ode was his maintained at a
separate garage, and that they were of society truly. Aileen would
never have followed the clue so vigorously had it not been for the look
she had seen Cowperwood fix on the girl in the Park and in the
restaurant--an air of soul-hunger which could not be gainsaid.

Let no one ridicule the terrors of unrequited love. Its tentacles are
cancerous, its grip is of icy death. Sitting in her boudoir
immediately after these events, driving, walking, shopping, calling on
the few with whom she had managed to scrape an acquaintance, Aileen
thought morning, noon, and night of this new woman. The pale, delicate
face haunted her. What were those eyes, so remote in their gaze,
surveying? Love? Cowperwood? Yes! Yes! Gone in a flash, and
permanently, as it seemed to Aileen, was the value of this house, her
dream of a new social entrance. And she had already suffered so much;
endured so much. Cowperwood being absent for a fortnight, she moped in
her room, sighed, raged, and then began to drink. Finally she sent for
an actor who had once paid attention to her in Chicago, and whom she
had later met here in the circle of the theaters. She was not so much
burning with lust as determined in her drunken gloom that she would
have revenge. For days there followed an orgy, in which wine,
bestiality, mutual recrimination, hatred, and despair were involved.
Sobering eventually, she wondered what Cowperwood would think of her
now if he knew this? Could he ever love her any more? Could he even
tolerate her? But what did he care? It served him right, the dog! She
would show him, she would wreck his dream, she would make her own life
a scandal, and his too! She would shame him before all the world. He
should never have a divorce! He should never be able to marry a girl
like that and leave her alone--never, never, never! When Cowperwood
returned she snarled at him without vouchsafing an explanation.

He suspected at once that she had been spying upon his manoeuvers.
Moreover, he did not fail to notice her heavy eyes, superheated cheeks,
and sickly breath. Obviously she had abandoned her dream of a social
victory of some kind, and was entering on a career of what--debauchery?
Since coming to New York she had failed utterly, he thought, to make
any single intelligent move toward her social rehabilitation. The
banal realms of art and the stage, with which in his absence or neglect
she had trifled with here, as she h