sometimes pleasant jesting were all a horrible offense. To complete her mental quandary, she was already beginning to quarrel with Lynde over this matter of her unbreakable regard for Cowperwood. With the sufficiency of a man of the world Lynde intended that she should succumb to him completely and forget her wonderful husband. When with him she was apparently charmed and interested, yielding herself freely, but this was more out of pique at Cowperwood’s neglect than from any genuine passion for Lynde. In spite of her pretensions of anger, her sneers, and criticisms whenever Cowperwood’s name came up, she was, nevertheless, hopelessly fond of him and identified with him spiritually, and it was not long before Lynde began to suspect this. Such a discovery is a sad one for any master of women to make. It jolted his pride severely. “You care for him still, don’t you?” he asked, with a wry smile, upon one occasion. They were sitting at dinner in a private room at Kinsley’s, and Aileen, whose color was high, and who was becomingly garbed in metallic-green silk, was looking especially handsome. Lynde had been proposing that she should make special arrangements to depart with him for a three-months’ stay in Europe, but she would have nothing to do with 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.