d intellectual, though
blended strongly therewith, was a humane and democratic spirit. We think
of egoism and intellectualism as closely confined to the arts. Finance
is an art. And it presents the operations of the subtlest of the
intellectuals and of the egoists. Cowperwood was a financier. Instead
of dwelling on the works of nature, its beauty and subtlety, to his
material disadvantage, he found a happy mean, owing to the swiftness
of his intellectual operations, whereby he could, intellectually and
emotionally, rejoice in the beauty of life without interfering with his
perpetual material and financial calculations. And when it came to women
and morals, which involved so much relating to beauty, happiness, a
sense of distinction and variety in living, he was but now beginning
to suspect for himself at least that apart from maintaining organized
society in its present form there was no basis for this one-life,
one-love idea. How had it come about that so many people agreed on this
single point, that it was good and necessary to marry one woman and
cleave to her until death? He did not know. It was not for him to bother
about the subtleties of evolution, which even then was being noised
abroad, or to ferret out the curiosities of history in connection with
this matter. He had no time. Suffice it that the vagaries of temperament
and conditions with which he came into immediate contact proved to him
that there was great dissatisfaction with that idea. People did not
cleave to each other until death; and in thousands of cases where
they did, they did not want to. Quickness of mind, subtlety of idea,
fortuitousness of opportunity, made it possible for some people to right
their matrimonial and social infelicities; whereas for others, because
of dullness of wit, thickness of comprehension, poverty, and lack of
charm, there was no escape from the slough of their despond. They
were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force
or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to
shuffle off this mortal coil--which under other circumstances had such
glittering possibilities--via the rope, the knife, the bullet, or the
cup of poison.

"I would die, too," he thought to himself, one day, reading of a man
who, confined by disease and poverty, had lived for twelve years alone
in a back bedroom attended by an old and probably decrepit housekeeper.
A darning-needle forced into his heart had ended his e