nights when he was not there--when
he was "out of the city"--and she resigned herself to accept his
excuses at their face value. Why quarrel? she asked herself. What
could she do? She was waiting, waiting, but for what?

And Cowperwood, noting the strange, unalterable changes which time
works in us all, the inward lap of the marks of age, the fluted
recession of that splendor and radiance which is youth, sighed at times
perhaps, but turned his face to that dawn which is forever breaking
where youth is. Not for him that poetic loyalty which substitutes for
the perfection of young love its memories, or takes for the glitter of
passion and desire that once was the happy thoughts of
companionship--the crystal memories that like early dews congealed
remain beaded recollections to comfort or torture for the end of former
joys. On the contrary, after the vanishing of Rita Sohlberg, with all
that she meant in the way of a delicate insouciance which Aileen had
never known, his temperament ached, for he must have something like
that. Truth to say, he must always have youth, the illusion of beauty,
vanity in womanhood, the novelty of a new, untested temperament, quite
as he must have pictures, old porcelain, music, a mansion, illuminated
missals, power, the applause of the great, unthinking world.

As has been said, this promiscuous attitude on Cowperwood's part was
the natural flowering out of a temperament that was chronically
promiscuous, intellectually uncertain, and philosophically anarchistic.
From one point of view it might have been said of him that he was
seeking the realization of an ideal, yet to one's amazement our very
ideals change at times and leave us floundering in the dark. What is
an ideal, anyhow? A wraith, a mist, a perfume in the wind, a dream of
fair water. The soul-yearning of a girl like Antoinette Nowak was a
little too strained for him. It was too ardent, too clinging, and he
had gradually extricated himself, not without difficulty, from that
particular entanglement. Since then he had been intimate with other
women for brief periods, but to no great satisfaction--Dorothy Ormsby,
Jessie Belle Hinsdale, Toma Lewis, Hilda Jewell; but they shall be
names merely. One was an actress, one a stenographer, one the daughter
of one of his stock patrons, one a church-worker, a solicitor for
charity coming to him to seek help for an orphan's home. It was a
pathetic mess at times, but so are all defiant v