How different the situation now, and how much she had suffered because of that change!
She gazed at it, recalling pleasant memories.
“Where did you get this?” she asked at last.
“I took it from your mother’s bureau in Louisville, the first time I saw it.
It was not in this case, though; I have added that.”
He closed it affectionately and returned it to his pocket.
“It has been close to me ever since,” he said.
Berenice smiled.
“I hope, unseen.
But I am such a child there.”
“Just the same, an ideal to me.
And more so now than ever.
I have known many women, of course. I have dealt with them according to my light and urge at the time.
But apart from all that, I have always had a certain conception of what I really desired. I have always dreamed of a strong, sensitive, poetic girl like yourself.
Think what you will about me, but judge me now by what I do, not by what I say.
You said you came because you thought I needed you.
I do.”
She laid her hand on his arm.
“I have decided,” she said, calmly.
“The best I can do with my life is to help you.
But we . . . I . . . neither of us can do just as we please.
You know that.”
“Perfectly.
I want you to be happy with me, and I want to be happy with you.
And, of course, I can’t be if you are going to worry over anything.
Here in Chicago, particularly at this time, I have to be most careful, and so do you.
And that’s why you’re going back to your hotel very shortly.
But tomorrow is another day, and at about eleven, I hope you will telephone me.
Then perhaps we can talk this over.
But wait a moment.”
He took her arm and directed her into his bedroom.
Closing the door, he walked briskly to a handsome wrought-iron chest of considerable size which stood in a corner of the room.
Unlocking it, he lifted from it three trays containing a collection of ancient Greek and Phoenician rings. After setting them in order before her, he said:
“With which of these would you like me to pledge you?”
Indulgently, and a little indifferently, as was her way—always the one to be pleaded with, not the one to plead—Berenice studied and toyed with the rings, occasionally exclaiming over one that interested her.
At last, she said: “Circe might have chosen this twisted silver snake.
And Helen, this green bronze circlet of flowers, perhaps.
I think Aphrodite might have liked this curled arm and hand encircling the stone.
But I will not choose for beauty alone.
For myself, I will take this tarnished silver band.
It has strength as well as beauty.”
“Always the unexpected, the original!” exclaimed Cowperwood.
“Bevy, you are incomparable!”
He kissed her tenderly as he placed the ring on her finger.
Chapter 2
The essential thing which Berenice achieved for Cowperwood in coming to him at the time of his defeat was to renew his faith in the unexpected and, better yet, in his own luck.
For hers was an individuality, as he saw it, self-seeking, poised, ironic, but less brutal and more poetic than his own.
Where he desired money in order to release its essential content, power, to be used by him as he pleased, Berenice appeared to demand the privilege of expressing her decidedly varied temperament in ways which would make for beauty and so satisfy her essentially aesthetic ideals.
She desired not so much to express herself in a given form of art as to live so that her life as well as her personality should be in itself an art form.
She had more than once thought, if only she had great wealth, very great power, how creatively she would use it.