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 tomorrow 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.
XVI
A Fateful Interlude
Cowperwood was enchanted. He kept the proposed tryst with eagerness and found her all that he had hoped. She was sweeter, more colorful, more elusive than anybody he had ever known. In their charming apartment on the North Side which he at once engaged, and where he sometimes spent mornings, evenings, afternoons, as opportunity afforded, he studied her with the most critical eye and found her almost flawless. She had that boundless value which youth and a certain insouciance of manner contribute. There was, delicious to relate, no melancholy in her nature, but a kind of innate sufficiency which neither looked forward to nor back upon troublesome ills. She loved beautiful things, but was not extravagant; and what interested him and commanded his respect was that no urgings of his toward prodigality, however subtly advanced, could affect her. She knew what she wanted, spent carefully, bought tastefully, arrayed herself in ways which appealed to him as the flowers did. His feeling for her became at times so great that he wished, one might almost have said, to destroy it—to appease the urge and allay the pull in himself, but it was useless. The charm of her endured. His transports would leave her refreshed apparently, prettier, more graceful than ever, it seemed to him, putting back her ruffled hair with her hand, mouthing at herself prettily in the glass, thinking of many remote delicious things at once.
“Do you remember that picture we saw in the art store the other day, Algernon?” she would drawl, calling him by his second name, which she had adopted for herself as being more suited to his moods when with her and more pleasing to her. Cowperwood had protested, but she held to it. “Do you remember that lovely blue of the old man’s coat?” (It was an Adoration of the Magi.) “Wasn’t that be‑yoot‑i‑ful?”
She drawled so sweetly and fixed her mouth in such an odd way that he was impelled to kiss her. “You clover blossom,” he would say to her, coming over and taking her by the arms. “You sprig of cherry bloom. You Dresden china dream.”
“Now, are you going to muss my hair, when I’ve just managed to fix it?”
The voice was the voice of careless, genial innocence—and the eyes.
“Yes, I am, minx.”
“Yes, but you mustn’t smother me, you know. Really, you know you almost hurt me with your mouth. Aren’t you going to be nice to me?”
“Yes, sweet. But I want to hurt you, too.”
“Well, then, if you must.”
But for all his transports the lure was still there. She was like a butterfly, he thought, yellow and white or blue and gold, fluttering over a hedge of wild rose.
In these intimacies it was that he came quickly to understand how much she knew of social movements and tendencies, though she was just an individual of the outer fringe. She caught at once a clear understanding of his social point of view, his art ambition, his dreams of something better for himself in every way. She seemed to see clearly that he had not as yet realized himself, that Aileen was not just the woman for him, though she might be one. She talked of her own husband after a time in a tolerant way—his foibles, defects, weaknesses. She was not unsympathetic, he thought, just weary of a state that was not properly balanced either in love, ability, or insight. Cowperwood had suggested that she could take a larger studio for herself and Harold—do away with the petty economies that had hampered her and him—and explain it all on the grounds of a larger generosity on the part of her family.
