It wasn’t anything like what he suggested.
Colonel Gillis and several others wanted me to rent them bachelor quarters, and that’s the way it all came about.
It wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t help myself, Bevy.”
“And what about Mr. Cowperwood?” inquired Berenice curiously.
She had begun of late to think a great deal about Cowperwood.
He was so cool, deep, dynamic, in a way resourceful, like herself.
“There’s nothing about him,” replied Mrs. Carter, looking up defensively.
Of all her men friends she best liked Cowperwood.
He had never advised her to evil ways or used her house as a convenience to himself alone.
“He never did anything but help me out.
He advised me to give up my house in Louisville and come East and devote myself to looking after you and Rolfe.
He offered to help me until you two should be able to help yourselves, and so I came.
Oh, if I had only not been so foolish—so afraid of life!
But your father and Mr. Carter just ran through everything.”
She heaved a deep, heartfelt sigh.
“Then we really haven’t anything at all, have we, mother—property or anything else?”
Mrs. Carter shook her head, meaning no.
“And the money we have been spending is Mr. Cowperwood’s?”
“Yes.”
Berenice paused and looked out the window over the wide stretch of park which it commanded.
Framed in it like a picture were a small lake, a hill of trees, with a Japanese pagoda effect in the foreground.
Over the hill were the yellow towering walls of a great hotel in Central Park West.
In the street below could be heard the jingle of street-cars.
On a road in the park could be seen a moving line of pleasure vehicles—society taking an airing in the chill November afternoon.
“Poverty, ostracism,” she thought.
And should she marry rich?
Of course, if she could. And whom should she marry?
The Lieutenant?
Never.
He was really not masterful enough mentally, and he had witnessed her discomfiture.
And who, then?
Oh, the long line of sillies, light-weights, rakes, ne’er-do-wells, who, combined with sober, prosperous, conventional, muddle-headed oofs, constituted society.
Here and there, at far jumps, was a real man, but would he be interested in her if he knew the whole truth about her?
“Have you broken with Mr. Braxmar?” asked her mother, curiously, nervously, hopefully, hopelessly.
“I haven’t seen him since,” replied Berenice, lying conservatively.
“I don’t know whether I shall or not.
I want to think.”
She arose.
“But don’t you mind, mother.
Only I wish we had some other way of living besides being dependent on Mr. Cowperwood.”
She walked into her boudoir, and before her mirror began to dress for a dinner to which she had been invited.
So it was Cowperwood’s money that had been sustaining them all during the last few years; and she had been so liberal with his means—so proud, vain, boastful, superior. And he had only fixed her with those inquiring, examining eyes.
Why?
But she did not need to ask herself why.
She knew now.
What a game he had been playing, and what a silly she had been not to see it.
Did her mother in any way suspect?
She doubted it.
This queer, paradoxical, impossible world!
The eyes of Cowperwood burned at her as she thought.