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face. This now was something in accordance with what he had expected of Cowperwood. A
man who could steal five hundred thousand dollars and set a whole city by the ears must have
wonderful adventures of all kinds, and Aileen looked like a true adventure. He led her to the little
room where he kept his desk and detained visitors, and then bustled down to Cowperwood's
cell, where the financier was working on one of his chairs and scratching on the door with his
key, called: "There's a young lady here to see you. Do you want to let her come inside?"
"Thank you, yes," replied Cowperwood; and Bonhag hurried away, unintentionally forgetting, in
his boorish incivility, to unlock the cell door, so that he had to open it in Aileen's presence. The
long corridor, with its thick doors, mathematically spaced gratings and gray-stone pavement,
caused Aileen to feel faint at heart. A prison, iron cells! And he was in one of them. It chilled her
usually courageous spirit. What a terrible place for her Frank to be! What a horrible thing to
have put him here! Judges, juries, courts, laws, jails seemed like so many foaming ogres ranged
about the world, glaring down upon her and her love-affair. The clank of the key in the lock, and
the heavy outward swinging of the door, completed her sense of the untoward. And then she
saw Cowperwood.
Because of the price he was to receive, Bonhag, after admitting her, strolled discreetly away.
Aileen looked at Cowperwood from behind her veil, afraid to speak until she was sure Bonhag
had gone. And Cowperwood, who was retaining his self-possession by an effort, signaled her
but with difficulty after a moment or two. "It's all right," he said. "He's gone away." She lifted her
veil, removed her cloak, and took in, without seeming to, the stuffy, narrow thickness of the
room, his wretched shoes, the cheap, misshapen suit, the iron door behind him leading out into
the little yard attached to his cell. Against such a background, with his partially caned chairs
visible at the end of the bed, he seemed unnatural, weird even. Her Frank! And in this condition.
She trembled and it was useless for her to try to speak. She could only put her arms around him
and stroke his head, murmuring: "My poor boy--my darling. Is this what they have done to you?
Oh, my poor darling." She held his head while Cowperwood, anxious to retain his composure,
winced and trembled, too. Her love was so full--so genuine. It was so soothing at the same time
that it was unmanning, as now he could see, making of him a child again. And for the first time
in his life, some inexplicable trick of chemistry-- that chemistry of the body, of blind forces which
so readily supersedes reason at times--he lost his self-control. The depth of Aileen's feelings,
the cooing sound of her voice, the velvety tenderness of her hands, that beauty that had drawn
him all the time--more radiant here perhaps within these hard walls, and in the face of his
physical misery, than it had ever been before-- completely unmanned him. He did not
understand how it could; he tried to defy the moods, but he could not. When she held his head
close and caressed it, of a sudden, in spite of himself, his breast felt thick and stuffy, and his
throat hurt him. He felt, for him, an astonishingly strange feeling, a desire to cry, which he did
his best to overcome; it shocked him so. There then combined and conspired to defeat him a
strange, rich picture of the great world he had so recently lost, of the lovely, magnificent world
which he hoped some day to regain. He felt more poignantly at this moment than ever he had
before the degradation of the clog shoes, the cotton shirt, the striped suit, the reputation of a
convict, permanent and not to be laid aside. He drew himself quickly away from her, turned his
back, clinched his hands, drew his muscles taut; but it was too late. He was crying, and he could
not stop.
"Oh, damn it!" he exclaimed, half angrily, half self-commiseratingly, in combined rage and
shame. "Why should I cry? What the devil's the matter with me, anyhow?"
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