not afraid. He liked it, the idea of self-duplication. It
was almost acquisitive, this thought. For days and weeks and months and
years, at least the first four or five, he took a keen satisfaction in
coming home evenings, strolling about the yard, driving with his wife,
having friends in to dinner, talking over with her in an explanatory
way the things he intended to do. She did not understand his financial
abstrusities, and he did not trouble to make them clear.

But love, her pretty body, her lips, her quiet manner--the lure of
all these combined, and his two children, when they came--two in four
years--held him. He would dandle Frank, Jr., who was the first to
arrive, on his knee, looking at his chubby feet, his kindling eyes, his
almost formless yet bud-like mouth, and wonder at the process by which
children came into the world. There was so much to think of in this
connection--the spermatozoic beginning, the strange period of gestation
in women, the danger of disease and delivery. He had gone through a
real period of strain when Frank, Jr., was born, for Mrs. Cowperwood
was frightened. He feared for the beauty of her body--troubled over the
danger of losing her; and he actually endured his first worry when he
stood outside the door the day the child came. Not much--he was too
self-sufficient, too resourceful; and yet he worried, conjuring up
thoughts of death and the end of their present state. Then word came,
after certain piercing, harrowing cries, that all was well, and he
was permitted to look at the new arrival. The experience broadened his
conception of things, made him more solid in his judgment of life. That
old conviction of tragedy underlying the surface of things, like wood
under its veneer, was emphasized. Little Frank, and later Lillian,
blue-eyed and golden-haired, touched his imagination for a while. There
was a good deal to this home idea, after all. That was the way life was
organized, and properly so--its cornerstone was the home.

It would be impossible to indicate fully how subtle were the material
changes which these years involved--changes so gradual that they were,
like the lap of soft waters, unnoticeable. Considerable--a great deal,
considering how little he had to begin with--wealth was added in
the next five years. He came, in his financial world, to know fairly
intimately, as commercial relationships go, some of the subtlest
characters of the steadily enlarging financial world. In his d