d her by affection and
subtle flattery and attention if he held her at all.

"The little snip"--she was not at all--"she thinks the sun rises and
sets in her father's pocket," Lillian observed one day to her husband.
"To hear her talk, you'd think they were descended from Irish kings. Her
pretended interest in art and music amuses me."

"Oh, don't be too hard on her," coaxed Cowperwood diplomatically. He
already liked Aileen very much. "She plays very well, and she has a good
voice."

"Yes, I know; but she has no real refinement. How could she have? Look
at her father and mother."

"I don't see anything so very much the matter with her," insisted
Cowperwood. "She's bright and good-looking. Of course, she's only a
girl, and a little vain, but she'll come out of that. She isn't without
sense and force, at that."

Aileen, as he knew, was most friendly to him. She liked him. She made a
point of playing the piano and singing for him in his home, and she sang
only when he was there. There was something about his steady, even gait,
his stocky body and handsome head, which attracted her. In spite of
her vanity and egotism, she felt a little overawed before him at
times--keyed up. She seemed to grow gayer and more brilliant in his
presence.

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at
exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of
contradictions--none more so than the most capable.

In the case of Aileen Butler it would be quite impossible to give
an exact definition. Intelligence, of a raw, crude order she had
certainly--also a native force, tamed somewhat by the doctrines and
conventions of current society, still showed clear at times in an
elemental and not entirely unattractive way. At this time she was only
eighteen years of age--decidedly attractive from the point of view of a
man of Frank Cowperwood's temperament. She supplied something he had not
previously known or consciously craved. Vitality and vivacity. No other
woman or girl whom he had ever known had possessed so much innate
force as she. Her red-gold hair--not so red as decidedly golden with a
suggestion of red in it--looped itself in heavy folds about her forehead
and sagged at the base of her neck. She had a beautiful nose, not
sensitive, but straight-cut with small nostril openings, and eyes that
were big and yet noticeably sensuous. They were, to him, a pleasing
shade of blue-gray-blue, and her toilet, due to her t