He had little faith in the ability of women aside from their value as objects of art; and yet now and then, as in this instance, they revealed a sweet insight which sharpened his own.
Aileen, he reflected, would not be capable of making a remark such as this.
She was not as beautiful now as this woman—not as alluringly simple, naive, delicious, nor yet as wise.
Mrs. Sohlberg, he reflected shrewdly, had a kind of fool for a husband.
Would she take an interest in him, Frank Cowperwood?
Would a woman like this surrender on any basis outside of divorce and marriage? He wondered.
On her part, Mrs. Sohlberg was thinking what a forceful man Cowperwood was, and how close he had stayed by her.
She felt his interest, for she had often seen these symptoms in other men and knew what they meant.
She knew the pull of her own beauty, and, while she heightened it as artfully as she dared, yet she kept aloof, too, feeling that she had never met any one as yet for whom it was worth while to be different.
But Cowperwood—he needed someone more soulful than Aileen, she thought.
Chapter XV. A New Affection
The growth of a relationship between Cowperwood and Rita Sohlberg was fostered quite accidentally by Aileen, who took a foolishly sentimental interest in Harold which yet was not based on anything of real meaning.
She liked him because he was a superlatively gracious, flattering, emotional man where women—pretty women—were concerned.
She had some idea she could send him pupils, and, anyhow, it was nice to call at the Sohlberg studio.
Her social life was dull enough as it was.
So she went, and Cowperwood, mindful of Mrs. Sohlberg, came also.
Shrewd to the point of destruction, he encouraged Aileen in her interest in them. He suggested that she invite them to dinner, that they give a musical at which Sohlberg could play and be paid.
There were boxes at the theaters, tickets for concerts sent, invitations to drive Sundays or other days.
The very chemistry of life seems to play into the hands of a situation of this kind.
Once Cowperwood was thinking vividly, forcefully, of her, Rita began to think in like manner of him.
Hourly he grew more attractive, a strange, gripping man.
Beset by his mood, she was having the devil’s own time with her conscience.
Not that anything had been said as yet, but he was investing her, gradually beleaguering her, sealing up, apparently, one avenue after another of escape.
One Thursday afternoon, when neither Aileen nor he could attend the Sohlberg tea, Mrs. Sohlberg received a magnificent bunch of Jacqueminot roses.
“For your nooks and corners,” said a card.
She knew well enough from whom it came and what it was worth.
There were all of fifty dollars worth of roses. It gave her breath of a world of money that she had never known.
Daily she saw the name of his banking and brokerage firm advertised in the papers.
Once she met him in Merrill’s store at noon, and he invited her to lunch; but she felt obliged to decline.
Always he looked at her with such straight, vigorous eyes.
To think that her beauty had done or was doing this!
Her mind, quite beyond herself, ran forward to an hour when perhaps this eager, magnetic man would take charge of her in a way never dreamed of by Harold.
But she went on practising, shopping, calling, reading, brooding over Harold’s inefficiency, and stopping oddly sometimes to think—the etherealized grip of Cowperwood upon her.
Those strong hands of his—how fine they were—and those large, soft-hard, incisive eyes.
The puritanism of Wichita (modified sometime since by the art life of Chicago, such as it was) was having a severe struggle with the manipulative subtlety of the ages—represented in this man.
“You know you are very elusive,” he said to her one evening at the theater when he sat behind her during the entr’acte, and Harold and Aileen had gone to walk in the foyer.
The hubbub of conversation drowned the sound of anything that might be said.
Mrs. Sohlberg was particularly pleasing in a lacy evening gown.
“No,” she replied, amusedly, flattered by his attention and acutely conscious of his physical nearness.
By degrees she had been yielding herself to his mood, thrilling at his every word.
“It seems to me I am very stable,” she went on. “I’m certainly substantial enough.” She looked at her full, smooth arm lying on her lap.
Cowperwood, who was feeling all the drag of her substantiality, but in addition the wonder of her temperament, which was so much richer than Aileen’s, was deeply moved.
Those little blood moods that no words ever (or rarely) indicate were coming to him from her—faint zephyr-like emanations of emotions, moods, and fancies in her mind which allured him.
She was like Aileen in animality, but better, still sweeter, more delicate, much richer spiritually.
Or was he just tired of Aileen for the present, he asked himself at times.
No, no, he told himself that could not be.
Rita Sohlberg was by far the most pleasing woman he had ever known.
“Yes, but elusive, just the same,” he went on, leaning toward her.
“You remind me of something that I can find no word for—a bit of color or a perfume or tone—a flash of something.
I follow you in my thoughts all the time now.