The Titan

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 catlike 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.

VI

The New Queen of the Home

The day Cowperwood and Aileen were married⁠—it was in an obscure village called Dalston, near Pittsburg, in western Pennsylvania, where they had stopped off to manage this matter⁠—he had said to her: “I want to tell you, dear, that you and I are really beginning life all over. Now it depends on how well we play this game as to how well we succeed. If you will listen to me we won’t try to do anything much socially in Chicago for the present. Of course we’ll have to meet a few people. That can’t be avoided. Mr. and Mrs. Addison are anxious to meet you, and I’ve delayed too long in that matter as it is. But what I mean is that I don’t believe it’s advisable to push this social exchange too far. People are sure to begin to make inquiries if we do. My plan is to wait a little while and then build a really fine house so that we won’t need to rebuild. We’re going to go to Europe next spring, if things go right, and we may get some ideas over there. I’m going to put in a good big gallery,” he concluded. “While we’re traveling we might as well see what we can find in the way of pictures and so on.”

Aileen was thrilling with anticipation. “Oh, Frank,” she said to him, quite ecstatically, “you’re so wonderful! You do everything you want, don’t you?”

“Not quite,” he said, deprecatingly; “but it isn’t for not wanting to. Chance has a little to say about some of these chings, Aileen.”

She stood in front of him, as she often did, her plump, ringed hands on his shoulders, and looked into those steady, lucid pools⁠—his eyes. Another man, less leonine, and with all his shifting thoughts, might have had to contend with the handicap of a shifty gaze; he fronted the queries and suspicions of the world with a seeming candor that was as disarming as that of a child. The truth was he believed in himself, and himself only, and thence sprang his courage to think as he pleased. Aileen wondered, but could get no answer.

“Oh, you big tiger!” she said. “You great, big lion! Boo!”

He pinched her cheek and smiled. “Poor Aileen!” he thought. She little knew the unsolvable mystery that he was even to himself⁠—to himself most of all.

Immediately after their marriage Cowperwood and Aileen journeyed to Chicago direct, and took the best rooms that the Tremont provided, for the time being. A little later they heard of a comparatively small furnished house at Twenty-third and Michigan Avenue, which, with horses and carriages thrown in, was to be had for a season or two on lease. They contracted for it at once, installing a butler, servants, and the general service of a well-appointed home. Here, because he thought it was only courteous, and not because he thought it was essential or wise at this time to attempt a social onslaught, he invited the Addisons and one or two others whom he felt sure would come⁠—Alexander Rambaud, president of the Chicago & Northwestern, and his wife, and Taylor Lord, an architect whom he had recently called into consultation and whom he found socially acceptable. Lord, like the Addisons, was in society, but only as a minor figure.

Trust Cowperwood to do the thing as it should be done. The place they had leased was a charming little gray-stone house, with a neat flight of granite, balustraded steps leading up to its wide-arched door, and a judicious