him, he could not tell
her. He could not forget that once, behind the grim bars in the
penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, he had cried on
her shoulder. He could not be an ingrate and wound her with his inmost
thoughts any more than he could deceive himself. A New York mansion
and the dreams of social supremacy which she might there entertain
would soothe her ruffled vanity and assuage her disappointed heart; and
at the same time he would be nearer Berenice Fleming. Say what one
will of these ferret windings of the human mind, they are,
nevertheless, true and characteristic of the average human being, and
Cowperwood was no exception. He saw it all, he calculated on it--he
calculated on the simple humanity of Aileen.

Chapter XLVI

Depths and Heights

The complications which had followed his various sentimental affairs
left Cowperwood in a quandary at times as to whether there could be any
peace or satisfaction outside of monogamy, after all. Although Mrs.
Hand had gone to Europe at the crisis of her affairs, she had returned
to seek him out. Cecily Haguenin found many opportunities of writing
him letters and assuring him of her undying affection. Florence
Cochrane persisted in seeing or attempting to see him even after his
interest in her began to wane. For another thing Aileen, owing to the
complication and general degeneracy of her affairs, had recently begun
to drink. Owing to the failure of her affair with Lynde--for in spite
of her yielding she had never had any real heart interest in it--and to
the cavalier attitude with which Cowperwood took her disloyalty, she
had reached that state of speculative doldrums where the human animal
turns upon itself in bitter self-analysis; the end with the more
sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death. Woe to him
who places his faith in illusion--the only reality--and woe to him who
does not. In one way lies disillusion with its pain, in the other way
regret.

After Lynde's departure for Europe, whither she had refused to follow
him, Aileen took up with a secondary personage by the name of Watson
Skeet, a sculptor. Unlike most artists, he was the solitary heir of
the president of an immense furniture-manufacturing company in which he
refused to take any interest. He had studied abroad, but had returned
to Chicago with a view to propagating art in the West. A large, blond,
soft-fleshed man, he had a kind of archaic nat