d later replaced if anything
better in the same held showed up."

His mind, in spite of his outward placidity, was tinged with a great
seeking. Wealth, in the beginning, had seemed the only goal, to which
had been added the beauty of women. And now art, for art's sake--the
first faint radiance of a rosy dawn--had begun to shine in upon him, and
to the beauty of womanhood he was beginning to see how necessary it was
to add the beauty of life--the beauty of material background--how, in
fact, the only background for great beauty was great art. This girl,
this Aileen Butler, her raw youth and radiance, was nevertheless
creating in him a sense of the distinguished and a need for it which
had never existed in him before to the same degree. It is impossible to
define these subtleties of reaction, temperament on temperament, for no
one knows to what degree we are marked by the things which attract us. A
love affair such as this had proved to be was little less or more than a
drop of coloring added to a glass of clear water, or a foreign chemical
agent introduced into a delicate chemical formula.

In short, for all her crudeness, Aileen Butler was a definite force
personally. Her nature, in a way, a protest against the clumsy
conditions by which she found herself surrounded, was almost
irrationally ambitious. To think that for so long, having been born into
the Butler family, she had been the subject, as well as the victim of
such commonplace and inartistic illusions and conditions, whereas now,
owing to her contact with, and mental subordination to Cowperwood, she
was learning so many wonderful phases of social, as well as financial,
refinement of which previously she had guessed nothing. The wonder, for
instance, of a future social career as the wife of such a man as Frank
Cowperwood. The beauty and resourcefulness of his mind, which, after
hours of intimate contact with her, he was pleased to reveal, and which,
so definite were his comments and instructions, she could not fail
to sense. The wonder of his financial and artistic and future social
dreams. And, oh, oh, she was his, and he was hers. She was actually
beside herself at times with the glory, as well as the delight of all
this.

At the same time, her father's local reputation as a quondam garbage
contractor ("slop-collector" was the unfeeling comment of the vulgarian
cognoscenti); her own unavailing efforts to right a condition of
material vulgarity or artistic ana