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 anyone 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 anyone 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 anyone 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.
XXVIII
The Exposure of Stephanie
At the same time the thought of readjusting her relations so that they would avoid disloyalty to Cowperwood was never further from Stephanie’s mind. Let no one quarrel with Stephanie Platow. She was an unstable chemical compound, artistic to her fingertips, 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
