he sat down, thinking, for
never before had she seen Cowperwood's face wearing such an expression
of stern, disturbed calculation. It was placid, like fine, white wax,
and quite as cold; and those deep, vague, inscrutable eyes! So Chicago
was burning. What would happen to him? Was he very much involved? He had
never told her in detail of his affairs. She would not have understood
fully any more than would have Mrs. Cowperwood. But she was worried,
nevertheless, because it was her Frank, and because she was bound to him
by what to her seemed indissoluble ties.

Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the
mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the
souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time
seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a
censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its
execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there
is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious
calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or
guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in
love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial
thought--the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she
can only do this. She may change--Hell hath no fury, etc.--but the
sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding
characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in
contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that
has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament
of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and
worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast
distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art,
that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the
great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great
decoration--namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of
beauty. Hence the significance of this particular mood in Aileen.

All the subtleties of the present combination were troubling Cowperwood
as he followed Butler into the room upstairs.

"Sit down, sit down. You won't take a little somethin'? You never do.
I remember now. Well, have a cigar, anyhow. Now, what's this that's
troublin' you to-night?"

Voices could be heard faintly