her car halted and driven to within seeing-distance behind a clump of bushes. A chauffeur whom she did not know was tinkering at a handsome machine, while on the grass near by stood Cowperwood and a tall, slender girl with red hair somewhat like Aileen’s own. Her expression was aloof, poetic, rhapsodical. Aileen could not analyze it, but it fixed her attention completely. In the tonneau sat an elderly lady, whom Aileen at once assumed to be the girl’s mother. Who were they? What was Cowperwood doing here in the Park at this hour? Where were they going? With a horrible retch of envy she noted upon Cowperwood’s face a smile the like and import of which she well knew. How often she had seen it years and years before! Having escaped detection, she ordered her chauffeur to follow the car, which soon started, at a safe distance. She saw Cowperwood and the two ladies put down at one of the great hotels, and followed them into the dining-room, where, from behind a screen, after the most careful manoeuvering, she had an opportunity of studying them at her leisure. She drank in every detail of Berenice’s face—the delicately pointed chin, the clear, fixed blue eyes, the straight, sensitive nose and tawny hair. Calling the head waiter, she inquired the names of the two women, and in return for a liberal tip was informed at once. “Mrs. Ira Carter, I believe, and her daughter, Miss Fleming, Miss Berenice Fleming. Mrs. Carter was Mrs. Fleming once.” Aileen followed them out eventually, and in her own car pursued them to their door, into which Cowperwood also disappeared. The next day, by telephoning the apartment to make inquiry, she learned that they actually lived there. After a few days of brooding she employed a detective, and learned that Cowperwood was a constant visitor at the Carters’, that the machine in which they rode was his maintained at a separate garage, and that they were of society truly. Aileen would never have followed the clue so vigorously had it not been for the look she had seen Cowperwood fix on the girl in the Park and in the restaurant—an air of soul-hunger which could not be gainsaid.
Let no one ridicule the terrors of unrequited love. Its tentacles are cancerous, its grip is of icy death. Sitting in her boudoir immediately after these events, driving, walking, shopping, calling on the few with whom she had managed to scrape an acquaintance, Aileen thought morning, noon, and night of this new woman. The pale, delicate face haunted her. What were those eyes, so remote in their gaze, surveying? Love? Cowperwood? Yes! Yes! Gone in a flash, and permanently, as it seemed to Aileen, was the value of this house, her dream of a new social entrance. And she had already suffered so much; endured so much. Cowperwood being absent for a fortnight, she moped in her room, sighed, raged, and then began to drink. Finally she sent for an actor who had once paid attention to her in Chicago, and whom she had later met here in the circle of the theaters. She was not so much burning with lust as determined in her drunken gloom that she would have revenge. For days there followed an orgy, in which wine, bestiality, mutual recrimination, hatred, and despair were involved. Sobering eventually, she wondered what Cowperwood would think of her now if he knew this? Could he ever love her any more? Could he even tolerate her? But what did he care? It served him right, the dog! She would show him, she would wreck his dream, she would make her own life a scandal, and his too! She would shame him before all the world. He should never have a divorce! He should never be able to marry a girl like that and leave her alone—never, never, never! When Cowperwood returned she snarled at him without vouchsafing an explanation.
He suspected at once that she had been spying upon his manoeuvers. Moreover, he did not fail to notice her heavy eyes, superheated cheeks, and sickly breath. Obviously she had abandoned her dream of a social victory of some kind, and was entering on a career of what—debauchery? Since coming to New York she had failed utterly, he thought, to make any single intelligent move toward her social rehabilitation. The banal realms of art and the stage, with which in his absence or neglect she had trifled with here, as she had done in Chicago, were worse than useless; they were destructive. He must have a long talk with her one of these days, must confess frankly to his passion for Berenice, and appeal to her sympathy and good sense. What scenes would follow! Yet she might succumb, at that. Despair, pride, disgust might move her. Besides, he could now bestow upon her a very large fortune. She could go to Europe or remain here and live in luxury. He would always remain friendly with her—helpful, advisory—if she would permit it.
The conversation which eventually followed on this topic was of such stuff as dreams are made of. It sounded hollow and unnatural within the walls where it took place. Consider the great house in upper Fifth Avenue, its magnificent chambers aglow, of a stormy Sunday night. Cowperwood was lingering in the city at this time, busy with a group of Eastern financiers who were influencing his contest in the state legislature of Illinois. Aileen was momentarily consoled by the thought that for him perhaps love might, after all, be a thing apart—a thing no longer vital and soul-controlling. To-night he was sitting in the court of orchids, reading a book—the diary of Cellini, which some one had recommended to him—stopping to think now and then of things in Chicago or Springfield, or to make a note. Outside the rain was splashing in torrents on the electric-lighted asphalt of Fifth Avenue—the Park opposite a Corot-like shadow. Aileen was in the music-room strumming indifferently. She was thinking of times past—Lynde, from whom she had not heard in half a year; Watson Skeet, the sculptor, who was also out of her ken at present. When Cowperwood was in the city and in the house she was accustomed from habit to remain indoors or near. So great is the influence of past customs of devotion that they linger long past the hour when the act ceases to become valid.
“What an awful night!” she observed once, strolling to a window to peer out from behind a brocaded valance.
“It is bad, isn’t it?” replied Cowperwood, as she returned. “Hadn’t you thought of going anywhere this evening?”
“No—oh no,” replied Aileen, indifferently. She rose restlessly from the piano, and strolled on into the great picture-gallery. Stopping before one of Raphael Sanzio’s Holy Families, only recently hung, she paused to contemplate the serene face—medieval, Madonnaesque, Italian.
The lady seemed fragile, colorless, spineless—without life. Were there such women? Why did artists paint them? Yet the little Christ was sweet. Art bored Aileen unless others were enthusiastic. She craved only the fanfare of the living—not painted resemblances. She returned to the music-room, to the court of orchids, and was just about to go up-stairs to prepare herself a drink and read a novel when Cowperwood observed:
“You’re bored, aren’t you?”
“Oh no; I’m used to lonely evenings,” she replied, quietly and without any attempt at sarcasm.
Relentless as he was in hewing life to his theory—hammering substance to the form of his thought—yet he was tender, too, in the manner of a rainbow dancing over an abyss. For the moment he wanted to say, “Poor girlie, you do have a hard time, don’t you, with me?” but he reflected instantly how such a remark would be received. He meditated, holding his book in his hand above his knee, looking at the purling water that flowed and flowed in sprinkling showers over the sportive marble figures of mermaids, a Triton, and nymphs astride of fishes.
“You’re really not happy in this state, any more, are you?” he inquired. “Would you feel any more comfortable if I stayed away entirely?”
His mind had turned of a sudden to the one problem that was fretting him and to the opportunities of this hour.
“You would,” she replied, for her boredom merely concealed her unhappiness in no longer being able to command in the least his interest or his sentiment.
“Why do you say that in just that way?” he asked.
“Because I know you would. I know why you ask. You know well enough that it isn’t anything I want to do that is concerned. It’s what you want to do. You’d like to turn me off like an old horse now that you are tired of me, and so you ask whether I would feel any more comfortable. What a liar you are, Frank! How really shifty you are! I don’t wonder you’re a multimillionaire. If you could live long enough you would eat up the whole world. Don’t you think for one moment that I don’t know of Berenice Fleming here in New York, and how you’re dancing attendance on her—because I do. I know how you have been hanging about her for months and months—ever since we have been here, and for long before. You think she’s wonderful now because she’s young and in society. I’ve seen you in the Waldorf and in the Park hanging on her every word, looking at her with adoring eyes. What a fool you are, to be so big a man! Every little snip, if she has pink cheeks and a doll’s face, can wind you right around her finger. Rita Sohlberg did it; Stephanie Platow did it; Florence Cochrane did it; Cecily Haguenin—and Heaven knows how many more that I never heard of. I suppose Mrs. Hand still lives with you in Chicago—the cheap strumpet! Now it’s Berenice Fleming and her frump of a mother. From all I can learn you haven’t been able to get her yet—because her mother’s too shrewd, perhaps—but you probably will in the end. It isn’t you so much as your money that they’re after. Pah! Well, I’m unhappy enough, but it isn’t anything you can remedy any more. Whatever you could do to make me unhappy you have done, and now you talk of my being happier away from you. Clever boy, you! I know you the way I know my ten fingers. You don’t deceive me at any time in any way any more. I can’t do anything
