he read it, struck Aileen to the
heart. She read it as gloom on his part--as great depression. Perhaps,
after all, the penitentiary and so soon, was really breaking his spirit,
and he had held up so courageously so long. Because of this, now she was
madly eager to get to him, to console him, even though it was difficult,
perilous. She must, she said.

In regard to visits from the various members of his family--his mother
and father, his brother, his wife, and his sister--Cowperwood made
it plain to them on one of the days on which he was out attending a
bankruptcy hearing, that even providing it could be arranged he did
not think they should come oftener than once in three months, unless he
wrote them or sent word by Steger. The truth was that he really did not
care to see much of any of them at present. He was sick of the whole
social scheme of things. In fact he wanted to be rid of the turmoil he
had been in, seeing it had proved so useless. He had used nearly fifteen
thousand dollars thus far in defending himself--court costs, family
maintenance, Steger, etc.; but he did not mind that. He expected to make
some little money working through Wingate. His family were not utterly
without funds, sufficient to live on in a small way. He had advised them
to remove into houses more in keeping with their reduced circumstances,
which they had done--his mother and father and brothers and sister to
a three-story brick house of about the caliber of the old Buttonwood
Street house, and his wife to a smaller, less expensive two-story one on
North Twenty-first Street, near the penitentiary, a portion of the money
saved out of the thirty-five thousand dollars extracted from Stener
under false pretenses aiding to sustain it. Of course all this was
a terrible descent from the Girard Avenue mansion for the elder
Cowperwood; for here was none of the furniture which characterized
the other somewhat gorgeous domicile--merely store-bought, ready-made
furniture, and neat but cheap hangings and fixtures generally. The
assignees, to whom all Cowperwood's personal property belonged, and to
whom Cowperwood, the elder, had surrendered all his holdings, would not
permit anything of importance to be removed. It had all to be sold for
the benefit of creditors. A few very small things, but only a few, had
been kept, as everything had been inventoried some time before. One of
the things which old Cowperwood wanted was his own desk which Frank had
had d