Aileen inhabited.  The type of the latter's escorts
+suggested error--a lack of social discrimination.  Because of the high
+position he had succeeded in achieving Cowperwood was entitled, no
+doubt, to be dissatisfied.  His wife had not kept pace with him, or,
+rather, had not eluded him in his onward flight--had not run swiftly
+before, like a winged victory.  Berenice reflected that if she were
+dealing with such a man he should never know her truly--he should be
+made to wonder and to doubt.  Lines of care and disappointment should
+never mar her face.  She would scheme and dream and conceal and evade.
+He should dance attendance, whoever he was.
+
+Nevertheless, here she herself was, at twenty-two, unmarried, her
+background insecure, the very ground on which she walked treacherous.
+Braxmar knew, and Beales Chadsey, and Cowperwood.  At least three or
+four of her acquaintances must have been at the Waldorf on that fatal
+night.  How long would it be before others became aware? She tried
+eluding her mother, Cowperwood, and the situation generally by freely
+accepting more extended invitations and by trying to see whether there
+was not some opening for her in the field of art. She thought of
+painting and essayed several canvases which she took to dealers.  The
+work was subtle, remote, fanciful--a snow scene with purple edges; a
+thinking satyr, iron-like in his heaviness, brooding over a cloudy
+valley; a lurking devil peering at a praying Marguerite; a Dutch
+interior inspired by Mrs. Batjer, and various dancing figures.
+Phlegmatic dealers of somber mien admitted some promise, but pointed
+out the difficulty of sales. Beginners were numerous.  Art was long.
+If she went on, of course....  Let them see other things.  She turned
+her thoughts to dancing.
+
+This art in its interpretative sense was just being introduced into
+America, a certain Althea Baker having created a good deal of stir in
+society by this means.  With the idea of duplicating or surpassing the
+success of this woman Berenice conceived a dance series of her own.
+One was to be "The Terror"--a nymph dancing in the spring woods, but
+eventually pursued and terrorized by a faun; another, "The Peacock," a
+fantasy illustrative of proud self-adulation; another, "The Vestal," a
+study from Roman choric worship.  After spending considerable time at
+Pocono evolving costumes, poses, and the like, Berenice finally hinted
+at the plan to Mrs. Batjer, declaring that she would enjoy the artistic
+outlet it would afford, and indicating at the same time that it might
+provide the necessary solution of a problem of ways and means.
+
+"Why, Bevy, how you talk!" commented Mrs. Batjer.  "And with your
+possibilities.  Why don't you marry first, and do your dancing
+afterward? You might compel a certain amount of attention that way."
+
+"Because of hubby? How droll! Whom would you suggest that I marry at
+once?"
+
+"Oh, when it comes to that--" replied Mrs. Batjer, with a slight
+reproachful lift in her voice, and thinking of Kilmer Duelma. "But
+surely your need isn't so pressing.  If you were to take up
+professional dancing I might have to cut you afterward--particularly if
+any one else did."
+
+She smiled the sweetest, most sensible smile.  Mrs. Batjer accompanied
+her suggestions nearly always with a slight sniff and cough. Berenice
+could see that the mere fact of this conversation made a slight
+difference.  In Mrs. Batjer's world poverty was a dangerous topic.  The
+mere odor of it suggested a kind of horror--perhaps the equivalent of
+error or sin.  Others, Berenice now suspected, would take affright even
+more swiftly.
+
+Subsequent to this, however, she made one slight investigation of those
+realms that govern professional theatrical engagements.  It was a most
+disturbing experience.  The mere color and odor of the stuffy offices,
+the gauche, material attendants, the impossible aspirants and
+participants in this make-believe world! The crudeness! The effrontery!
+The materiality! The sensuality! It came to her as a sickening breath
+and for the moment frightened her.  What would become of refinement
+there? What of delicacy? How could one rise and sustain an individual
+dignity and control in such a world as this?
+
+Cowperwood was now suggesting as a binding link that he should buy a
+home for them in Park Avenue, where such social functions as would be
+of advantage to Berenice and in some measure to himself as an
+occasional guest might be indulged in.  Mrs. Carter, a fool of comfort,
+was pleased to welcome this idea.  It promised to give her absolute
+financial security for the future.
+
+"I know how it is with you, Frank," she declared.  "I know you need
+some place that you can call a home.  The whole difficulty will be with
+Bevy.  Ever since that miserable puppy made those charges against me I
+haven't been able to talk to her at all.  She doesn't seem to want to
+do anything I suggest.  You have much more influence with her than I
+have.  If you explain, it may be all right."
+
+Instantly Cowperwood saw an opportunity.  Intensely pleased with this
+confession of weakness on the part of the mother, he went to Berenice,
+but by his usual method of indirect direction.
+
+"You know, Bevy," he said, one afternoon when he found her alone, "I
+have been wondering if it wouldn't be better if I bought a large house
+for you and your mother here in New York, where you and she could do
+entertaining on a large scale.  Since I can't spend my money on myself,
+I might as well spend it on some one who would make an interesting use
+of it.  You might include me as an uncle or father's cousin or
+something of that sort," he added, lightly.
+
+Berenice, who saw quite clearly the trap he was setting for her, was
+nonplussed.  At the same time she could not help seeing that a house,
+if it were beautifully furnished, would be an interesting asset.
+People in society loved fixed, notable dwellings; she had observed
+that.  What functions could not be held if only her mother's past were
+not charged against her! That was the great difficulty.  It was almost
+an Arabian situation, heightened by the glitter of gold.  And
+Cowperwood was always so diplomatic.  He came forward with such a
+bland, engaging smile.  His hands were so shapely and seeking.
+
+"A house such as you speak of would enlarge the debt beyond payment, I
+presume," she remarked, sardonically and with a sad, almost
+contemptuous gesture.  Cowperwood realized how her piercing intellect
+was following his shifty trail, and winced.  She must see that her fate
+was in his hands, but oh! if she would only surrender, how swiftly
+every dollar of his vast fortune should be piled humbly at her feet.
+She should have her heart's desire, if money would buy it.  She could
+say to him go, and he would go; come, and he would come.
+
+"Berenice," he said, getting up, "I know what you think.  You fancy I
+am trying to further my own interests in this way, but I'm not. I
+wouldn't compromise you ultimately for all the wealth of India. I have
+told you where I stand.  Every dollar that I have is yours to do with
+as you choose on any basis that you may care to name. I have no future
+outside of you, none except art.  I do not expect you to marry me.
+Take all that I have.  Wipe society under your feet.  Don't think that
+I will ever charge it up as a debt.  I won't.  I want you to hold your
+own.  Just answer me one question; I won't ever ask another."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"If I were single now, and you were not in love or married, would you
+consider me at all?"
+
+His eyes pleaded as never had they pleaded before.
+
+She started, looked concerned, severe, then relaxed as suddenly. "Let
+me see," she said, with a slight brightening of the eyes and a toss of
+her head.  "That is a second cousin to a proposal, isn't it? You have
+no right to make it.  You aren't single, and aren't likely to be.  Why
+should I try to read the future?"
+
+She walked indifferently out of the room, and Cowperwood stayed a
+moment to think.  Obviously he had triumphed in a way.  She had not
+taken great offense.  She must like him and would marry him if only...
+
+Only Aileen.
+
+And now he wished more definitely and forcefully than ever that he were
+really and truly free.  He felt that if ever he wished to attain
+Berenice he must persuade Aileen to divorce him.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LVII
+
+Aileen's Last Card
+
+
+It was not until some little time after they were established in the
+new house that Aileen first came upon any evidence of the existence of
+Berenice Fleming.  In a general way she assumed that there were
+women--possibly some of whom she had known--Stephanie, Mrs. Hand,
+Florence Cochrane, or later arrivals--yet so long as they were not
+obtruded on her she permitted herself the semi-comforting thought that
+things were not as bad as they might be.  So long, indeed, as
+Cowperwood was genuinely promiscuous, so long as he trotted here and
+there, not snared by any particular siren, she could not despair, for,
+after all, she had ensnared him and held him deliciously--without
+variation, she believed, for all of ten years--a feat which no other
+woman had achieved before or after. Rita Sohlberg might have
+succeeded--the beast! How she hated the thought of Rita! By this time,
+however, Cowperwood was getting on in years.  The day must come when he
+would be less keen for variability, or, at least, would think it no
+longer worth while to change.  If only he did not find some one woman,
+some Circe, who would bind and enslave him in these Later years as she
+had herself done in his earlier ones all might yet be well.  At the
+same time she lived in daily terror of a discovery which was soon to
+follow.
+
+She had gone out one day to pay a call on some one to whom Rhees Grier,
+the Chicago sculptor, had given her an introduction. Crossing Central
+Park in one of the new French machines which Cowperwood had purchased
+for her indulgence, her glance wandered down a branch road to where
+another automobile similar to her own was stalled.  It was early in the
+afternoon, at which time Cowperwood was presumably engaged in Wall
+Street.  Yet there he was, and with him two women, neither of whom, in
+the speed of passing, could Aileen quite make out.  She had her car
+halted and driven to within seeing-distance behind a clump of bushes.
+A chauffeur whom she did not know was tinkering at a handsome machine,
+while on the grass near by stood Cowperwood and a tall, slender girl
+with red hair somewhat like Aileen's own.  Her expression was aloof,
+poetic, rhapsodical.  Aileen could not analyze it, but it fixed her
+attention completely.  In the tonneau sat an elderly lady, whom Aileen
+at once assumed to be the girl's mother.  Who were they? What was
+Cowperwood doing here in the Park at this hour? Where were they going?
+With a horrible retch of envy she noted upon Cowperwood's face a smile
+the like and import of which she well knew.  How often she had seen it
+years and years before! Having escaped detection, she ordered her
+chauffeur to follow the car, which soon started, at a safe distance.
+She saw Cowperwood and the two ladies put down at one of the great
+hotels, and followed them into the dining-room, where, from behind a
+screen, after the most careful manoeuvering, she had an opportunity of
+studying them at her leisure.  She drank in every detail of Berenice's
+face--the delicately pointed chin, the clear, fixed blue eyes, the
+straight, sensitive nose and tawny hair.  Calling the head waiter, she
+inquired the names of the two women, and in return for a liberal tip
+was informed at once.  "Mrs. Ira Carter, I believe, and her daughter,
+Miss Fleming, Miss Berenice Fleming.  Mrs. Carter was Mrs. Fleming
+once." Aileen followed them out eventually, and in her own car pursued
+them to their door, into which Cowperwood also disappeared.  The next
+day, by telephoning the apartment to make inquiry, she learned that
+they actually lived there.  After a few days of brooding she employed a
+detective, and learned that Cowperwood was a constant visitor at the
+Carters', that the machine in which they rode was his maintained at a
+separate garage, and that they were of society truly.  Aileen would
+never have followed the clue so vigorously had it not been for the look
+she had seen Cowperwood fix on the girl in the Park and in the
+restaurant--an air of soul-hunger which could not be gainsaid.
+
+Let no one ridicule the terrors of unrequited love.  Its tentacles are
+cancerous, its grip is of icy death.  Sitting in her boudoir
+immediately after these events, driving, walking, shopping, calling on
+the few with whom she had managed to scrape an acquaintance, Aileen
+thought morning, noon, and night of this new woman.  The pale, delicate
+face haunted her.  What were those eyes, so remote in their gaze,
+surveying? Love? Cowperwood? Yes! Yes! Gone in a flash, and
+permanently, as it seemed to Aileen, was the value of this house, her
+dream of a new social entrance.  And she had already suffered so much;
+endured so much.  Cowperwood being absent for a fortnight, she moped in
+her room, sighed, raged, and then began to drink.  Finally she sent for
+an actor who had once paid attention to her in Chicago, and whom she
+had later met here in the circle of the theaters.  She was not so much
+burning with lust as determined in her drunken gloom that she would
+have revenge.  For days there followed an orgy, in which wine,
+bestiality, mutual recrimination, hatred, and despair were involved.
+Sobering eventually, she wondered what Cowperwood would think of her
+now if he knew this? Could he ever love her any more? Could he even
+tolerate her? But what did he care? It served him right, the dog! She
+would show him, she would wreck his dream, she would make her own life
+a scandal, and his too! She would shame him before all the world. He
+should never have a divorce! He should never be able to marry a girl
+like that and leave her alone--never, never, never! When Cowperwood
+returned she snarled at him without vouchsafing an explanation.
+
+He suspected at once that she had been spying upon his manoeuvers.
+Moreover, he did not fail to notice her heavy eyes, superheated cheeks,
+and sickly breath.  Obviously she had abandoned her dream of a social
+victory of some kind, and was entering on a career of what--debauchery?
+Since coming to New York she had failed utterly, he thought, to make
+any single intelligent move toward her social rehabilitation.  The
+banal realms of art and the stage, with which in his absence or neglect
+she had trifled with here, as she had done in Chicago, were worse than
+useless; they were destructive. He must have a long talk with her one
+of these days, must confess frankly to his passion for Berenice, and
+appeal to her sympathy and good sense.   What scenes would follow! Yet
+she might succumb, at that.  Despair, pride, disgust might move her.
+Besides, he could now bestow upon her a very large fortune.  She could
+go to Europe or remain here and live in luxury.  He would always remain
+friendly with her--helpful, advisory--if she would permit it.
+
+The conversation which eventually followed on this topic was of such
+stuff as dreams are made of.  It sounded hollow and unnatural within
+the walls where it took place.  Consider the great house in upper Fifth
+Avenue, its magnificent chambers aglow, of a stormy Sunday night.
+Cowperwood was lingering in the city at this time, busy with a group of
+Eastern financiers who were influencing his contest in the state
+legislature of Illinois.  Aileen was momentarily consoled by the
+thought that for him perhaps love might, after all, be a thing apart--a
+thing no longer vital and soul-controlling. To-night he was sitting in
+the court of orchids, reading a book--the diary of Cellini, which some
+one had recommended to him--stopping to think now and then of things in
+Chicago or Springfield, or to make a note.  Outside the rain was
+splashing in torrents on the electric-lighted asphalt of Fifth
+Avenue--the Park opposite a Corot-like shadow.  Aileen was in the
+music-room strumming indifferently.  She was thinking of times
+past--Lynde, from whom she had not heard in half a year; Watson Skeet,
+the sculptor, who was also out of her ken at present.  When Cowperwood
+was in the city and in the house she was accustomed from habit to
+remain indoors or near.  So great is the influence of past customs of
+devotion that they linger long past the hour when the act ceases to
+become valid.
+
+"What an awful night!" she observed once, strolling to a window to peer
+out from behind a brocaded valance.
+
+"It is bad, isn't it?" replied Cowperwood, as she returned.  "Hadn't
+you thought of going anywhere this evening?"
+
+"No--oh no," replied Aileen, indifferently.  She rose restlessly from
+the piano, and strolled on into the great picture-gallery. Stopping
+before one of Raphael Sanzio's Holy Families, only recently hung, she
+paused to contemplate the serene face--medieval, Madonnaesque, Italian.
+
+The lady seemed fragile, colorless, spineless--without life.  Were
+there such women? Why did artists paint them? Yet the little Christ was
+sweet.  Art bored Aileen unless others were enthusiastic.  She craved
+only the fanfare of the living--not painted resemblances. She returned
+to the music-room, to the court of orchids, and was just about to go
+up-stairs to prepare herself a drink and read a novel when Cowperwood
+observed:
+
+"You're bored, aren't you?"
+
+"Oh no; I'm used to lonely evenings," she replied, quietly and without
+any attempt at sarcasm.
+
+Relentless as he was in hewing life to his theory--hammering substance
+to the form of his thought--yet he was tender, too, in the manner of a
+rainbow dancing over an abyss.  For the moment he wanted to say, "Poor
+girlie, you do have a hard time, don't you, with me?" but he reflected
+instantly how such a remark would be received.  He meditated, holding
+his book in his hand above his knee, looking at the purling water that
+flowed and flowed in sprinkling showers over the sportive marble
+figures of mermaids, a Triton, and nymphs astride of fishes.
+
+"You're really not happy in this state, any more, are you?" he
+inquired.  "Would you feel any more comfortable if I stayed away
+entirely?"
+
+His mind had turned of a sudden to the one problem that was fretting
+him and to the opportunities of this hour.
+
+"You would," she replied, for her boredom merely concealed her
+unhappiness in no longer being able to command in the least his
+interest or his sentiment.
+
+"Why do you say that in just that way?" he asked.
+
+"Because I know you would.  I know why you ask.  You know well enough
+that it isn't anything I want to do that is concerned. It's what you
+want to do.  You'd like to turn me off like an old horse now that you
+are tired of me, and so you ask whether I would feel any more
+comfortable.  What a liar you are, Frank! How really shifty you are! I
+don't wonder you're a multimillionaire.  If you could live long enough
+you would eat up the whole world.  Don't you think for one moment that
+I don't know of Berenice Fleming here in New York, and how you're
+dancing attendance on her--because I do.  I know how you have been
+hanging about her for months and months--ever since we have been here,
+and for long before.  You think she's wonderful now because she's young
+and in society. I've seen you in the Waldorf and in the Park hanging on
+her every word, looking at her with adoring eyes.  What a fool you are,
+to be so big a man! Every little snip, if she has pink cheeks and a
+doll's face, can wind you right around her finger.  Rita Sohlberg did
+it; Stephanie Platow did it; Florence Cochrane did it; Cecily
+Haguenin--and Heaven knows how many more that I never heard of. I
+suppose Mrs. Hand still lives with you in Chicago--the cheap strumpet!
+Now it's Berenice Fleming and her frump of a mother. From all I can
+learn you haven't been able to get her yet--because her mother's too
+shrewd, perhaps--but you probably will in the end.  It isn't you so
+much as your money that they're after.  Pah! Well, I'm unhappy enough,
+but it isn't anything you can remedy any more.  Whatever you could do
+to make me unhappy you have done, and now you talk of my being happier
+away from you.  Clever boy, you! I know you the way I know my ten
+fingers.  You don't deceive me at any time in any way any more.  I
+can't do anything about it.  I can't stop you from making a fool of
+yourself with every woman you meet, and having people talk from one end
+of the country to the other.  Why, for a woman to be seen with you is
+enough to fix her reputation forever.  Right now all Broadway knows
+you're running after Berenice Fleming.  Her name will soon be as sweet
+as those of the others you've had.  She might as well give herself to
+you. If she ever had a decent reputation it's gone by now, you can
+depend upon that."
+
+These remarks irritated Cowperwood greatly--enraged him--particularly
+her references to Berenice.  What were you to do with such a woman? he
+thought.  Her tongue was becoming unbearable; her speech in its
+persistence and force was that of a termagant.  Surely, surely, he had
+made a great mistake in marrying her.  At the same time the control of
+her was largely in his own hands even yet.
+
+"Aileen," he said, coolly, at the end of her speech, "you talk too
+much.  You rave.  You're growing vulgar, I believe.  Now let me tell
+you something." And he fixed her with a hard, quieting eye. "I have no
+apologies to make.  Think what you please.  I know why you say what you
+do.  But here is the point.  I want you to get it straight and clear.
+It may make some difference eventually if you're any kind of a woman at
+all.  I don't care for you any more. If you want to put it another
+way--I'm tired of you.  I have been for a long while.  That's why I've
+run with other women.  If I hadn't been tired of you I wouldn't have
+done it.  What's more, I'm in love with somebody else--Berenice
+Fleming, and I expect to stay in love.  I wish I were free so I could
+rearrange my life on a different basis and find a little comfort before
+I die.  You don't really care for me any more.  You can't.  I'll admit
+I have treated you badly; but if I had really loved you I wouldn't have
+done it, would I? It isn't my fault that love died in me, is it? It
+isn't your fault.  I'm not blaming you.  Love isn't a bunch of coals
+that can be blown by an artificial bellows into a flame at any time.
+It's out, and that's an end of it.  Since I don't love you and can't,
+why should you want me to stay near you? Why shouldn't you let me go
+and give me a divorce? You'll be just as happy or unhappy away from me
+as with me.  Why not? I want to be free again. I'm miserable here, and
+have been for a long time.  I'll make any arrangement that seems fair
+and right to you.  I'll give you this house--these pictures, though I
+really don't see what you'd want with them." (Cowperwood had no
+intention of giving up the gallery if he could help it.) "I'll settle
+on you for life any income you desire, or I'll give you a fixed sum
+outright.  I want to be free, and I want you to let me be.  Now why
+won't you be sensible and let me do this?"
+
+During this harangue Cowperwood had first sat and then stood.  At the
+statement that his love was really dead--the first time he had ever
+baldly and squarely announced it--Aileen had paled a little and put her
+hand to her forehead over her eyes.  It was then he had arisen.  He was
+cold, determined, a little revengeful for the moment.  She realized now
+that he meant this--that in his heart was no least feeling for all that
+had gone before--no sweet memories, no binding thoughts of happy hours,
+days, weeks, years, that were so glittering and wonderful to her in
+retrospect.  Great Heavens, it was really true! His love was dead; he
+had said it! But for the nonce she could not believe it; she would not.
+It really couldn't be true.
+
+"Frank," she began, coming toward him, the while he moved away to evade
+her.  Her eyes were wide, her hands trembling, her lips moving in an
+emotional, wavy, rhythmic way.  "You really don't mean that, do you?
+Love isn't wholly dead, is it? All the love you used to feel for me?
+Oh, Frank, I have raged, I have hated, I have said terrible, ugly
+things, but it has been because I have been in love with you! All the
+time I have.  You know that.  I have felt so bad--O God, how bad I have
+felt! Frank, you don't know it--but my pillow has been wet many and
+many a night.  I have cried and cried.  I have got up and walked the
+floor.  I have drunk whisky--plain, raw whisky--because something hurt
+me and I wanted to kill the pain.  I have gone with other men, one
+after another--you know that--but, oh! Frank, Frank, you know that I
+didn't want to, that I didn't mean to! I have always despised the
+thought of them afterward.  It was only because I was lonely and
+because you wouldn't pay any attention to me or be nice to me.  Oh, how
+I have longed and longed for just one loving hour with you--one night,
+one day! There are women who could suffer in silence, but I can't.  My
+mind won't let me alone, Frank--my thoughts won't. I can't help
+thinking how I used to run to you in Philadelphia, when you would meet
+me on your way home, or when I used to come to you in Ninth Street or
+on Eleventh.  Oh, Frank, I probably did wrong to your first wife.  I
+see it now--how she must have suffered! But I was just a silly girl
+then, and I didn't know.  Don't you remember how I used to come to you
+in Ninth Street and how I saw you day after day in the penitentiary in
+Philadelphia? You said then you would love me always and that you would
+never forget. Can't you love me any more--just a little? Is it really
+true that your love is dead? Am I so old, so changed? Oh, Frank, please
+don't say that--please don't--please, please please! I beg of you!"
+
+She tried to reach him and put a hand on his arm, but he stepped aside.
+To him, as he looked at her now, she was the antithesis of anything he
+could brook, let alone desire artistically or physically.  The charm
+was gone, the spell broken.  It was another type, another point of view
+he required, but, above all and principally, youth, youth--the spirit,
+for instance, that was in Berenice Fleming.  He was sorry--in his way.
+He felt sympathy, but it was like the tinkling of a far-off
+sheep-bell--the moaning of a whistling buoy heard over the thrash of
+night-black waves on a stormy sea.
+
+"You don't understand how it is, Aileen," he said.  "I can't help
+myself.  My love is dead.  It is gone.  I can't recall it.  I can't
+feel it.  I wish I could, but I can't; you must understand that. Some
+things are possible and some are not."
+
+He looked at her, but with no relenting.  Aileen, for her part, saw in
+his eyes nothing, as she believed, save cold philosophic logic--the man
+of business, the thinker, the bargainer, the plotter. At the thought of
+the adamantine character of his soul, which could thus definitely close
+its gates on her for ever and ever, she became wild, angry,
+feverish--not quite sane.
+
+"Oh, don't say that!" she pleaded, foolishly.  "Please don't. Please
+don't say that.  It might come back a little if--if--you would only
+believe in it.  Don't you see how I feel? Don't you see how it is?"
+
+She dropped to her knees and clasped him about the waist.  "Oh, Frank!
+Oh, Frank! Oh, Frank!" she began to call, crying.  "I can't stand it! I
+can't! I can't! I can't! I shall die."
+
+"Don't give way like that, Aileen," he pleaded.  "It doesn't do any
+good.  I can't lie to myself.  I don't want to lie to you. Life is too
+short.  Facts are facts.  If I could say and believe that I loved you I
+would say so now, but I can't.  I don't love you.  Why should I say
+that I do?"
+
+In the content of Aileen's nature was a portion that was purely
+histrionic, a portion that was childish--petted and spoiled--a portion
+that was sheer unreason, and a portion that was splendid emotion--deep,
+dark, involved.  At this statement of Cowperwood's which seemed to
+throw her back on herself for ever and ever to be alone, she first
+pleaded willingness to compromise--to share.  She had not fought
+Stephanie Platow, she had not fought Florence Cochrane, nor Cecily
+Haguenin, nor Mrs. Hand, nor, indeed, anybody after Rita, and she would
+fight no more.  She had not spied on him in connection with
+Berenice--she had accidentally met them.  True, she had gone with other
+men, but? Berenice was beautiful, she admitted it, but so was she in
+her way still--a little, still. Couldn't he find a place for her yet in
+his life? Wasn't there room for both?
+
+At this expression of humiliation and defeat Cowperwood was sad, sick,
+almost nauseated.  How could one argue? How make her understand?
+
+"I wish it were possible, Aileen," he concluded, finally and heavily,
+"but it isn't."
+
+All at once she arose, her eyes red but dry.
+
+"You don't love me, then, at all, do you? Not a bit?"
+
+"No, Aileen, I don't.  I don't mean by that that I dislike you. I don't
+mean to say that you aren't interesting in your way as a woman and that
+I don't sympathize with you.  I do.  But I don't love you any more.  I
+can't.  The thing I used to feel I can't feel any more."
+
+She paused for a moment, uncertain how to take this, the while she
+whitened, grew more tense, more spiritual than she had been in many a
+day.  Now she felt desperate, angry, sick, but like the scorpion that
+ringed by fire can turn only on itself.  What a hell life was, she told
+herself.  How it slipped away and left one aging, horribly alone! Love
+was nothing, faith nothing--nothing, nothing!
+
+A fine light of conviction, intensity, intention lit her eye for the
+moment.  "Very well, then," she said, coolly, tensely.  "I know what
+I'll do.  I'll not live this way.  I'll not live beyond to-night.  I
+want to die, anyhow, and I will."
+
+It was by no means a cry, this last, but a calm statement.  It should
+prove her love.  To Cowperwood it seemed unreal, bravado, a momentary
+rage intended to frighten him.  She turned and walked up the grand
+staircase, which was near--a splendid piece of marble and bronze
+fifteen feet wide, with marble nereids for newel-posts, and dancing
+figures worked into the stone.  She went into her room quite calmly and
+took up a steel paper-cutter of dagger design--a knife with a handle of
+bronze and a point of great sharpness. Coming out and going along the
+balcony over the court of orchids, where Cowperwood still was seated,
+she entered the sunrise room with its pool of water, its birds, its
+benches, its vines.  Locking the door, she sat down and then, suddenly
+baring an arm, jabbed a vein--ripped it for inches--and sat there to
+bleed.  Now she would see whether she could die, whether he would let
+her.
+
+Uncertain, astonished, not able to believe that she could be so rash,
+not believing that her feeling could be so great, Cowperwood still
+remained where she had left him wondering.  He had not been so greatly
+moved--the tantrums of women were common--and yet-- Could she really be
+contemplating death? How could she? How ridiculous! Life was so
+strange, so mad.  But this was Aileen who had just made this threat,
+and she had gone up the stairs to carry it out, perhaps.  Impossible!
+How could it be? Yet back of all his doubts there was a kind of
+sickening feeling, a dread.  He recalled how she had assaulted Rita
+Sohlberg.
+
+He hurried up the steps now and into her room.  She was not there. He
+went quickly along the balcony, looking here and there, until he came
+to the sunrise room.  She must be there, for the door was shut.  He
+tried it--it was locked.
+
+"Aileen," he called.  "Aileen! Are you in there?" No answer.  He
+listened.  Still no answer.  "Aileen!" he repeated.  "Are you in there?
+What damned nonsense is this, anyhow?"
+
+"George!" he thought to himself, stepping back; "she might do it,
+too--perhaps she has." He could not hear anything save the odd
+chattering of a toucan aroused by the light she had switched on.
+Perspiration stood out on his brow.  He shook the knob, pushed a bell
+for a servant, called for keys which had been made for every door,
+called for a chisel and hammer.
+
+"Aileen," he said, "if you don't open the door this instant I will see
+that it is opened.  It can be opened quick enough."
+
+Still no sound.
+
+"Damn it!" he exclaimed, becoming wretched, horrified.  A servant
+brought the keys.  The right one would not enter.  A second was on the
+other side.  "There is a bigger hammer somewhere," Cowperwood said.
+"Get it! Get me a chair!" Meantime, with terrific energy, using a large
+chisel, he forced the door.
+
+There on one of the stone benches of the lovely room sat Aileen, the
+level pool of water before her, the sunrise glow over every thing,
+tropic birds in their branches, and she, her hair disheveled, her face
+pale, one arm--her left--hanging down, ripped and bleeding, trickling a
+thick stream of rich, red blood.  On the floor was a pool of blood,
+fierce, scarlet, like some rich cloth, already turning darker in places.
+
+Cowperwood paused--amazed.  He hurried forward, seized her arm, made a
+bandage of a torn handkerchief above the wound, sent for a surgeon,
+saying the while: "How could you, Aileen? How impossible! To try to
+take your life! This isn't love.  It isn't even madness. It's foolish
+acting."
+
+"Don't you really care?" she asked.
+
+"How can you ask? How could you really do this?"
+
+He was angry, hurt, glad that she was alive, shamed--many things.
+
+"Don't you really care?" she repeated, wearily.
+
+"Aileen, this is nonsense.  I will not talk to you about it now. Have
+you cut yourself anywhere else?" he asked, feeling about her bosom and
+sides.
+
+"Then why not let me die?" she replied, in the same manner.  "I will
+some day.  I want to."
+
+"Well, you may, some day," he replied, "but not to-night.  I scarcely
+think you want to now.  This is too much, Aileen--really impossible."
+
+He drew himself up and looked at her--cool, unbelieving, the light of
+control, even of victory, in his eyes.  As he had suspected, it was not
+truly real.  She would not have killed herself.  She had expected him
+to come--to make the old effort.  Very good.  He would see her safely
+in bed and in a nurse's hands, and would then avoid her as much as
+possible in the future.  If her intention was genuine she would carry
+it out in his absence, but he did not believe she would.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LVIII
+
+A Marauder Upon the Commonwealth
+
+
+The spring and summer months of 1897 and the late fall of 1898
+witnessed the final closing battle between Frank Algernon Cowperwood
+and the forces inimical to him in so far as the city of Chicago, the
+state of Illinois, and indeed the United States of America, were
+concerned.  When in 1896 a new governor and a new group of state
+representatives were installed Cowperwood decided that it would be
+advisable to continue the struggle at once.  By the time this new
+legislature should convene for its labors a year would have passed
+since Governor Swanson had vetoed the original
+public-service-commission bill.  By that time public sentiment as
+aroused by the newspapers would have had time to cool.  Already through
+various favorable financial interests--particularly Haeckelheimer,
+Gotloeb & Co. and all the subsurface forces they represented--he had
+attempted to influence the incoming governor, and had in part succeeded.
+
+The new governor in this instance--one Corporal A. E. Archer--or
+ex-Congressman Archer, as he was sometimes called--was, unlike Swanson,
+a curious mixture of the commonplace and the ideal--one of those
+shiftily loyal and loyally shifty who make their upward way by devious,
+if not too reprehensible methods.  He was a little man, stocky,
+brown-haired, brown-eyed, vigorous, witty, with the ordinary
+politician's estimate of public morality--namely, that there is no such
+thing.  A drummer-boy at fourteen in the War of the Rebellion, a
+private at sixteen and eighteen, he had subsequently been breveted for
+conspicuous military service.  At this later time he was head of the
+Grand Army of the Republic, and conspicuous in various stirring
+eleemosynary efforts on behalf of the old soldiers, their widows and
+orphans.  A fine American, flag-waving, tobacco-chewing, foul-swearing
+little man was this--and one with noteworthy political ambitions.
+Other Grand Army men had been conspicuous in the lists for Presidential
+nominations.  Why not he? An excellent orator in a high falsetto way,
+and popular because of good-fellowship, presence, force, he was by
+nature materially and commercially minded--therefore without basic
+appeal to the higher ranks of intelligence.  In seeking the nomination
+for governorship he had made the usual overtures and had in turn been
+sounded by Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb, and various other corporate
+interests who were in league with Cowperwood as to his attitude in
+regard to a proposed public-service commission.  At first he had
+refused to commit himself.  Later, finding that the C. W. & I. and the
+Chicago & Pacific (very powerful railroads both) were interested, and
+that other candidates were running him a tight chase in the
+gubernatorial contest, he succumbed in a measure, declaring privately
+that in case the legislature proved to be strongly in favor of the idea
+and the newspapers not too crushingly opposed he might be willing to
+stand as its advocate.  Other candidates expressed similar views, but
+Corporal Archer proved to have the greater following, and was
+eventually nominated and comfortably elected.
+
+Shortly after the new legislature had convened, it so chanced that a
+certain A. S. Rotherhite, publisher of the South Chicago Journal, was
+one day accidentally sitting as a visitor in the seat of a state
+representative by the name of Clarence Mulligan.  While so occupied
+Rotherhite was familiarly slapped on the back by a certain Senator
+Ladrigo, of Menard, and was invited to come out into the rotunda,
+where, posing as Representative Mulligan, he was introduced by Senator
+Ladrigo to a stranger by the name of Gerard.  The latter, with but few
+preliminary remarks, began as follows:
+
+"Mr. Mulligan, I want to fix it with you in regard to this Southack
+bill which is soon to come up in the house.  We have seventy votes, but
+we want ninety.  The fact that the bill has gone to a second reading in
+the senate shows our strength.  I am authorized to come to terms with
+you this morning if you would like.  Your vote is worth two thousand
+dollars to you the moment the bill is signed."
+
+Mr. Rotherhite, who happened to be a newly recruited member of the
+Opposition press, proved very canny in this situation.
+
+"Excuse me," he stammered, "I did not understand your name?"
+
+"Gerard.  G-er-ard.  Henry A. Gerard," replied this other.
+
+"Thank you.  I will think it over," was the response of the presumed
+Representative Mulligan.
+
+Strange to state, at this very instant the authentic Mulligan actually
+appeared--heralded aloud by several of his colleagues who happened to
+be lingering near by in the lobby.  Whereupon the anomalous Mr. Gerard
+and the crafty Senator Ladrigo discreetly withdrew.  Needless to say
+that Mr. Rotherhite hurried at once to the forces of righteousness.
+The press should spread this little story broadcast.  It was a very
+meaty incident; and it brought the whole matter once more into the
+fatal, poisonous field of press discussion.
+
+At once the Chicago papers flew to arms.  The cry was raised that the
+same old sinister Cowperwoodian forces were at work.  The members of
+the senate and the house were solemnly warned.  The sterling attitude
+of ex-Governor Swanson was held up as an example to the present
+Governor Archer.  "The whole idea," observed an editorial in Truman
+Leslie MacDonald's Inquirer, "smacks of chicane, political subtlety,
+and political jugglery.  Well do the citizens of Chicago and the people
+of Illinois know who and what particular organization would prove the
+true beneficiaries.  We do not want a public-service commission at the
+behest of a private street-railway corporation.  Are the tentacles of
+Frank A. Cowperwood to envelop this legislature as they did the last?"
+
+This broadside, coming in conjunction with various hostile rumblings in
+other papers, aroused Cowperwood to emphatic language.
+
+"They can all go to the devil," he said to Addison, one day at lunch.
+"I have a right to an extension of my franchises for fifty years, and I
+am going to get it.  Look at New York and Philadelphia. Why, the
+Eastern houses laugh.  They don't understand such a situation.  It's
+all the inside work of this Hand-Schryhart crowd. I know what they're
+doing and who's pulling the strings.  The newspapers yap-yap every time
+they give an order.  Hyssop waltzes every time Arneel moves.  Little
+MacDonald is a stool-pigeon for Hand.  It's got down so low now that
+it's anything to beat Cowperwood. Well, they won't beat me.  I'll find
+a way out.  The legislature will pass a bill allowing for a fifty-year
+franchise, and the governor will sign it.  I'll see to that personally.
+I have at least eighteen thousand stockholders who want a decent run
+for their money, and I propose to give it to them.  Aren't other men
+getting rich? Aren't other corporations earning ten and twelve per
+cent? Why shouldn't I? Is Chicago any the worse? Don't I employ twenty
+thousand men and pay them well? All this palaver about the rights of
+the people and the duty to the public--rats! Does Mr. Hand acknowledge
+any duty to the public where his special interests are concerned? Or
+Mr. Schryhart? Or Mr. Arneel? The newspapers be damned! I know my
+rights.  An honest legislature will give me a decent franchise to save
+me from the local political sharks."
+
+By this time, however, the newspapers had become as subtle and powerful
+as the politicians themselves.  Under the great dome of the capitol at
+Springfield, in the halls and conference chambers of the senate and
+house, in the hotels, and in the rural districts wherever any least
+information was to be gathered, were their representatives--to see, to
+listen, to pry.  Out of this contest they were gaining prestige and
+cash.  By them were the reform aldermen persuaded to call mass-meetings
+in their respective districts.  Property-owners were urged to organize;
+a committee of one hundred prominent citizens led by Hand and Schryhart
+was formed.  It was not long before the halls, chambers, and
+committee-rooms of the capitol at Springfield and the corridors of the
+one principal hotel were being tramped over almost daily by rampant
+delegations of ministers, reform aldermen, and civil committeemen, who
+arrived speechifying, threatening, and haranguing, and departed, only
+to make room for another relay.
+
+"Say, what do you think of these delegations, Senator?" inquired a
+certain Representative Greenough of Senator George Christian, of
+Grundy, one morning, the while a group of Chicago clergymen accompanied
+by the mayor and several distinguished private citizens passed through
+the rotunda on their way to the committee on railroads, where the house
+bill was privily being discussed. "Don't you think they speak well for
+our civic pride and moral upbringing?" He raised his eyes and crossed
+his fingers over his waistcoat in the most sanctimonious and
+reverential attitude.
+
+"Yes, dear Pastor," replied the irreverent Christian, without the
+shadow of a smile.  He was a little sallow, wiry man with eyes like a
+ferret, a small mustache and goatee ornamenting his face. "But do not
+forget that the Lord has called us also to this work."
+
+"Even so," acquiesced Greenough.  "We must not weary in well doing. The
+harvest is truly plenteous and the laborers are few."
+
+"Tut, tut, Pastor.  Don't overdo it.  You might make me larf," replied
+Christian; and the twain parted with knowing and yet weary smiles.
+
+Yet how little did the accommodating attitude of these gentlemen avail
+in silencing the newspapers.  The damnable newspapers! They were here,
+there, and everywhere reporting each least fragment of rumor,
+conversation, or imaginary programme.  Never did the citizens of
+Chicago receive so keen a drilling in statecraft--its subtleties and
+ramifications.  The president of the senate and the speaker of the
+house were singled out and warned separately as to their duty.  A page
+a day devoted to legislative proceeding in this quarter was practically
+the custom of the situation.  Cowperwood was here personally on the
+scene, brazen, defiant, logical, the courage of his convictions in his
+eyes, the power of his magnetism fairly enslaving men.  Throwing off
+the mask of disinterestedness--if any might be said to have covered
+him--he now frankly came out in the open and, journeying to
+Springfield, took quarters at the principal hotel.  Like a general in
+time of battle, he marshaled his forces about him.  In the warm,
+moonlit atmosphere of June nights when the streets of Springfield were
+quiet, the great plain of Illinois bathed for hundreds of miles from
+north to south in a sweet effulgence and the rurals slumbering in their
+simple homes, he sat conferring with his lawyers and legislative agents.
+
+Pity in such a crisis the poor country-jake legislator torn between his
+desire for a justifiable and expedient gain and his fear lest he should
+be assailed as a betrayer of the people's interests. To some of these
+small-town legislators, who had never seen as much as two thousand
+dollars in cash in all their days, the problem was soul-racking.  Men
+gathered in private rooms and hotel parlors to discuss it.  They stood
+in their rooms at night and thought about it alone.  The sight of big
+business compelling its desires the while the people went begging was
+destructive.  Many a romantic, illusioned, idealistic young country
+editor, lawyer, or statesman was here made over into a minor cynic or
+bribe-taker.  Men were robbed of every vestige of faith or even of
+charity; they came to feel, perforce, that there was nothing outside
+the capacity for taking and keeping.  The surface might appear
+commonplace--ordinary men of the state of Illinois going here and
+there--simple farmers and small-town senators and representatives
+conferring and meditating and wondering what they could do--yet a
+jungle-like complexity was present, a dark, rank growth of horrific but
+avid life--life at the full, life knife in hand, life blazing with
+courage and dripping at the jaws with hunger.
+
+However, because of the terrific uproar the more cautious legislators
+were by degrees becoming fearful.  Friends in their home towns, at the
+instigation of the papers, were beginning to write them. Political
+enemies were taking heart.  It meant too much of a sacrifice on the
+part of everybody.  In spite of the fact that the bait was apparently
+within easy reach, many became evasive and disturbed.  When a certain
+Representative Sparks, cocked and primed, with the bill in his pocket,
+arose upon the floor of the house, asking leave to have it spread upon
+the minutes, there was an instant explosion.  The privilege of the
+floor was requested by a hundred.  Another representative, Disback,
+being in charge of the opposition to Cowperwood, had made a count of
+noses and was satisfied in spite of all subtlety on the part of the
+enemy that he had at least one hundred and two votes, the necessary
+two-thirds wherewith to crush any measure which might originate on the
+floor.  Nevertheless, his followers, because of caution, voted it to a
+second and a third reading.  All sorts of amendments were made--one for
+a three-cent fare during the rush-hours, another for a 20 per cent. tax
+on gross receipts.  In amended form the measure was sent to the senate,
+where the changes were stricken out and the bill once more returned to
+the house.  Here, to Cowperwood's chagrin, signs were made manifest
+that it could not be passed.  "It can't be done, Frank," said Judge
+Dickensheets.  "It's too grilling a game.  Their home papers are after
+them.  They can't live."
+
+Consequently a second measure was devised--more soothing and lulling to
+the newspapers, but far less satisfactory to Cowperwood.  It conferred
+upon the Chicago City Council, by a trick of revising the old Horse and
+Dummy Act of 1865, the right to grant a franchise for fifty instead of
+for twenty years.  This meant that Cowperwood would have to return to
+Chicago and fight out his battle there. It was a severe blow, yet
+better than nothing.  Providing that he could win one more franchise
+battle within the walls of the city council in Chicago, it would give
+him all that he desired.  But could he? Had he not come here to the
+legislature especially to evade such a risk? His motives were enduring
+such a blistering exposure.  Yet perhaps, after all, if the price were
+large enough the Chicago councilmen would have more real courage than
+these country legislators--would dare more.  They would have to.
+
+So, after Heaven knows what desperate whisperings, conferences,
+arguments, and heartening of members, there was originated a second
+measure which--after the defeat of the first bill, 104 to 49--was
+introduced, by way of a very complicated path, through the judiciary
+committee.  It was passed; and Governor Archer, after heavy hours of
+contemplation and self-examination, signed it.  A little man mentally,
+he failed to estimate an aroused popular fury at its true import to
+him.  At his elbow was Cowperwood in the clear light of day, snapping
+his fingers in the face of his enemies, showing by the hard, cheerful
+glint in his eye that he was still master of the situation, giving all
+assurance that he would yet live to whip the Chicago papers into
+submission.  Besides, in the event of the passage of the bill,
+Cowperwood had promised to make Archer independently rich--a cash
+reward of five hundred thousand dollars.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LIX
+
+Capital and Public Rights
+
+
+Between the passage on June 5, 1897, of the Mears bill--so christened
+after the doughty representative who had received a small fortune for
+introducing it--and its presentation to the Chicago City Council in
+December of the same year, what broodings, plottings, politickings, and
+editorializings on the part of all and sundry! In spite of the intense
+feeling of opposition to Cowperwood there was at the same time in local
+public life one stratum of commercial and phlegmatic substance that
+could not view him in an altogether unfavorable light.  They were in
+business themselves.  His lines passed their doors and served them.
+They could not see wherein his street-railway service differed so much
+from that which others might give.  Here was the type of materialist
+who in Cowperwood's defiance saw a justification of his own material
+point of view and was not afraid to say so.  But as against these there
+were the preachers--poor wind-blown sticks of unreason who saw only
+what the current palaver seemed to indicate.  Again there were the
+anarchists, socialists, single-taxers, and public-ownership advocates.
+There were the very poor who saw in Cowperwood's wealth and in the
+fabulous stories of his New York home and of his art-collection a
+heartless exploitation of their needs.  At this time the feeling was
+spreading broadcast in America that great political and economic
+changes were at hand--that the tyranny of iron masters at the top was
+to give way to a richer, freer, happier life for the rank and file. A
+national eight-hour-day law was being advocated, and the public
+ownership of public franchises.  And here now was a great
+street-railway corporation, serving a population of a million and a
+half, occupying streets which the people themselves created by their
+presence, taking toll from all these humble citizens to the amount of
+sixteen or eighteen millions of dollars in the year and giving in
+return, so the papers said, poor service, shabby cars, no seats at
+rush-hours, no universal transfers (as a matter of fact, there were in
+operation three hundred and sixty-two separate transfer points) and no
+adequate tax on the immense sums earned. The workingman who read this
+by gas or lamp light in the kitchen or parlor of his shabby flat or
+cottage, and who read also in other sections of his paper of the free,
+reckless, glorious lives of the rich, felt himself to be defrauded of a
+portion of his rightful inheritance.  It was all a question of
+compelling Frank A. Cowperwood to do his duty by Chicago.  He must not
+again be allowed to bribe the aldermen; he must not be allowed to have
+a fifty-year franchise, the privilege of granting which he had already
+bought from the state legislature by the degradation of honest men.  He
+must be made to succumb, to yield to the forces of law and order.  It
+was claimed--and with a justice of which those who made the charge were
+by no means fully aware--that the Mears bill had been put through the
+house and senate by the use of cold cash, proffered even to the
+governor himself.  No legal proof of this was obtainable, but
+Cowperwood was assumed to be a briber on a giant scale.  By the
+newspaper cartoons he was represented as a pirate commander ordering
+his men to scuttle another vessel--the ship of Public Rights.  He was
+pictured as a thief, a black mask over his eyes, and as a seducer,
+throttling Chicago, the fair maiden, while he stole her purse.  The
+fame of this battle was by now becoming world-wide.  In Montreal, in
+Cape Town, in Buenos Ayres and Melbourne, in London and Paris, men were
+reading of this singular struggle.  At last, and truly, he was a
+national and international figure.  His original dream, however,
+modified by circumstances, had literally been fulfilled.
+
+Meanwhile be it admitted that the local elements in finance which had
+brought about this terrific onslaught on Cowperwood were not a little
+disturbed as to the eventual character of the child of their own
+creation.  Here at last was a public opinion definitely inimical to
+Cowperwood; but here also were they themselves, tremendous
+profit-holders, with a desire for just such favors as Cowperwood
+himself had exacted, deliberately setting out to kill the goose that
+could lay the golden egg.  Men such as Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb, Fishel,
+tremendous capitalists in the East and foremost in the directorates of
+huge transcontinental lines, international banking-houses, and the
+like, were amazed that the newspapers and the anti-Cowperwood element
+should have gone so far in Chicago. Had they no respect for capital?
+Did they not know that long-time franchises were practically the basis
+of all modern capitalistic prosperity? Such theories as were now being
+advocated here would spread to other cities unless checked.  America
+might readily become anti-capitalistic--socialistic.  Public ownership
+might appear as a workable theory--and then what?
+
+"Those men out there are very foolish," observed Mr. Haeckelheimer at
+one time to Mr. Fishel, of Fishel, Stone & Symons.  "I can't see that
+Mr. Cowperwood is different from any other organizer of his day.  He
+seems to me perfectly sound and able.  All his companies pay.  There
+are no better investments than the North and West Chicago railways.  It
+would be advisable, in my judgment, that all the lines out there should
+be consolidated and be put in his charge. He would make money for the
+stockholders.  He seems to know how to run street-railways."
+
+"You know," replied Mr. Fishel, as smug and white as Mr. Haeckelheimer,
+and in thorough sympathy with his point of view, "I have been thinking
+of something like that myself.  All this quarreling should be hushed
+up.  It's very bad for business--very.  Once they get that
+public-ownership nonsense started, it will be hard to stop. There has
+been too much of it already."
+
+Mr. Fishel was stout and round like Mr. Haeckelheimer, but much
+smaller.  He was little more than a walking mathematical formula. In
+his cranium were financial theorems and syllogisms of the second,
+third, and fourth power only.
+
+And now behold a new trend of affairs.  Mr. Timothy Arneel, attacked by
+pneumonia, dies and leaves his holdings in Chicago City to his eldest
+son, Edward Arneel.  Mr. Fishel and Mr. Haeckelheimer, through agents
+and then direct, approach Mr. Merrill in behalf of Cowperwood.  There
+is much talk of profits--how much more profitable has been the
+Cowperwood regime over street-railway lines than that of Mr. Schryhart.
+Mr. Fishel is interested in allaying socialistic excitement.  So, by
+this time, is Mr. Merrill.  Directly hereafter Mr. Haeckelheimer
+approaches Mr. Edward Arneel, who is not nearly so forceful as his
+father, though he would like to be so.  He, strange to relate, has come
+rather to admire Cowperwood and sees no advantage in a policy that can
+only tend to municipalize local lines.  Mr. Merrill, for Mr. Fishel,
+approaches Mr. Hand.  "Never! never! never!" says Hand.  Mr.
+Haeckelheimer approaches Mr. Hand. "Never! never! never! To the devil
+with Mr. Cowperwood!" But as a final emissary for Mr. Haeckelheimer and
+Mr. Fishel there now appears Mr. Morgan Frankhauser, the partner of Mr.
+Hand in a seven-million-dollar traction scheme in Minneapolis and St.
+Paul. Why will Mr. Hand be so persistent? Why pursue a scheme of
+revenge which only stirs up the masses and makes municipal ownership a
+valid political idea, thus disturbing capital elsewhere? Why not trade
+his Chicago holdings to him, Frankhauser, for Pittsburg traction
+stock--share and share alike--and then fight Cowperwood all he pleases
+on the outside?
+
+Mr. Hand, puzzled, astounded, scratching his round head, slaps a heavy
+hand on his desk.  "Never!" he exclaims.  "Never, by God--as long as I
+am alive and in Chicago!" And then he yields.  Life does shifty things,
+he is forced to reflect in a most puzzled way. Never would he have
+believed it! "Schryhart," he declared to Frankhauser, "will never come
+in.  He will die first.  Poor old Timothy--if he were alive--he
+wouldn't either."
+
+"Leave Mr. Schryhart out of it, for Heaven's sake," pleaded Mr.
+Frankhauser, a genial American German.  "Haven't I troubles enough?"
+
+Mr. Schryhart is enraged.  Never! never! never! He will sell out
+first--but he is in a minority, and Mr. Frankhauser, for Mr. Fishel or
+Mr. Haeckelheimer, will gladly take his holdings.
+
+Now behold in the autumn of 1897 all rival Chicago street-railway lines
+brought to Mr. Cowperwood on a platter, as it were--a golden platter.
+
+"Ve haff it fixed," confidentially declared Mr. Gotloeb to Mr.
+Cowperwood, over an excellent dinner in the sacred precincts of the
+Metropolitan Club in New York.  Time, 8.30 P.M.  Wine--sparkling
+burgundy.  "A telegram come shusst to-day from Frankhauser.  A nice man
+dot.  You shouldt meet him sometime.  Hant--he sells out his stock to
+Frankhauser.  Merrill unt Edward Arneel vork vit us. Ve hantle
+efferyt'ing for dem.  Mr. Fishel vill haff his friends pick up all de
+local shares he can, unt mit dees tree ve control de board.  Schryhart
+iss out.  He sess he vill resign.  Very goot. I don't subbose dot vill
+make you veep any.  It all hintges now on vether you can get dot
+fifty-year-franchise ordinance troo de city council or not.
+Haeckelheimer sess he prefers you to all utters to run t'ings.  He vill
+leef everytink positifely in your hands.  Frankhauser sess de same.
+Vot Haeckelheimer sess he doess. Now dere you are.  It's up to you.  I
+vish you much choy.  It is no small chop you haff, beating de
+newspapers, unt you still haff Hant unt Schryhart against you.  Mr.
+Haeckelheimer askt me to pay his complimends to you unt to say vill you
+dine vit him next veek, or may he dine vit you--vicheffer iss most
+conveniend.  So."
+
+In the mayor's chair of Chicago at this time sat a man named Walden H.
+Lucas.  Aged thirty-eight, he was politically ambitious.  He had the
+elements of popularity--the knack or luck of fixing public attention.
+A fine, upstanding, healthy young buck he was, subtle, vigorous, a
+cool, direct, practical thinker and speaker, an eager enigmatic dreamer
+of great political honors to come, anxious to play his cards just
+right, to make friends, to be the pride of the righteous, and yet the
+not too uncompromising foe of the wicked. In short, a youthful, hopeful
+Western Machiavelli, and one who could, if he chose, serve the cause of
+the anti-Cowperwood struggle exceedingly well indeed.
+
+Cowperwood, disturbed, visits the mayor in his office.
+
+"Mr. Lucas, what is it you personally want? What can I do for you? Is
+it future political preferment you are after?"
+
+"Mr. Cowperwood, there isn't anything you can do for me.  You do not
+understand me, and I do not understand you.  You cannot understand me
+because I am an honest man."
+
+"Ye gods!" replied Cowperwood.  "This is certainly a case of
+self-esteem and great knowledge.  Good afternoon."
+
+Shortly thereafter the mayor was approached by one Mr. Carker, who was
+the shrewd, cold, and yet magnetic leader of Democracy in the state of
+New York.  Said Carker:
+
+"You see, Mr. Lucas, the great money houses of the East are interested
+in this local contest here in Chicago.  For example, Haeckelheimer,
+Gotloeb & Co. would like to see a consolidation of all the lines on a
+basis that will make them an attractive investment for buyers generally
+and will at the same time be fair and right to the city.  A twenty-year
+contract is much too short a term in their eyes.  Fifty is the least
+they could comfortably contemplate, and they would prefer a hundred.
+It is little enough for so great an outlay.  The policy now being
+pursued here can lead only to the public ownership of public utilities,
+and that is something which the national Democratic party at large can
+certainly not afford to advocate at present.  It would antagonize the
+money element from coast to coast.  Any man whose political record was
+definitely identified with such a movement would have no possible
+chance at even a state nomination, let alone a national one.  He could
+never be elected.  I make myself clear, do I not?"
+
+"You do."
+
+"A man can just as easily be taken from the mayor's office in Chicago
+as from the governor's office at Springfield," pursued Mr. Carker.
+"Mr. Haeckelheimer and Mr. Fishel have personally asked me to call on
+you.  If you want to be mayor of Chicago again for two years or
+governor next year, until the time for picking a candidate for the
+Presidency arrives, suit yourself.  In the mean time you will be
+unwise, in my judgment, to saddle yourself with this public-ownership
+idea.  The newspapers in fighting Mr. Cowperwood have raised an issue
+which never should have been raised."
+
+After Mr. Carker's departure, arrived Mr. Edward Arneel, of local
+renown, and then Mr. Jacob Bethal, the Democratic leader in San
+Francisco, both offering suggestions which if followed might result in
+mutual support.  There were in addition delegations of powerful
+Republicans from Minneapolis and from Philadelphia.  Even the president
+of the Lake City Bank and the president of the Prairie National--once
+anti-Cowperwood--arrived to say what had already been said.  So it
+went.  Mr. Lucas was greatly nonplussed.  A political career was surely
+a difficult thing to effect.  Would it pay to harry Mr. Cowperwood as
+he had set out to do? Would a steadfast policy advocating the cause of
+the people get him anywhere? Would they be grateful? Would they
+remember? Suppose the current policy of the newspapers should be
+modified, as Mr. Carker had suggested that it might be.  What a mess
+and tangle politics really were!
+
+"Well, Bessie," he inquired of his handsome, healthy, semi-blonde wife,
+one evening, "what would you do if you were I?"
+
+She was gray-eyed, gay, practical, vain, substantially connected in so
+far as family went, and proud of her husband's position and future.  He
+had formed the habit of talking over his various difficulties with her.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you, Wally," she replied.  "You've got to stick to
+something.  It looks to me as though the winning side was with the
+people this time.  I don't see how the newspapers can change now after
+all they've done.  You don't have to advocate public ownership or
+anything unfair to the money element, but just the same I'd stick to my
+point that the fifty-year franchise is too much.  You ought to make
+them pay the city something and get their franchise without bribery.
+They can't do less than that.  I'd stick to the course you've begun on.
+You can't get along without the people, Wally.  You just must have
+them.  If you lose their good will the politicians can't help you much,
+nor anybody else."
+
+Plainly there were times when the people had to be considered. They
+just had to be!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LX
+
+The Net
+
+
+The storm which burst in connection with Cowperwood's machinations at
+Springfield early in 1897, and continued without abating until the
+following fall, attracted such general attention that it was largely
+reported in the Eastern papers.  F. A. Cowperwood versus the state of
+Illinois--thus one New York daily phrased the situation. The
+magnetizing power of fame is great.  Who can resist utterly the luster
+that surrounds the individualities of some men, causing them to glow
+with a separate and special effulgence? Even in the case of Berenice
+this was not without its value.  In a Chicago paper which she found
+lying one day on a desk which Cowperwood had occupied was an extended
+editorial which interested her greatly. After reciting his various
+misdeeds, particularly in connection with the present state
+legislature, it went on to say: "He has an innate, chronic,
+unconquerable contempt for the rank and file. Men are but slaves and
+thralls to draw for him the chariot of his greatness.  Never in all his
+history has he seen fit to go to the people direct for anything.  In
+Philadelphia, when he wanted public-franchise control, he sought
+privily and by chicane to arrange his affairs with a venal city
+treasurer.  In Chicago he has uniformly sought to buy and convert to
+his own use the splendid privileges of the city, which should really
+redound to the benefit of all.  Frank Algernon Cowperwood does not
+believe in the people; he does not trust them.  To him they constitute
+no more than a field upon which corn is to be sown, and from which it
+is to be reaped.  They present but a mass of bent backs, their knees
+and faces in the mire, over which as over a floor he strides to
+superiority.  His private and inmost faith is in himself alone. Upon
+the majority he shuts the gates of his glory in order that the sight of
+their misery and their needs may not disturb nor alloy his selfish
+bliss.  Frank Algernon Cowperwood does not believe in the people."
+
+This editorial battle-cry, flung aloft during the latter days of the
+contest at Springfield and taken up by the Chicago papers generally and
+by those elsewhere, interested Berenice greatly. As she thought of
+him--waging his terrific contests, hurrying to and fro between New York
+and Chicago, building his splendid mansion, collecting his pictures,
+quarreling with Aileen--he came by degrees to take on the outlines of a
+superman, a half-god or demi-gorgon. How could the ordinary rules of
+life or the accustomed paths of men be expected to control him? They
+could not and did not.  And here he was pursuing her, seeking her out
+with his eyes, grateful for a smile, waiting as much as he dared on her
+every wish and whim.
+
+Say what one will, the wish buried deep in every woman's heart is that
+her lover should be a hero.  Some, out of the veriest stick or stone,
+fashion the idol before which they kneel, others demand the hard
+reality of greatness; but in either case the illusion of
+paragon-worship is maintained.
+
+Berenice, by no means ready to look upon Cowperwood as an accepted
+lover, was nevertheless gratified that his erring devotion was the
+tribute of one able apparently to command thought from the whole world.
+Moreover, because the New York papers had taken fire from his great
+struggle in the Middle West and were charging him with bribery,
+perjury, and intent to thwart the will of the people, Cowperwood now
+came forward with an attempt to explain his exact position to Berenice
+and to justify himself in her eyes.  During visits to the Carter house
+or in entr'actes at the opera or the theater, he recounted to her bit
+by bit his entire history.  He described the characters of Hand,
+Schryhart, Arneel, and the motives of jealousy and revenge which had
+led to their attack upon him in Chicago.  "No human being could get
+anything through the Chicago City Council without paying for it," he
+declared.  "It's simply a question of who's putting up the money." He
+told how Truman Leslie MacDonald had once tried to "shake him down" for
+fifty thousand dollars, and how the newspapers had since found it
+possible to make money, to increase their circulation, by attacking
+him.  He frankly admitted the fact of his social ostracism, attributing
+it partially to Aileen's deficiencies and partially to his own attitude
+of Promethean defiance, which had never yet brooked defeat.
+
+"And I will defeat them now," he said, solemnly, to Berenice one day
+over a luncheon-table at the Plaza when the room was nearly empty.  His
+gray eyes were a study in colossal enigmatic spirit. "The governor
+hasn't signed my fifty-year franchise bill" (this was before the
+closing events at Springfield), "but he will sign it.  Then I have one
+more fight ahead of me.  I'm going to combine all the traffic lines out
+there under one general system.  I am the logical person to provide it.
+Later on, if public ownership ever arrives, the city can buy it."
+
+"And then--" asked Berenice sweetly, flattered by his confidences.
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  I suppose I'll live abroad.  You don't seem to be
+very much interested in me.  I'll finish my picture collection--"
+
+"But supposing you should lose?"
+
+"I don't contemplate losing," he remarked, coolly.  "Whatever happens,
+I'll have enough to live on.  I'm a little tired of contest."
+
+He smiled, but Berenice saw that the thought of defeat was a gray one.
+With victory was his heart, and only there.  Owing to the national
+publicity being given to Cowperwood's affairs at this time the effect
+upon Berenice of these conversations with him was considerable.  At the
+same time another and somewhat sinister influence was working in his
+favor.  By slow degrees she and her mother were coming to learn that
+the ultra-conservatives of society were no longer willing to accept
+them.  Berenice had become at last too individual a figure to be
+overlooked.  At an important luncheon given by the Harris Haggertys,
+some five months after the Beales Chadsey affair, she had been pointed
+out to Mrs. Haggerty by a visiting guest from Cincinnati as some one
+with whom rumor was concerning itself.  Mrs. Haggerty wrote to friends
+in Louisville for information, and received it.  Shortly after, at the
+coming-out party of a certain Geraldine Borga, Berenice, who had been
+her sister's schoolmate, was curiously omitted.  She took sharp note of
+that.  Subsequently the Haggertys failed to include her, as they had
+always done before, in their generous summer invitations. This was true
+also of the Lanman Zeiglers and the Lucas Demmigs. No direct affront
+was offered; she was simply no longer invited. Also one morning she
+read in the Tribune that Mrs. Corscaden Batjer had sailed for Italy.
+No word of this had been sent to Berenice.  Yet Mrs. Batjer was
+supposedly one of her best friends. A hint to some is of more avail
+than an open statement to others. Berenice knew quite well in which
+direction the tide was setting.
+
+True, there were a number--the ultra-smart of the smart world--who
+protested.  Mrs. Patrick Gilbennin, for instance: "No! You don't tell
+me? What a shame! Well, I like Bevy and shall always like her.  She's
+clever, and she can come here just as long as she chooses.  It isn't
+her fault.  She's a lady at heart and always will be.  Life is so
+cruel." Mrs. Augustus Tabreez: "Is that really true? I can't believe
+it.  Just the same, she's too charming to be dropped.  I for one
+propose to ignore these rumors just as long as I dare.  She can come
+here if she can't go anywhere else." Mrs. Pennington Drury: "That of
+Bevy Fleming! Who says so? I don't believe it.  I like her anyhow.  The
+idea of the Haggertys cutting her--dull fools! Well, she can be my
+guest, the dear thing, as long as she pleases.  As though her mother's
+career really affected her!"
+
+Nevertheless, in the world of the dull rich--those who hold their own
+by might of possession, conformity, owl-eyed sobriety, and
+ignorance--Bevy Fleming had become persona non grata.  How did she take
+all this? With that air of superior consciousness which knows that no
+shift of outer material ill-fortune can detract one jot from an inward
+mental superiority.  The truly individual know themselves from the
+beginning and rarely, if ever, doubt.  Life may play fast and loose
+about them, running like a racing, destructive tide in and out, but
+they themselves are like a rock, still, serene, unmoved.  Bevy Fleming
+felt herself to be so immensely superior to anything of which she was a
+part that she could afford to hold her head high even now Just the
+same, in order to remedy the situation she now looked about her with an
+eye single to a possible satisfactory marriage.  Braxmar had gone for
+good.  He was somewhere in the East--in China, she heard--his
+infatuation for her apparently dead.  Kilmer Duelma was gone
+also--snapped up--an acquisition on the part of one of those families
+who did not now receive her. However, in the drawing-rooms where she
+still appeared--and what were they but marriage markets?--one or two
+affairs did spring up--tentative approachments on the part of scions of
+wealth.  They were destined to prove abortive.  One of these youths,
+Pedro Ricer Marcado, a Brazilian, educated at Oxford, promised much for
+sincerity and feeling until he learned that Berenice was poor in her
+own right--and what else? Some one had whispered something in his ear.
+Again there was a certain William Drake Bowdoin, the son of a famous
+old family, who lived on the north side of Washington Square. After a
+ball, a morning musicale, and one other affair at which they met
+Bowdoin took Berenice to see his mother and sister, who were charmed.
+"Oh, you serene divinity!" he said to her, ecstatically, one day.
+"Won't you marry me?" Bevy looked at him and wondered. "Let us wait
+just a little longer, my dear," she counseled.  "I want you to be sure
+that you really love me.  Shortly thereafter, meeting an old classmate
+at a club, Bowdoin was greeted as follows:
+
+"Look here, Bowdoin.  You're a friend of mine.  I see you with that
+Miss Fleming.  Now, I don't know how far things have gone, and I don't
+want to intrude, but are you sure you are aware of all the aspects of
+the case?"
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Bowdoin.  "I want you to speak out."
+
+"Oh, pardon, old man.  No offense, really.  You know me.  I couldn't.
+College--and all that.  Just this, though, before you go any further.
+Inquire about.  You may hear things.  If they're true you ought to
+know.  If not, the talking ought to stop.  If I'm wrong call on me for
+amends.  I hear talk, I tell you.  Best intentions in the world, old
+man.  I do assure you."
+
+More inquiries.  The tongues of jealousy and envy.  Mr. Bowdoin was
+sure to inherit three million dollars.  Then a very necessary trip to
+somewhere, and Berenice stared at herself in the glass. What was it?
+What were people saying, if anything? This was strange. Well, she was
+young and beautiful.  There were others.  Still, she might have come to
+love Bowdoin.  He was so airy, artistic in an unconscious way.  Really,
+she had thought better of him.
+
+The effect of all this was not wholly depressing.  Enigmatic,
+disdainful, with a touch of melancholy and a world of gaiety and
+courage, Berenice heard at times behind joy the hollow echo of
+unreality.  Here was a ticklish business, this living.  For want of
+light and air the finest flowers might die.  Her mother's error was not
+so inexplicable now.  By it had she not, after all, preserved herself
+and her family to a certain phase of social superiority? Beauty was of
+such substance as dreams are made of, and as fleeting. Not one's self
+alone--one's inmost worth, the splendor of one's dreams--but other
+things--name, wealth, the presence or absence of rumor, and of
+accident--were important.  Berenice's lip curled. But life could be
+lived.  One could lie to the world.  Youth is optimistic, and Berenice,
+in spite of her splendid mind, was so young.  She saw life as a game, a
+good chance, that could be played in many ways.  Cowperwood's theory of
+things began to appeal to her.  One must create one's own career, carve
+it out, or remain horribly dull or bored, dragged along at the chariot
+wheels of others.  If society was so finicky, if men were so
+dull--well, there was one thing she could do.  She must have life,
+life--and money would help some to that end.
+
+Besides, Cowperwood by degrees was becoming attractive to her; he
+really was.  He was so much better than most of the others, so very
+powerful.  She was preternaturally gay, as one who says, "Victory shall
+be mine anyhow."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LXI
+
+The Cataclysm
+
+
+And now at last Chicago is really facing the thing which it has most
+feared.  A giant monopoly is really reaching out to enfold it with an
+octopus-like grip.  And Cowperwood is its eyes, its tentacles, its
+force! Embedded in the giant strength and good will of Haeckelheimer,
+Gotloeb & Co., he is like a monument based on a rock of great strength.
+A fifty-year franchise, to be delivered to him by a majority of
+forty-eight out of a total of sixty-eight aldermen (in case the
+ordinance has to be passed over the mayor's veto), is all that now
+stands between him and the realization of his dreams.  What a triumph
+for his iron policy of courage in the face of all obstacles! What a
+tribute to his ability not to flinch in the face of storm and stress!
+Other men might have abandoned the game long before, but not he.  What
+a splendid windfall of chance that the money element should of its own
+accord take fright at the Chicago idea of the municipalization of
+public privilege and should hand him this giant South Side system as a
+reward for his stern opposition to fol-de-rol theories.
+
+Through the influence of these powerful advocates he was invited to
+speak before various local commercial bodies--the Board of Real Estate
+Dealers, the Property Owners' Association, the Merchants' League, the
+Bankers' Union, and so forth, where he had an opportunity to present
+his case and justify his cause.  But the effect of his suave
+speechifyings in these quarters was largely neutralized by newspaper
+denunciation.  "Can any good come out of Nazareth?" was the regular
+inquiry.  That section of the press formerly beholden to Hand and
+Schryhart stood out as bitterly as ever; and most of the other
+newspapers, being under no obligation to Eastern capital, felt it the
+part of wisdom to support the rank and file.  The most searching and
+elaborate mathematical examinations were conducted with a view to
+showing the fabulous profits of the streetcar trust in future years.
+The fine hand of Eastern banking-houses was detected and their sinister
+motives noised abroad.  "Millions for everybody in the trust, but not
+one cent for Chicago," was the Inquirer's way of putting it.  Certain
+altruists of the community were by now so aroused that in the
+destruction of Cowperwood they saw their duty to God, to humanity, and
+to democracy straight and clear.  The heavens had once more opened, and
+they saw a great light.  On the other hand the politicians--those in
+office outside the mayor--constituted a petty band of guerrillas or
+free-booters who, like hungry swine shut in a pen, were ready to fall
+upon any and all propositions brought to their attention with but one
+end in view: that they might eat, and eat heartily.  In times of great
+opportunity and contest for privilege life always sinks to its lowest
+depths of materialism and rises at the same time to its highest reaches
+of the ideal.  When the waves of the sea are most towering its hollows
+are most awesome.
+
+Finally the summer passed, the council assembled, and with the first
+breath of autumn chill the very air of the city was touched by a
+premonition of contest.  Cowperwood, disappointed by the outcome of his
+various ingratiatory efforts, decided to fall back on his old reliable
+method of bribery.  He fixed on his price--twenty thousand dollars for
+each favorable vote, to begin with. Later, if necessary, he would raise
+it to twenty-five thousand, or even thirty thousand, making the total
+cost in the neighborhood of a million and a half.  Yet it was a small
+price indeed when the ultimate return was considered.  He planned to
+have his ordinance introduced by an alderman named Ballenberg, a
+trusted lieutenant, and handed thereafter to the clerk, who would read
+it, whereupon another henchman would rise to move that it be referred
+to the joint committee on streets and alleys, consisting of thirty-four
+members drawn from all the standing committees.  By this committee it
+would be considered for one week in the general council-chamber, where
+public hearings would be held.  By keeping up a bold front Cowperwood
+thought the necessary iron could be put into his followers to enable
+them to go through with the scorching ordeal which was sure to follow.
+Already aldermen were being besieged at their homes and in the
+precincts of the ward clubs and meeting-places. Their mail was being
+packed with importuning or threatening letters. Their very children
+were being derided, their neighbors urged to chastise them.  Ministers
+wrote them in appealing or denunciatory vein.  They were spied upon and
+abused daily in the public prints. The mayor, shrewd son of battle that
+he was, realizing that he had a whip of terror in his hands, excited by
+the long contest waged, and by the smell of battle, was not backward in
+urging the most drastic remedies.
+
+"Wait till the thing comes up," he said to his friends, in a great
+central music-hall conference in which thousands participated, and when
+the matter of ways and means to defeat the venal aldermen was being
+discussed.  "We have Mr. Cowperwood in a corner, I think. He cannot do
+anything for two weeks, once his ordinance is in, and by that time we
+shall be able to organize a vigilance committee, ward meetings,
+marching clubs, and the like.  We ought to organize a great central
+mass-meeting for the Sunday night before the Monday when the bill comes
+up for final hearing.  We want overflow meetings in every ward at the
+same time.  I tell you, gentlemen, that, while I believe there are
+enough honest voters in the city council to prevent the Cowperwood
+crowd from passing this bill over my veto, yet I don't think the matter
+ought to be allowed to go that far. You never can tell what these
+rascals will do once they see an actual cash bid of twenty or thirty
+thousand dollars before them. Most of them, even if they were lucky,
+would never make the half of that in a lifetime.  They don't expect to
+be returned to the Chicago City Council.  Once is enough.  There are
+too many others behind them waiting to get their noses in the trough.
+Go into your respective wards and districts and organize meetings.
+Call your particular alderman before you.  Don't let him evade you or
+quibble or stand on his rights as a private citizen or a public
+officer.  Threaten--don't cajole.  Soft or kind words won't go with
+that type of man.  Threaten, and when you have managed to extract a
+promise be on hand with ropes to see that he keeps his word.  I don't
+like to advise arbitrary methods, but what else is to be done? The
+enemy is armed and ready for action right now. They're just waiting for
+a peaceful moment.  Don't let them find it.  Be ready.  Fight.  I'm
+your mayor, and ready to do all I can, but I stand alone with a mere
+pitiful veto right.  You help me and I'll help you.  You fight for me
+and I'll fight for you."
+
+Witness hereafter the discomfiting situation of Mr. Simon Pinski at 9
+P.M. on the second evening following the introduction of the ordinance,
+in the ward house of the Fourteenth Ward Democratic Club.  Rotund,
+flaccid, red-faced, his costume a long black frock-coat and silk hat,
+Mr. Pinski was being heckled by his neighbors and business associates.
+He had been called here by threats to answer for his prospective high
+crimes and misdemeanors. By now it was pretty well understood that
+nearly all the present aldermen were criminal and venal, and in
+consequence party enmities were practically wiped out.  There were no
+longer for the time being Democrats and Republicans, but only pro or
+anti Cowperwoods--principally anti.  Mr. Pinski, unfortunately, had
+been singled out by the Transcript, the Inquirer, and the Chronicle as
+one of those open to advance questioning by his constituents.  Of mixed
+Jewish and American extraction, he had been born and raised in the
+Fourteenth and spoke with a decidedly American accent.  He was neither
+small nor large--sandy-haired, shifty-eyed, cunning, and on most
+occasions amiable.  Just now he was decidedly nervous, wrathy, and
+perplexed, for he had been brought here against his will.  His slightly
+oleaginous eye--not unlike that of a small pig--had been fixed
+definitely and finally on the munificent sum of thirty thousand
+dollars, no less, and this local agitation threatened to deprive him of
+his almost unalienable right to the same.  His ordeal took place in a
+large, low-ceiled room illuminated by five very plain, thin, two-armed
+gas-jets suspended from the ceiling and adorned by posters of
+prizefights, raffles, games, and the "Simon Pinski Pleasure
+Association" plastered here and there freely against dirty,
+long-unwhitewashed walls.  He stood on the low raised platform at the
+back of the room, surrounded by a score or more of his ward henchmen,
+all more or less reliable, all black-frocked, or at least in their
+Sunday clothes; all scowling, nervous, defensive, red-faced, and
+fearing trouble.  Mr. Pinski has come armed.  This talk of the mayor's
+concerning guns, ropes, drums, marching clubs, and the like has been
+given very wide publicity, and the public seems rather eager for a
+Chicago holiday in which the slaughter of an alderman or so might
+furnish the leading and most acceptable feature.
+
+"Hey, Pinski!" yells some one out of a small sea of new and decidedly
+unfriendly faces.  (This is no meeting of Pinski followers, but a
+conglomerate outpouring of all those elements of a distrait populace
+bent on enforcing for once the principles of aldermanic decency. There
+are even women here--local church-members, and one or two advanced
+civic reformers and W. C. T. U. bar-room smashers.  Mr. Pinski has been
+summoned to their presence by the threat that if he didn't come the
+noble company would seek him out later at his own house.)
+
+"Hey, Pinski! You old boodler! How much do you expect to get out of
+this traction business?" (This from a voice somewhere in the rear.)
+
+Mr. Pinski (turning to one side as if pinched in the neck).  "The man
+that says I am a boodler is a liar! I never took a dishonest dollar in
+my life, and everybody in the Fourteenth Ward knows it."
+
+The Five Hundred People Assembled.  "Ha! ha! ha! Pinski never took a
+dollar! Ho! ho! ho! Whoop-ee!"
+
+Mr. Pinski (very red-faced, rising).  "It is so.  Why should I talk to
+a lot of loafers that come here because the papers tell them to call me
+names? I have been an alderman for six years now. Everybody knows me."
+
+A Voice.  "You call us loafers.  You crook!"
+
+Another Voice (referring to his statement of being known).  "You bet
+they do!"
+
+Another Voice (this from a small, bony plumber in workclothes). "Hey,
+you old grafter! Which way do you expect to vote? For or against this
+franchise? Which way?"
+
+Still Another Voice (an insurance clerk).  "Yes, which way?"
+
+Mr. Pinski (rising once more, for in his nervousness he is constantly
+rising or starting to rise, and then sitting down again).  "I have a
+right to my own mind, ain't I? I got a right to think.  What for am I
+an alderman, then? The constitution..."
+
+An Anti-Pinski Republican (a young law clerk).  "To hell with the
+constitution! No fine words now, Pinski.  Which way do you expect to
+vote? For or against? Yes or no?"
+
+A Voice (that of a bricklayer, anti-Pinski).  "He daresn't say. He's
+got some of that bastard's money in his jeans now, I'll bet."
+
+A Voice from Behind (one of Pinski's henchmen--a heavy, pugilistic
+Irishman).  "Don't let them frighten you, Sim.  Stand your ground. They
+can't hurt you.  We're here."
+
+Pinski (getting up once more).  "This is an outrage, I say.  Ain't I
+gon' to be allowed to say what I think? There are two sides to every
+question.  Now, I think whatever the newspapers say that Cowperwood--"
+
+A Journeyman Carpenter (a reader of the Inquirer).  "You're bribed, you
+thief! You're beating about the bush.  You want to sell out."
+
+The Bony Plumber.  "Yes, you crook! You want to get away with thirty
+thousand dollars, that's what you want, you boodler!"
+
+Mr. Pinski (defiantly, egged on by voices from behind).  "I want to be
+fair--that's what.  I want to keep my own mind.  The constitution gives
+everybody the right of free speech--even me. I insist that the
+street-car companies have some rights; at the same time the people have
+rights too."
+
+A Voice.  "What are those rights?"
+
+Another Voice.  "He don't know.  He wouldn't know the people's rights
+from a sawmill."
+
+Another Voice.  "Or a load of hay."
+
+Pinski (continuing very defiantly now, since he has not yet been
+slain).  "I say the people have their rights.  The companies ought to
+be made to pay a fair tax.  But this twenty-year-franchise idea is too
+little, I think.  The Mears bill now gives them fifty years, and I
+think all told--"
+
+The Five Hundred (in chorus).  "Ho, you robber! You thief! You boodler!
+Hang him! Ho! ho! ho! Get a rope!"
+
+Pinski (retreating within a defensive circle as various citizens
+approach him, their eyes blazing, their teeth showing, their fists
+clenched).  "My friends, wait! Ain't I goin' to be allowed to finish?"
+
+A Voice.  "We'll finish you, you stiff!"
+
+A Citizen (advancing; a bearded Pole).  "How will you vote, hey? Tell
+us that! How? Hey?"
+
+A Second Citizen (a Jew).  "You're a no-good, you robber.  I know you
+for ten years now already.  You cheated me when you were in the grocery
+business."
+
+A Third Citizen (a Swede.  In a sing-song voice).  "Answer me this, Mr.
+Pinski.  If a majority of the citizens of the Fourteenth Ward don't
+want you to vote for it, will you still vote for it?"
+
+Pinski (hesitating).
+
+The Five Hundred.  "Ho! look at the scoundrel! He's afraid to say. He
+don't know whether he'll do what the people of this ward want him to
+do.  Kill him! Brain him!"
+
+A Voice from Behind.  "Aw, stand up, Pinski.  Don't be afraid." Pinski
+(terrorized as the five hundred make a rush for the stage). "If the
+people don't want me to do it, of course I won't do it. Why should I?
+Ain't I their representative?"
+
+A Voice.  "Yes, when you think you're going to get the wadding kicked
+out of you."
+
+Another Voice.  "You wouldn't be honest with your mother, you bastard.
+You couldn't be!"
+
+Pinski.  "If one-half the voters should ask me not to do it I wouldn't
+do it."
+
+A Voice.  "Well, we'll get the voters to ask you, all right.  We'll get
+nine-tenths of them to sign before to-morrow night."
+
+An Irish-American (aged twenty-six; a gas collector; coming close to
+Pinski).  "If you don't vote right we'll hang you, and I'll be there to
+help pull the rope myself."
+
+One of Pinski's Lieutenants.  "Say, who is that freshie? We want to lay
+for him.  One good kick in the right place will just about finish him."
+
+The Gas Collector.  "Not from you, you carrot-faced terrier.  Come
+outside and see." (Business of friends interfering).
+
+The meeting becomes disorderly.  Pinski is escorted out by
+friends--completely surrounded--amid shrieks and hisses, cat-calls,
+cries of "Boodler!" "Thief!" "Robber!"
+
+There were many such little dramatic incidents after the ordinance had
+been introduced.
+
+Henceforth on the streets, in the wards and outlying sections, and
+even, on occasion, in the business heart, behold the marching
+clubs--those sinister, ephemeral organizations which on demand of the
+mayor had cropped out into existence--great companies of the
+unheralded, the dull, the undistinguished--clerks, working-men, small
+business men, and minor scions of religion or morality; all tramping to
+and fro of an evening, after working-hours, assembling in cheap halls
+and party club-houses, and drilling themselves to what end? That they
+might march to the city hall on the fateful Monday night when the
+street-railway ordinances should be up for passage and demand of
+unregenerate lawmakers that they do their duty.  Cowperwood, coming
+down to his office one morning on his own elevated lines, was the
+observer of a button or badge worn upon the coat lapel of stolid,
+inconsequential citizens who sat reading their papers, unconscious of
+that presence which epitomized the terror and the power they all
+feared.  One of these badges had for its device a gallows with a free
+noose suspended; another was blazoned with the query: "Are we going to
+be robbed?" On sign-boards, fences, and dead walls huge posters, four
+by six feet in dimension, were displayed.
+
+                          WALDEN H. LUCAS
+
+                            against the
+
+                             BOODLERS
+                   ===========================
+                 Every citizen of Chicago should
+                 come  down  to  the  City  Hall
+
+                            TO-NIGHT
+                         MONDAY, DEC. 12
+                   ===========================
+                      and every Monday night
+                  thereafter while the Street-car
+                Franchises are under consideration,
+                     and see that the interests
+                 of the city are protected against
+
+                           BOODLEISM
+                           =========
+              Citizens, Arouse and Defeat the Boodlers!
+
+In the papers were flaring head-lines; in the clubs, halls, and
+churches fiery speeches could nightly be heard.  Men were drunk now
+with a kind of fury of contest.  They would not succumb to this Titan
+who was bent on undoing them.  They would not be devoured by this
+gorgon of the East.  He should be made to pay an honest return to the
+city or get out.  No fifty-year franchise should be granted him.  The
+Mears law must be repealed, and he must come into the city council
+humble and with clean hands.  No alderman who received as much as a
+dollar for his vote should in this instance be safe with his life.
+
+Needless to say that in the face of such a campaign of intimidation
+only great courage could win.  The aldermen were only human.  In the
+council committee-chamber Cowperwood went freely among them, explaining
+as he best could the justice of his course and making it plain that,
+although willing to buy his rights, he looked on them as no more than
+his due.  The rule of the council was barter, and he accepted it.  His
+unshaken and unconquerable defiance heartened his followers greatly,
+and the thought of thirty thousand dollars was as a buttress against
+many terrors.  At the same time many an alderman speculated solemnly as
+to what he would do afterward and where he would go once he had sold
+out.
+
+At last the Monday night arrived which was to bring the final test of
+strength.  Picture the large, ponderous structure of black
+granite--erected at the expense of millions and suggesting somewhat the
+somnolent architecture of ancient Egypt--which served as the city hall
+and county court-house combined.  On this evening the four streets
+surrounding it were packed with thousands of people. To this throng
+Cowperwood has become an astounding figure: his wealth fabulous, his
+heart iron, his intentions sinister--the acme of cruel, plotting
+deviltry.  Only this day, the Chronicle, calculating well the hour and
+the occasion, has completely covered one of its pages with an intimate,
+though exaggerated, description of Cowperwood's house in New York: his
+court of orchids, his sunrise room, the baths of pink and blue
+alabaster, the finishings of marble and intaglio.  Here Cowperwood was
+represented as seated in a swinging divan, his various books, art
+treasures, and comforts piled about him.  The idea was vaguely
+suggested that in his sybaritic hours odalesques danced before him and
+unnamable indulgences and excesses were perpetrated.
+
+At this same hour in the council-chamber itself were assembling as
+hungry and bold a company of gray wolves as was ever gathered under one
+roof.  The room was large, ornamented to the south by tall windows, its
+ceiling supporting a heavy, intricate chandelier, its sixty-six
+aldermanic desks arranged in half-circles, one behind the other; its
+woodwork of black oak carved and highly polished; its walls a dark
+blue-gray decorated with arabesques in gold--thus giving to all
+proceedings an air of dignity and stateliness.  Above the speaker's
+head was an immense portrait in oil of a former mayor--poorly done,
+dusty, and yet impressive.  The size and character of the place gave on
+ordinary occasions a sort of resonance to the voices of the speakers.
+To-night through the closed windows could be heard the sound of distant
+drums and marching feet.  In the hall outside the council door were
+packed at least a thousand men with ropes, sticks, a fife-and-drum
+corps which occasionally struck up "Hail! Columbia, Happy Land," "My
+Country, 'Tis of Thee," and "Dixie." Alderman Schlumbohm, heckled to
+within an inch of his life, followed to the council door by three
+hundred of his fellow-citizens, was there left with the admonition that
+they would be waiting for him when he should make his exit.  He was at
+last seriously impressed.
+
+"What is this?" he asked of his neighbor and nearest associate,
+Alderman Gavegan, when he gained the safety of his seat.  "A free
+country?"
+
+"Search me!" replied his compatriot, wearily.  "I never seen such a
+band as I have to deal with out in the Twentieth.  Why, my God! a man
+can't call his name his own any more out here.  It's got so now the
+newspapers tell everybody what to do."
+
+Alderman Pinski and Alderman Hoherkorn, conferring together in one
+corner, were both very dour.  "I'll tell you what, Joe," said Pinski to
+his confrere; "it's this fellow Lucas that has got the people so
+stirred up.  I didn't go home last night because I didn't want those
+fellows to follow me down there.  Me and my wife stayed down-town.  But
+one of the boys was over here at Jake's a little while ago, and he says
+there must 'a' been five hundred people around my house at six o'clock,
+already.  Whad ye think o' that?"
+
+"Same here.  I don't take much stock in this lynching idea.  Still, you
+can't tell.  I don't know whether the police could help us much or not.
+It's a damned outrage.  Cowperwood has a fair proposition.  What's the
+matter with them, anyhow?"
+
+Renewed sounds of "Marching Through Georgia" from without.
+
+Enter at this time Aldermen Ziner, Knudson, Revere, Rogers, Tiernan,
+and Kerrigan.  Of all the aldermen perhaps Messrs. Tiernan and Kerrigan
+were as cool as any.  Still the spectacle of streets blocked with
+people who carried torches and wore badges showing slip-nooses attached
+to a gallows was rather serious.
+
+"I'll tell you, Pat," said "Smiling Mike," as they eventually made the
+door through throngs of jeering citizens; "it does look a little rough.
+Whad ye think?"
+
+"To hell with them!" replied Kerrigan, angry, waspish, determined.
+"They don't run me or my ward.  I'll vote as I damn please."
+
+"Same here," replied Tiernan, with a great show of courage.  "That goes
+for me.  But it's putty warm, anyhow, eh?"
+
+"Yes, it's warm, all right," replied Kerrigan, suspicious lest his
+companion in arms might be weakening, "but that'll never make a quitter
+out of me."
+
+"Nor me, either," replied the Smiling One.
+
+Enter now the mayor, accompanied by a fife-and-drum corps rendering
+"Hail to the Chief." He ascends the rostrum.  Outside in the halls the
+huzzas of the populace.  In the gallery overhead a picked audience.  As
+the various aldermen look up they contemplate a sea of unfriendly
+faces.  "Get on to the mayor's guests," commented one alderman to
+another, cynically.
+
+A little sparring for time while minor matters are considered, and the
+gallery is given opportunity for comment on the various communal
+lights, identifying for itself first one local celebrity and then
+another.  "There's Johnnie Dowling, that big blond fellow with the
+round head; there's Pinski--look at the little rat; there's Kerrigan.
+Get on to the emerald.  Eh, Pat, how's the jewelry? You won't get any
+chance to do any grafting to-night, Pat.  You won't pass no ordinance
+to-night."
+
+Alderman Winkler (pro-Cowperwood).  "If the chair pleases, I think
+something ought to be done to restore order in the gallery and keep
+these proceedings from being disturbed.  It seems to me an outrage,
+that, on an occasion of this kind, when the interests of the people
+require the most careful attention--"
+
+A Voice.  "The interests of the people!"
+
+Another Voice.  "Sit down.  You're bought!"
+
+Alderman Winkler.  "If the chair pleases--"
+
+The Mayor.  "I shall have to ask the audience in the gallery to keep
+quiet in order that the business in hand may be considered." (Applause,
+and the gallery lapses into silence.)
+
+Alderman Guigler (to Alderman Sumulsky).  "Well trained, eh?"
+
+Alderman Ballenberg (pro-Cowperwood, getting up--large, brown, florid,
+smooth-faced).  "Before calling up an ordinance which bears my name I
+should like to ask permission of the council to make a statement.  When
+I introduced this ordinance last week I said--"
+
+A Voice.  "We know what you said."
+
+Alderman Ballenberg.  "I said that I did so by request.  I want to
+explain that it was at the request of a number of gentlemen who have
+since appeared before the committee of this council that now has this
+ordinance--"
+
+A Voice.  "That's all right, Ballenberg.  We know by whose request you
+introduced it.  You've said your little say."
+
+Alderman Ballenberg.  "If the chair pleases--"
+
+A Voice.  "Sit down, Ballenberg.  Give some other boodler a chance."
+
+The Mayor.  "Will the gallery please stop interrupting."
+
+Alderman Horanek (jumping to his feet).  "This is an outrage.  The
+gallery is packed with people come here to intimidate us.  Here is a
+great public corporation that has served this city for years, and
+served it well, and when it comes to this body with a sensible
+proposition we ain't even allowed to consider it.  The mayor packs the
+gallery with his friends, and the papers stir up people to come down
+here by thousands and try to frighten us.  I for one--"
+
+A Voice.  "What's the matter, Billy? Haven't you got your money yet?"
+
+Alderman Hvranek (Polish-American, intelligent, even artistic looking,
+shaking his fist at the gallery).  "You dare not come down here and say
+that, you coward!"
+
+A Chorus of Fifty Voices.  "Rats!" (also) "Billy, you ought to have
+wings."
+
+Alderman Tiernan (rising).  "I say now, Mr. Mayor, don't you think
+we've had enough of this?"
+
+A Voice.  "Well, look who's here.  If it ain't Smiling Mike."
+
+Another Voice.  "How much do you expect to get, Mike?"
+
+Alderman Tiernan (turning to gallery).  "I want to say I can lick any
+man that wants to come down here and talk to me to my face. I'm not
+afraid of no ropes and no guns.  These corporations have done
+everything for the city--"
+
+A Voice.  "Aw!"
+
+Alderman Tiernan.  "If it wasn't for the street-car companies we
+wouldn't have any city."
+
+Ten Voices.  "Aw!"
+
+Alderman Tiernan (bravely).  "My mind ain't the mind of some people."
+
+A Voice.  "I should say not."
+
+Alderman Tiernan.  "I'm talking for compensation for the privileges we
+expect to give."
+
+A Voice.  "You're talking for your pocket-book."
+
+Alderman Tiernan.  "I don't give a damn for these cheap skates and
+cowards in the gallery.  I say treat these corporations right. They
+have helped make the city."
+
+A Chorus of Fifty Voices.  "Aw! You want to treat yourself right,
+that's what you want.  You vote right to-night or you'll be sorry."
+
+By now the various aldermen outside of the most hardened characters
+were more or less terrified by the grilling contest.  It could do no
+good to battle with this gallery or the crowd outside.  Above them sat
+the mayor, before them reporters, ticking in shorthand every phrase and
+word.  "I don't see what we can do," said Alderman Pinski to Alderman
+Hvranek, his neighbor.  "It looks to me as if we might just as well not
+try."
+
+At this point arose Alderman Gilleran, small, pale, intelligent,
+anti-Cowperwood.  By prearrangement he had been scheduled to bring the
+second, and as it proved, the final test of strength to the issue.  "If
+the chair pleases," he said, "I move that the vote by which the
+Ballenberg fifty-year ordinance was referred to the joint committee of
+streets and alleys be reconsidered, and that instead it be referred to
+the committee on city hall."
+
+This was a committee that hitherto had always been considered by
+members of council as of the least importance.  Its principal duties
+consisted in devising new names for streets and regulating the hours of
+city-hall servants.  There were no perquisites, no graft.  In a spirit
+of ribald defiance at the organization of the present session all the
+mayor's friends--the reformers--those who could not be trusted--had
+been relegated to this committee.  Now it was proposed to take this
+ordinance out of the hands of friends and send it here, from whence
+unquestionably it would never reappear. The great test had come.
+
+Alderman Hoberkorn (mouthpiece for his gang because the most skilful in
+a parliamentary sense).  "The vote cannot be reconsidered." He begins a
+long explanation amid hisses.
+
+A Voice.  "How much have you got?"
+
+A Second Voice.  "You've been a boodler all your life."
+
+Alderman Hoberkorn (turning to the gallery, a light of defiance in his
+eye).  "You come here to intimidate us, but you can't do it.  You're
+too contemptible to notice."
+
+A Voice.  "You hear the drums, don't you?"
+
+A Second Voice.  "Vote wrong, Hoberkorn, and see.  We know you."
+
+Alderman Tiernan (to himself).  "Say, that's pretty rough, ain't it?"
+
+The Mayor.  "Motion overruled.  The point is not well taken."
+
+Alderman Guigler (rising a little puzzled).  "Do we vote now on the
+Gilleran resolution?"
+
+A Voice.  "You bet you do, and you vote right."
+
+The Mayor.  "Yes.  The clerk will call the roll."
+
+The Clerk (reading the names, beginning with the A's).  "Altvast?"
+(pro-Cowperwood).
+
+Alderman Altvast.  "Yea." Fear had conquered him.
+
+Alderman Tiernan (to Alderman Kerrigan).  "Well, there's one baby down."
+
+Alderman Kerrigan.  "Yep."
+
+"Ballenberg?" (Pro-Cowperwood; the man who had introduced the
+ordinance.)
+
+"Yea."
+
+Alderman Tiernan.  "Say, has Ballenberg weakened?"
+
+Alderman Kerrigan.  "It looks that way."
+
+"Canna?"
+
+"Yea."
+
+"Fogarty?"
+
+"Yea."
+
+Alderman Tiernan (nervously).  "There goes Fogarty."
+
+"Hvranek?"
+
+"Yea."
+
+Alderman Tiernan.  "And Hvranek!"
+
+Alderman Kerrigan (referring to the courage of his colleagues). "It's
+coming out of their hair."
+
+In exactly eighty seconds the roll-call was in and Cowperwood had
+lost--41 to 25.  It was plain that the ordinance could never be revived.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LXII
+
+The Recompense
+
+
+You have seen, perhaps, a man whose heart was weighted by a great woe.
+You have seen the eye darken, the soul fag, and the spirit congeal
+under the breath of an icy disaster.  At ten-thirty of this particular
+evening Cowperwood, sitting alone in the library of his Michigan Avenue
+house, was brought face to face with the fact that he had lost.  He had
+built so much on the cast of this single die.  It was useless to say to
+himself that he could go into the council a week later with a modified
+ordinance or could wait until the storm had died out.  He refused
+himself these consolations.  Already he had battled so long and so
+vigorously, by every resource and subtlety which his mind had been able
+to devise.  All week long on divers occasions he had stood in the
+council-chamber where the committee had been conducting its hearings.
+Small comfort to know that by suits, injunctions, appeals, and writs to
+intervene he could tie up this transit situation and leave it for years
+and years the prey of lawyers, the despair of the city, a hopeless
+muddle which would not be unraveled until he and his enemies should
+long be dead.  This contest had been so long in the brewing, he had
+gone about it with such care years before. And now the enemy had been
+heartened by a great victory.  His aldermen, powerful, hungry, fighting
+men all--like those picked soldiers of the ancient Roman
+emperors--ruthless, conscienceless, as desperate as himself, had in
+their last redoubt of personal privilege fallen, weakened, yielded.
+How could he hearten them to another struggle--how face the blazing
+wrath of a mighty populace that had once learned how to win? Others
+might enter here--Haeckelheimer, Fishel, any one of a half-dozen
+Eastern giants--and smooth out the ruffled surface of the angry sea
+that he had blown to fury.  But as for him, he was tired, sick of
+Chicago, sick of this interminable contest.  Only recently he had
+promised himself that if he were to turn this great trick he would
+never again attempt anything so desperate or requiring so much effort.
+He would not need to.  The size of his fortune made it of little worth.
+Besides, in spite of his tremendous vigor, he was getting on.
+
+Since he had alienated Aileen he was quite alone, out of touch with any
+one identified with the earlier years of his life.  His all-desired
+Berenice still evaded him.  True, she had shown lately a kind of
+warming sympathy; but what was it? Gracious tolerance, perhaps--a sense
+of obligation? Certainly little more, he felt. He looked into the
+future, deciding heavily that he must fight on, whatever happened, and
+then--
+
+While he sat thus drearily pondering, answering a telephone call now
+and then, the door-bell rang and the servant brought a card which he
+said had been presented by a young woman who declared that it would
+bring immediate recognition.  Glancing at it, Cowperwood jumped to his
+feet and hurried down-stairs into the one presence he most craved.
+
+There are compromises of the spirit too elusive and subtle to be traced
+in all their involute windings.  From that earliest day when Berenice
+Fleming had first set eyes on Cowperwood she had been moved by a sense
+of power, an amazing and fascinating individuality.  Since then by
+degrees he had familiarized her with a thought of individual freedom of
+action and a disregard of current social standards which were
+destructive to an earlier conventional view of things.  Following him
+through this Chicago fight, she had been caught by the wonder of his
+dreams; he was on the way toward being one of the world's greatest
+money giants.  During his recent trips East she had sometimes felt that
+she was able to read in the cast of his face the intensity of this
+great ambition, which had for its ultimate aim--herself.  So he had
+once assured her.  Always with her he had been so handsome, so
+pleading, so patient.
+
+So here she was in Chicago to-night, the guest of friends at the
+Richelieu, and standing in Cowperwood's presence.
+
+"Why, Berenice!" he said, extending a cordial hand.
+
+"When did you arrive in town? Whatever brings you here?" He had once
+tried to make her promise that if ever her feeling toward him changed
+she would let him know of it in some way.  And here she was
+to-night--on what errand? He noted her costume of brown silk and
+velvet--how well it seemed to suggest her cat-like grace!
+
+"You bring me here," she replied, with an indefinable something in her
+voice which was at once a challenge and a confession.  "I thought from
+what I had just been reading that you might really need me now."
+
+"You mean--?" he inquired, looking at her with vivid eyes.  There he
+paused.
+
+"That I have made up my mind.  Besides, I ought to pay some time."
+
+"Berenice!" he exclaimed, reproachfully.
+
+"No, I don't mean that, either," she replied.  "I am sorry now. I think
+I understand you better.  Besides," she added, with a sudden gaiety
+that had a touch of self-consolation in it, "I want to."
+
+"Berenice! Truly?"
+
+"Can't you tell?" she queried.
+
+"Well, then," he smiled, holding out his hands; and, to his amazement,
+she came forward.
+
+"I can't explain myself to myself quite," she added, in a hurried low,
+eager tone, "but I couldn't stay away any longer.  I had the feeling
+that you might be going to lose here for the present.  But I want you
+to go somewhere else if you have to--London or Paris. The world won't
+understand us quite--but I do."
+
+"Berenice!" He smothered her cheek and hair.
+
+"Not so close, please.  And there aren't to be any other ladies, unless
+you want me to change my mind."
+
+"Not another one, as I hope to keep you.  You will share everything I
+have..."
+
+For answer--
+
+How strange are realities as opposed to illusion!
+
+
+
+
+In Retrospect
+
+
+The world is dosed with too much religion.  Life is to be learned from
+life, and the professional moralist is at best but a manufacturer of
+shoddy wares.  At the ultimate remove, God or the life force, if
+anything, is an equation, and at its nearest expression for man--the
+contract social--it is that also.  Its method of expression appears to
+be that of generating the individual, in all his glittering variety and
+scope, and through him progressing to the mass with its problems.  In
+the end a balance is invariably struck wherein the mass subdues the
+individual or the individual the mass--for the time being.  For,
+behold, the sea is ever dancing or raging.
+
+In the mean time there have sprung up social words and phrases
+expressing a need of balance--of equation.  These are right, justice,
+truth, morality, an honest mind, a pure heart--all words meaning: a
+balance must be struck.  The strong must not be too strong; the weak
+not too weak.  But without variation how could the balance be
+maintained? Nirvana! Nirvana! The ultimate, still, equation.
+
+Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail,
+Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of
+individuality.  But for him also the eternal equation--the pathos of
+the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an ultimate
+balance must be struck.  Of the strange, tortured, terrified reflection
+of those who, caught in his wake, were swept from the normal and the
+commonplace, what shall we say? Legislators by the hundred, who were
+hounded from politics into their graves; a half-hundred aldermen of
+various councils who were driven grumbling or whining into the limbo of
+the dull, the useless, the commonplace. A splendid governor dreaming of
+an ideal on the one hand, succumbing to material necessity on the
+other, traducing the spirit that aided him the while he tortured
+himself with his own doubts.  A second governor, more amenable, was to
+be greeted by the hisses of the populace, to retire brooding and
+discomfited, and finally to take his own life.  Schryhart and Hand,
+venomous men both, unable to discover whether they had really
+triumphed, were to die eventually, puzzled.  A mayor whose greatest
+hour was in thwarting one who contemned him, lived to say: "It is a
+great mystery.  He was a strange man." A great city struggled for a
+score of years to untangle that which was all but beyond the power of
+solution--a true Gordian knot.
+
+And this giant himself, rushing on to new struggles and new
+difficulties in an older land, forever suffering the goad of a restless
+heart--for him was no ultimate peace, no real understanding, but only
+hunger and thirst and wonder.  Wealth, wealth, wealth! A new grasp of a
+new great problem and its eventual solution.  Anew the old urgent
+thirst for life, and only its partial quenchment. In Dresden a palace
+for one woman, in Rome a second for another. In London a third for his
+beloved Berenice, the lure of beauty ever in his eye.  The lives of two
+women wrecked, a score of victims despoiled; Berenice herself weary,
+yet brilliant, turning to others for recompense for her lost youth.
+And he resigned, and yet not--loving, understanding, doubting, caught
+at last by the drug of a personality which he could not gainsay.
+
+What shall we say of life in the last analysis--"Peace, be still"? Or
+shall we battle sternly for that equation which we know will be
+maintained whether we battle or no, in order that the strong become not
+too strong or the weak not too weak? Or perchance shall we say (sick of
+dullness): "Enough of this.  I will have strong meat or die!" And die?
+Or live?
+
+Each according to his temperament--that something which he has not made
+and cannot always subdue, and which may not always be subdued by others
+for him.  Who plans the steps that lead lives on to splendid glories,
+or twist them into gnarled sacrifices, or make of them dark,
+disdainful, contentious tragedies? The soul within? And whence comes
+it? Of God?
+
+What thought engendered the spirit of Circe, or gave to a Helen the
+lust of tragedy? What lit the walls of Troy? Or prepared the woes of an
+Andromache? By what demon counsel was the fate of Hamlet prepared? And
+why did the weird sisters plan ruin to the murderous Scot?
+
+  Double, double toil and trouble,
+  Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
+
+In a mulch of darkness are bedded the roots of endless sorrows--and of
+endless joys.  Canst thou fix thine eye on the morning? Be glad. And if
+in the ultimate it blind thee, be glad also! Thou hast lived.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser
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