The Titan

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 declassé. 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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”