“The little snip”—she was not at all—“she thinks the sun rises and sets in her father’s pocket,” Lillian observed one day to her husband. “To hear her talk, you’d think they were descended from Irish kings. Her pretended interest in art and music amuses me.” “Oh, don’t be too hard on her,” coaxed Cowperwood diplomatically. He already liked Aileen very much. “She plays very well, and she has a good voice.” “Yes, I know; but she has no real refinement. How could she have? Look at her father and mother.” “I don’t see anything so very much the matter with her,” insisted Cowperwood. “She’s bright and good-looking. Of course, she’s only a girl, and a little vain, but she’ll come out of that. She isn’t without sense and force, at that.” Aileen, as he knew, was most friendly to him. She liked him. She made a point of playing the piano and singing for him in his home, and she sang only when he was there. There was something about his steady, even gait, his stocky body and handsome head, which attracted her. In spite of her vanity and egotism, she felt a little overawed before him at times—keyed up. She seemed to grow gayer and more brilliant in his presence. The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions—none more so than the most capable. In the case of Aileen Butler it would be quite impossible to give an exact definition. Intelligence, of a raw, crude order she had certainly—also a native force, tamed somewhat by the doctrines and conventions of current society, still showed clear at times in an elemental and not entirely unattractive way. At this time she was only eighteen years of age—decidedly attractive from the point of view of a man of Frank Cowperwood’s temperament. She supplied something he had not previously known or consciously craved. Vitality and vivacity. No other woman or girl whom he had ever known had possessed so much innate force as she. Her red-gold hair—not so red as decidedly golden with a suggestion of red in it—looped itself in heavy folds about her forehead and sagged at the base of her neck. She had a beautiful nose, not sensitive, but straight-cut with small nostril openings, and eyes that were big and yet noticeably sensuous. They were, to him, a pleasing shade of blue-gray-blue, and her toilet, due to her temperament, of course, suggested almost undue luxury, the bangles, anklets, ear-rings, and breast-plates of the odalisque, and yet, of course, they were not there. She confessed to him years afterward that she would have loved to have stained her nails and painted the palms of her hands with madder-red. Healthy and vigorous, she was chronically interested in men—what they would think of her—and how she compared with other women.