ome one who would be worthy to share his throne.

It is curious how that first and most potent tendency of the human
mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating. Here was Cowperwood at
fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man,
celebrated in a local and in some respects in a national way, who was
nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been achieved.
He was not yet all-powerful as were divers Eastern magnates, or even
these four or five magnificently moneyed men here in Chicago who, by
plodding thought and labor in many dreary fields such as Cowperwood
himself frequently scorned, had reaped tremendous and uncontended
profits. How was it, he asked himself, that his path had almost
constantly been strewn with stormy opposition and threatened calamity?
Was it due to his private immorality? Other men were immoral; the mass,
despite religious dogma and fol-de-rol theory imposed from the top, was
generally so. Was it not rather due to his inability to control
without dominating personally--without standing out fully and clearly
in the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so. The humdrum
conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his
constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency was a
taunt and a mockery to many. The hard implication of his eye was
dreaded by the weaker as fire is feared by a burnt child. Dissembling
enough, he was not sufficiently oily and make-believe.

Well, come what might, he did not need to be or mean to be so, and
there the game must lie; but he had not by any means attained the
height of his ambition. He was not yet looked upon as a money prince.
He could not rank as yet with the magnates of the East--the serried
Sequoias of Wall Street. Until he could stand with these men, until he
could have a magnificent mansion, acknowledged as such by all, until he
could have a world-famous gallery, Berenice, millions--what did it
avail?

The character of Cowperwood's New York house, which proved one of the
central achievements of his later years, was one of those
flowerings--out of disposition which eventuate in the case of men quite
as in that of plants. After the passing of the years neither a
modified Gothic (such as his Philadelphia house had been), nor a
conventionalized Norman-French, after the style of his Michigan Avenue
home, seemed suitable to him. Only the Italian palaces of medieval or
Renaissance origin which he