After all, these Chicagoans aren’t even a snapper on the real society whip.
It’s the Easterners who set the pace, and the New-Yorkers most of all.
If you want to say the word, I can sell this place and we can live down there, part of the time, anyhow.
I could spend as much of my time with you there as I have been doing here—perhaps more.”
Because of her soul of vanity Aileen’s mind ran forward in spite of herself to the wider opportunities which his words suggested.
This house had become a nightmare to her—a place of neglect and bad memories.
Here she had fought with Rita Sohlberg; here she had seen society come for a very little while only to disappear; here she had waited this long time for the renewal of Cowperwood’s love, which was now obviously never to be restored in its original glamour.
As he spoke she looked at him quizzically, almost sadly in her great doubt.
At the same time she could not help reflecting that in New York where money counted for so much, and with Cowperwood’s great and growing wealth and prestige behind her, she might hope to find herself socially at last.
“Nothing venture, nothing have” had always been her motto, nailed to her mast, though her equipment for the life she now craved had never been more than the veriest make-believe—painted wood and tinsel.
Vain, radiant, hopeful Aileen!
Yet how was she to know?
“Very well,” she observed, finally.
“Do as you like.
I can live down there as well as I can here, I presume—alone.”
Cowperwood knew the nature of her longings.
He knew what was running in her mind, and how futile were her dreams.
Life had taught him how fortuitous must be the circumstances which could enable a woman of Aileen’s handicaps and defects to enter that cold upper world.
Yet for all the courage of him, for the very life of him, he could not tell her.
He could not forget that once, behind the grim bars in the penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, he had cried on her shoulder.
He could not be an ingrate and wound her with his inmost thoughts any more than he could deceive himself.
A New York mansion and the dreams of social supremacy which she might there entertain would soothe her ruffled vanity and assuage her disappointed heart; and at the same time he would be nearer Berenice Fleming.
Say what one will of these ferret windings of the human mind, they are, nevertheless, true and characteristic of the average human being, and Cowperwood was no exception.
He saw it all, he calculated on it—he calculated on the simple humanity of Aileen.
Chapter XLVI. Depths and Heights
The complications which had followed his various sentimental affairs left Cowperwood in a quandary at times as to whether there could be any peace or satisfaction outside of monogamy, after all.
Although Mrs. Hand had gone to Europe at the crisis of her affairs, she had returned to seek him out.
Cecily Haguenin found many opportunities of writing him letters and assuring him of her undying affection.
Florence Cochrane persisted in seeing or attempting to see him even after his interest in her began to wane.
For another thing Aileen, owing to the complication and general degeneracy of her affairs, had recently begun to drink.
Owing to the failure of her affair with Lynde—for in spite of her yielding she had never had any real heart interest in it—and to the cavalier attitude with which Cowperwood took her disloyalty, she had reached that state of speculative doldrums where the human animal turns upon itself in bitter self-analysis; the end with the more sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death.
Woe to him who places his faith in illusion—the only reality—and woe to him who does not.
In one way lies disillusion with its pain, in the other way regret.
After Lynde’s departure for Europe, whither she had refused to follow him, Aileen took up with a secondary personage by the name of Watson Skeet, a sculptor.
Unlike most artists, he was the solitary heir of the president of an immense furniture-manufacturing company in which he refused to take any interest.
He had studied abroad, but had returned to Chicago with a view to propagating art in the West.
A large, blond, soft-fleshed man, he had a kind of archaic naturalness and simplicity which appealed to Aileen.
They had met at the Rhees Griers’.
Feeling herself neglected after Lynde’s departure, and dreading loneliness above all things, Aileen became intimate with Skeet, but to no intense mental satisfaction.
That driving standard within—that obsessing ideal which requires that all things be measured by it—was still dominant.
Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better thing?
How it creeps over the spirit of one’s current dreams! Like the specter at the banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy the makeshift feast.
The what-might-have-been of her life with Cowperwood walked side by side with her wherever she went.
Once occasionally indulging in cigarettes, she now smoked almost constantly.
Once barely sipping at wines, cocktails, brandy-and-soda, she now took to the latter, or, rather, to a new whisky-and-soda combination known as “highball” with a kind of vehemence which had little to do with a taste for the thing itself.
True, drinking is, after all, a state of mind, and not an appetite.
She had found on a number of occasions when she had been quarreling with Lynde or was mentally depressed that in partaking of these drinks a sort of warm, speculative indifference seized upon her.
She was no longer so sad.
She might cry, but it was in a soft, rainy, relieving way.
Her sorrows were as strange, enticing figures in dreams. They moved about and around her, not as things actually identical with her, but as ills which she could view at a distance.