t: "I am a
millionaire. I am a free man. I am only thirty-six, and my future is all
before me."

It was with this thought that he went to visit Aileen, and to plan for
the future.

It was only three months later that a train, speeding through the
mountains of Pennsylvania and over the plains of Ohio and Indiana, bore
to Chicago and the West the young financial aspirant who, in spite of
youth and wealth and a notable vigor of body, was a solemn, conservative
speculator as to what his future might be. The West, as he had carefully
calculated before leaving, held much. He had studied the receipts of the
New York Clearing House recently and the disposition of bank-balances
and the shipment of gold, and had seen that vast quantities of the
latter metal were going to Chicago. He understood finance accurately.
The meaning of gold shipments was clear. Where money was going trade
was--a thriving, developing life. He wished to see clearly for himself
what this world had to offer.

Two years later, following the meteoric appearance of a young speculator
in Duluth, and after Chicago had seen the tentative opening of a
grain and commission company labeled Frank A. Cowperwood & Co., which
ostensibly dealt in the great wheat crops of the West, a quiet divorce
was granted Mrs. Frank A. Cowperwood in Philadelphia, because apparently
she wished it. Time had not seemingly dealt badly with her. Her
financial affairs, once so bad, were now apparently all straightened
out, and she occupied in West Philadelphia, near one of her sisters, a
new and interesting home which was fitted with all the comforts of an
excellent middle-class residence. She was now quite religious once more.
The two children, Frank and Lillian, were in private schools, returning
evenings to their mother. "Wash" Sims was once more the negro general
factotum. Frequent visitors on Sundays were Mr. and Mrs. Henry
Worthington Cowperwood, no longer distressed financially, but subdued
and wearied, the wind completely gone from their once much-favored
sails. Cowperwood, senior, had sufficient money wherewith to sustain
himself, and that without slaving as a petty clerk, but his social joy
in life was gone. He was old, disappointed, sad. He could feel that with
his quondam honor and financial glory, he was the same--and he was not.
His courage and his dreams were gone, and he awaited death.

Here, too, came Anna Adelaide Cowperwood on occasion, a clerk in the
city water offic