ariations from the
accustomed drift of things. In the hardy language of Napoleon, one
cannot make an omelette without cracking a number of eggs.

The coming of Stephanie Platow, Russian Jewess on one side of her
family, Southwestern American on the other, was an event in
Cowperwood's life. She was tall, graceful, brilliant, young, with much
of the optimism of Rita Sohlberg, and yet endowed with a strange
fatalism which, once he knew her better, touched and moved him. He met
her on shipboard on the way to Goteborg. Her father, Isadore Platow,
was a wealthy furrier of Chicago. He was a large, meaty, oily type of
man--a kind of ambling, gelatinous formula of the male, with the usual
sound commercial instincts of the Jew, but with an errant philosophy
which led him to believe first one thing and then another so long as
neither interfered definitely with his business. He was an admirer of
Henry George and of so altruistic a programme as that of Robert Owen,
and, also, in his way, a social snob. And yet he had married Susetta
Osborn, a Texas girl who was once his bookkeeper. Mrs. Platow was
lithe, amiable, subtle, with an eye always to the main social
chance--in other words, a climber. She was shrewd enough to realize
that a knowledge of books and art and current events was essential, and
so she "went in" for these things.

It is curious how the temperaments of parents blend and revivify in
their children. As Stephanie grew up she had repeated in her very
differing body some of her father's and mother's characteristics--an
interesting variability of soul. She was tall, dark, sallow, lithe,
with a strange moodiness of heart and a recessive, fulgurous gleam in
her chestnut-brown, almost brownish-black eyes. She had a full,
sensuous, Cupid's mouth, a dreamy and even languishing expression, a
graceful neck, and a heavy, dark, and yet pleasingly modeled face.
From both her father and mother she had inherited a penchant for art,
literature, philosophy, and music. Already at eighteen she was
dreaming of painting, singing, writing poetry, writing books,
acting--anything and everything. Serene in her own judgment of what
was worth while, she was like to lay stress on any silly mood or fad,
thinking it exquisite--the last word. Finally, she was a rank
voluptuary, dreaming dreams of passionate union with first one and then
another type of artist, poet, musician--the whole gamut of the artistic
and emotional world.

Cow