uralness and simplicity
which appealed to Aileen. They had met at the Rhees Griers'. Feeling
herself neglected after Lynde's departure, and dreading loneliness
above all things, Aileen became intimate with Skeet, but to no intense
mental satisfaction. That driving standard within--that obsessing ideal
which requires that all things be measured by it--was still dominant.
Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better thing? How it
creeps over the spirit of one's current dreams! Like the specter at the
banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy
the makeshift feast. The what-might-have-been of her life with
Cowperwood walked side by side with her wherever she went. Once
occasionally indulging in cigarettes, she now smoked almost constantly.
Once barely sipping at wines, cocktails, brandy-and-soda, she now took
to the latter, or, rather, to a new whisky-and-soda combination known
as "highball" with a kind of vehemence which had little to do with a
taste for the thing itself. True, drinking is, after all, a state of
mind, and not an appetite. She had found on a number of occasions when
she had been quarreling with Lynde or was mentally depressed that in
partaking of these drinks a sort of warm, speculative indifference
seized upon her. She was no longer so sad. She might cry, but it was
in a soft, rainy, relieving way. Her sorrows were as strange, enticing
figures in dreams. They moved about and around her, not as things
actually identical with her, but as ills which she could view at a
distance. Sometimes both she and they (for she saw herself also as in
a kind of mirage or inverted vision) seemed beings of another state,
troubled, but not bitterly painful. The old nepenthe of the bottle had
seized upon her. After a few accidental lapses, in which she found it
acted as a solace or sedative, the highball visioned itself to her as a
resource. Why should she not drink if it relieved her, as it actually
did, of physical and mental pain? There were apparently no bad
after-effects. The whisky involved was diluted to an almost watery
state. It was her custom now when at home alone to go to the butler's
pantry where the liquors were stored and prepare a drink for herself,
or to order a tray with a siphon and bottle placed in her room.
Cowperwood, noticing the persistence of its presence there and the fact
that she drank heavily at table, commented upon it.

"You're not taking to