tuous going to pieces of Ira
George Carter, the looming pathos of the future of the children, and a
growing sense of affection and responsibility had finally sobered her.
The lure of love and life had not entirely disappeared, but her chance
of sipping at those crystal founts had grown sadly slender. A woman of
thirty-eight and still possessing some beauty, she was not content to
eat the husks provided for the unworthy. Her gorge rose at the thought
of that neglected state into which the pariahs of society fall and on
which the inexperienced so cheerfully comment. Neglected by her own
set, shunned by the respectable, her fortune quite gone, she was
nevertheless determined that she would not be a back-street seamstress
or a pensioner upon the bounty of quondam friends. By insensible
degrees came first unhallowed relationships through friendship and
passing passion, then a curious intermediate state between the high
world of fashion and the half world of harlotry, until, finally, in
Louisville, she had become, not openly, but actually, the mistress of a
house of ill repute. Men who knew how these things were done, and who
were consulting their own convenience far more than her welfare,
suggested the advisability of it. Three or four friends like Colonel
Gillis wished rooms--convenient place in which to loaf, gamble, and
bring their women. Hattie Starr was her name now, and as such she had
even become known in a vague way to the police--but only vaguely--as a
woman whose home was suspiciously gay on occasions.

Cowperwood, with his appetite for the wonders of life, his appreciation
of the dramas which produce either failure or success, could not help
being interested in this spoiled woman who was sailing so vaguely the
seas of chance. Colonel Gillis once said that with some strong man to
back her, Nannie Fleming could be put back into society. She had a
pleasant appeal--she and her two children, of whom she never spoke.
After a few visits to her home Cowperwood spent hours talking with Mrs.
Carter whenever he was in Louisville. On one occasion, as they were
entering her boudoir, she picked up a photograph of her daughter from
the dresser and dropped it into a drawer. Cowperwood had never seen
this picture before. It was that of a girl of fifteen or sixteen, of
whom he obtained but the most fleeting glance. Yet, with that instinct
for the essential and vital which invariably possessed him, he gained a
keen impre