the project. She did not dare. Such a move would make
Cowperwood feel that she was alienating herself forever; it would give
him an excellent excuse to leave her.

"Oh, it isn't that," she had declared, in reply to Lynde's query. "I
just don't want to go. I can't. I'm not prepared. It's nothing but a
notion of yours, anyhow. You're tired of Chicago because it's getting
near spring. You go and I'll be here when you come back, or I may
decide to come over later." She smiled.

Lynde pulled a dark face.

"Hell!" he said. "I know how it is with you. You still stick to him,
even when he treats you like a dog. You pretend not to love him when
as a matter of fact you're mad about him. I've seen it all along. You
don't really care anything about me. You can't. You're too crazy about
him."

"Oh, shut up!" replied Aileen, irritated greatly for the moment by this
onslaught. "You talk like a fool. I'm not anything of the sort. I
admire him. How could any one help it?" (At this time, of course,
Cowperwood's name was filling the city.) "He's a very wonderful man.
He was never brutal to me. He's a full-sized man--I'll say that for
him."

By now Aileen had become sufficiently familiar with Lynde to criticize
him in her own mind, and even outwardly by innuendo, for being a loafer
and idler who had never created in any way the money he was so freely
spending. She had little power to psychologize concerning social
conditions, but the stalwart constructive persistence of Cowperwood
along commercial lines coupled with the current American contempt of
leisure reflected somewhat unfavorably upon Lynde, she thought.

Lynde's face clouded still more at this outburst. "You go to the
devil," he retorted. "I don't get you at all. Sometimes you talk as
though you were fond of me. At other times you're all wrapped up in
him. Now you either care for me or you don't. Which is it? If you're
so crazy about him that you can't leave home for a month or so you
certainly can't care much about me."

Aileen, however, because of her long experience with Cowperwood, was
more than a match for Lynde. At the same time she was afraid to let go
of him for fear that she should have no one to care for her. She liked
him. He was a happy resource in her misery, at least for the moment.
Yet the knowledge that Cowperwood looked upon this affair as a heavy
blemish on her pristine solidarity cooled her. At the thought of him
and of her