ay be no
longer loved as we once were, is apt to make any woman pause, even in
the face of the most significant financial position. Where would she go
if she left him? What would people think? What about the children?
Could she prove this liaison? Could she entrap him in a compromising
situation? Did she want to?

She saw now that she did not love him as some women love their husbands.
She was not wild about him. In a way she had been taking him for
granted all these years, had thought that he loved her enough not to be
unfaithful to her; at least fancied that he was so engrossed with the
more serious things of life that no petty liaison such as this letter
indicated would trouble him or interrupt his great career. Apparently
this was not true. What should she do? What say? How act? Her none too
brilliant mind was not of much service in this crisis. She did not know
very well how either to plan or to fight.

The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is
oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has
its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty
ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly,
that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing
of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms
or terrors is ever discovered except through accident. When some crude,
suggestive fact, such as this letter proved to be, suddenly manifests
itself in the placid flow of events, there is great agony or disturbance
and clogging of the so-called normal processes. The siphon does not
work right. It sucks in fear and distress. There is great grinding of
maladjusted parts--not unlike sand in a machine--and life, as is so
often the case, ceases or goes lamely ever after.

Mrs. Cowperwood was possessed of a conventional mind. She really knew
nothing about life. And life could not teach her. Reaction in her from
salty thought-processes was not possible. She was not alive in the
sense that Aileen Butler was, and yet she thought that she was very
much alive. All illusion. She wasn't. She was charming if you loved
placidity. If you did not, she was not. She was not engaging, brilliant,
or forceful. Frank Cowperwood might well have asked himself in the
beginning why he married her. He did not do so now because he did
not believe it was wise to question the past as to one's failures and
errors. It was, accor