d enter--late in the night--his now silent
gallery, and turning on the lights so that the whole sweet room stood
revealed, he would seat himself before some treasure, reflecting on the
nature, the mood, the time, and the man that had produced it.
Sometimes it would be one of Rembrandt's melancholy heads--the sad
"Portrait of a Rabbi"--or the sweet introspection of a Rousseau stream.
A solemn Dutch housewife, rendered with the bold fidelity and resonant
enameled surfaces of a Hals or the cold elegance of an Ingres,
commanded his utmost enthusiasm. So he would sit and wonder at the
vision and skill of the original dreamer, exclaiming at times: "A
marvel! A marvel!"

At the same time, so far as Aileen was concerned things were obviously
shaping up for additional changes. She was in that peculiar state
which has befallen many a woman--trying to substitute a lesser ideal
for a greater, and finding that the effort is useless or nearly so. In
regard to her affair with Lynde, aside from the temporary relief and
diversion it had afforded her, she was beginning to feel that she had
made a serious mistake. Lynde was delightful, after his fashion. He
could amuse her with a different type of experience from any that
Cowperwood had to relate. Once they were intimate he had, with an
easy, genial air, confessed to all sorts of liaisons in Europe and
America. He was utterly pagan--a faun--and at the same time he was
truly of the smart world. His open contempt of all but one or two of
the people in Chicago whom Aileen had secretly admired and wished to
associate with, and his easy references to figures of importance in the
East and in Paris and London, raised him amazingly in her estimation;
it made her feel, sad to relate, that she had by no means lowered
herself in succumbing so readily to his forceful charms.

Nevertheless, because he was what he was--genial, complimentary,
affectionate, but a playboy, merely, and a soldier of fortune, with no
desire to make over her life for her on any new basis--she was now
grieving over the futility of this romance which had got her nowhere,
and which, in all probability, had alienated Cowperwood for good. He
was still outwardly genial and friendly, but their relationship was now
colored by a sense of mistake and uncertainty which existed on both
sides, but which, in Aileen's case, amounted to a subtle species of
soul-torture. Hitherto she had been the aggrieved one, the one whose
loyal