“You dance beautifully,” he said.
“I love it,” she replied.
She was already of an agreeable height for him.
It was soon over.
“I wish you would take me where the ices are,” she said to Cowperwood.
He led her, half amused, half disturbed at her attitude toward him.
“You are having a pleasant time teasing me, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I am only tired,” she replied.
“The evening bores me. Really it does.
I wish we were all home.”
“We can go when you say, no doubt.”
As they reached the ices, and she took one from his hand, she surveyed him with those cool, dull blue eyes of hers—eyes that had the flat quality of unglazed Dutch tiles.
“I wish you would forgive me,” she said.
“I was rude.
I couldn’t help it.
I am all out of sorts with myself.”
“I hadn’t felt you were rude,” he observed, lying grandly, his mood toward her changing entirely.
“Oh yes I was, and I hope you will forgive me.
I sincerely wish you would.”
“I do with all my heart—the little that there is to forgive.”
He waited to take her back, and yielded her to a youth who was waiting.
He watched her trip away in a dance, and eventually led her mother to the trap.
Berenice was not with them on the home drive; some one else was bringing her.
Cowperwood wondered when she would come, and where was her room, and whether she was really sorry, and— As he fell asleep Berenice Fleming and her slate-blue eyes were filling his mind completely.
Chapter XLIII. The Planet Mars
The banking hostility to Cowperwood, which in its beginning had made necessary his trip to Kentucky and elsewhere, finally reached a climax.
It followed an attempt on his part to furnish funds for the building of elevated roads.
The hour for this new form of transit convenience had struck.
The public demanded it.
Cowperwood saw one elevated road, the South Side Alley Line, being built, and another, the West Side Metropolitan Line, being proposed, largely, as he knew, in order to create sentiment for the idea, and so to make his opposition to a general franchise difficult.
He was well aware that if he did not choose to build them others would.
It mattered little that electricity had arrived finally as a perfected traction factor, and that all his lines would soon have to be done over to meet that condition, or that it was costing him thousands and thousands to stay the threatening aspect of things politically. In addition he must now plunge into this new realm, gaining franchises by the roughest and subtlest forms of political bribery. The most serious aspect of this was not political, but rather financial.
Elevated roads in Chicago, owing to the sparseness of the population over large areas, were a serious thing to contemplate.
The mere cost of iron, right of way, rolling-stock, and power-plants was immense.
Being chronically opposed to investing his private funds where stocks could just as well be unloaded on the public, and the management and control retained by him, Cowperwood, for the time being, was puzzled as to where he should get credit for the millions to be laid down in structural steel, engineering fees, labor, and equipment before ever a dollar could be taken out in passenger fares.
Owing to the advent of the World’s Fair, the South Side ‘L’—to which, in order to have peace and quiet, he had finally conceded a franchise—was doing reasonably well.
Yet it was not making any such return on the investment as the New York roads.
The new lines which he was preparing would traverse even less populous sections of the city, and would in all likelihood yield even a smaller return.
Money had to be forthcoming—something between twelve and fifteen million dollars—and this on the stocks and bonds of a purely paper corporation which might not yield paying dividends for years to come.
Addison, finding that the Chicago Trust Company was already heavily loaded, called upon various minor but prosperous local banks to take over the new securities (each in part, of course).
He was astonished and chagrined to find that one and all uniformly refused.
“I’ll tell you how it is, Judah,” one bank president confided to him, in great secrecy.
“We owe Timothy Arneel at least three hundred thousand dollars that we only have to pay three per cent. for.
It’s a call-loan.
Besides, the Lake National is our main standby when it comes to quick trades, and he’s in on that.
I understand from one or two friends that he’s at outs with Cowperwood, and we can’t afford to offend him.
I’d like to, but no more for me—not at present, anyhow.”
“Why, Simmons,” replied Addison, “these fellows are simply cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
These stock and bond issues are perfectly good investments, and no one knows it better than you do.
All this hue and cry in the newspapers against Cowperwood doesn’t amount to anything.