True, she had shown lately a kind of warming sympathy; but what was it?
Gracious tolerance, perhaps—a sense of obligation?
Certainly little more, he felt.
He looked into the future, deciding heavily that he must fight on, whatever happened, and then—
While he sat thus drearily pondering, answering a telephone call now and then, the door-bell rang and the servant brought a card which he said had been presented by a young woman who declared that it would bring immediate recognition.
Glancing at it, Cowperwood jumped to his feet and hurried down-stairs into the one presence he most craved.
There are compromises of the spirit too elusive and subtle to be traced in all their involute windings.
From that earliest day when Berenice Fleming had first set eyes on Cowperwood she had been moved by a sense of power, an amazing and fascinating individuality.
Since then by degrees he had familiarized her with a thought of individual freedom of action and a disregard of current social standards which were destructive to an earlier conventional view of things.
Following him through this Chicago fight, she had been caught by the wonder of his dreams; he was on the way toward being one of the world’s greatest money giants.
During his recent trips East she had sometimes felt that she was able to read in the cast of his face the intensity of this great ambition, which had for its ultimate aim—herself.
So he had once assured her.
Always with her he had been so handsome, so pleading, so patient.
So here she was in Chicago to-night, the guest of friends at the Richelieu, and standing in Cowperwood’s presence.
“Why, Berenice!” he said, extending a cordial hand.
“When did you arrive in town? Whatever brings you here?”
He had once tried to make her promise that if ever her feeling toward him changed she would let him know of it in some way.
And here she was to-night—on what errand?
He noted her costume of brown silk and velvet—how well it seemed to suggest her cat-like grace!
“You bring me here,” she replied, with an indefinable something in her voice which was at once a challenge and a confession.
“I thought from what I had just been reading that you might really need me now.”
“You mean—?” he inquired, looking at her with vivid eyes.
There he paused.
“That I have made up my mind.
Besides, I ought to pay some time.”
“Berenice!” he exclaimed, reproachfully.
“No, I don’t mean that, either,” she replied.
“I am sorry now.
I think I understand you better.
Besides,” she added, with a sudden gaiety that had a touch of self-consolation in it, “I want to.”
“Berenice!
Truly?”
“Can’t you tell?” she queried.
“Well, then,” he smiled, holding out his hands; and, to his amazement, she came forward.
“I can’t explain myself to myself quite,” she added, in a hurried low, eager tone, “but I couldn’t stay away any longer.
I had the feeling that you might be going to lose here for the present.
But I want you to go somewhere else if you have to—London or Paris. The world won’t understand us quite—but I do.”
“Berenice!”
He smothered her cheek and hair.
“Not so close, please.
And there aren’t to be any other ladies, unless you want me to change my mind.”
“Not another one, as I hope to keep you.
You will share everything I have. . . .”
For answer—
How strange are realities as opposed to illusion!
In Retrospect
The world is dosed with too much religion. Life is to be learned from life, and the professional moralist is at best but a manufacturer of shoddy wares.
At the ultimate remove, God or the life force, if anything, is an equation, and at its nearest expression for man—the contract social—it is that also.
Its method of expression appears to be that of generating the individual, in all his glittering variety and scope, and through him progressing to the mass with its problems.
In the end a balance is invariably struck wherein the mass subdues the individual or the individual the mass—for the time being.