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Fortunately by now Cowperwood had begun to see that by a little experimenting his business
relations with Wingate were likely to prove profitable. The broker had made it clear that he
intended to be perfectly straight with him. He had employed Cowperwood's two brothers, at very
moderate salaries--one to take care of the books and look after the office, and the other to act
on 'change with him, for their seats in that organization had never been sold. And also, by
considerable effort, he had succeeded in securing Cowperwood, Sr., a place as a clerk in a
bank. For the latter, since the day of his resignation from the Third National had been in a deep,
sad quandary as to what further to do with his life. His son's disgrace! The horror of his trial and
incarceration. Since the day of Frank's indictment and more so, since his sentence and
commitment to the Eastern Penitentiary, he was as one who walked in a dream. That trial! That
charge against Frank! His own son, a convict in stripes--and after he and Frank had walked so
proudly in the front rank of the successful and respected here. Like so many others in his hour
of distress, he had taken to reading the Bible, looking into its pages for something of that mind
consolation that always, from youth up, although rather casually in these latter years, he had
imagined was to be found there. The Psalms, Isaiah, the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes. And for the
most part, because of the fraying nature of his present ills, not finding it.
But day after day secreting himself in his room--a little hall-bedroom office in his newest home,
where to his wife, he pretended that he had some commercial matters wherewith he was still
concerned-- and once inside, the door locked, sitting and brooding on all that had befallen
him--his losses; his good name. Or, after months of this, and because of the new position
secured for him by Wingate-- a bookkeeping job in one of the outlying banks--slipping away
early in the morning, and returning late at night, his mind a gloomy epitome of all that had been
or yet might be.
To see him bustling off from his new but very much reduced home at half after seven in the
morning in order to reach the small bank, which was some distance away and not accessible by
street-car line, was one of those pathetic sights which the fortunes of trade so frequently offer.
He carried his lunch in a small box because it was inconvenient to return home in the time
allotted for this purpose, and because his new salary did not permit the extravagance of a
purchased one. It was his one ambition now to eke out a respectable but unseen existence until
he should die, which he hoped would not be long. He was a pathetic figure with his thin legs and
body, his gray hair, and his snow-white side-whiskers. He was very lean and angular, and, when
confronted by a difficult problem, a little uncertain or vague in his mind. An old habit which had
grown on him in the years of his prosperity of putting his hand to his mouth and of opening his
eyes in an assumption of surprise, which had no basis in fact, now grew upon him. He really
degenerated, although he did not know it, into a mere automaton. Life strews its shores with
such interesting and pathetic wrecks.
One of the things that caused Cowperwood no little thought at this time, and especially in view
of his present extreme indifference to her, was how he would bring up this matter of his
indifference to his wife and his desire to end their relationship. Yet apart from the brutality of the
plain truth, he saw no way. As he could plainly see, she was now persisting in her pretense of
devotion, uncolored, apparently, by any suspicion of what had happened. Yet since his trial and
conviction, she had been hearing from one source and another that he was still intimate with
Aileen, and it was only her thought of his concurrent woes, and the fact that he might possibly
be spared to a successful financial life, that now deterred her from speaking. He was shut up in
a cell, she said to herself, and she was really very sorry for him, but she did not love him as she
once had. He was really too deserving of reproach for his general unseemly conduct, and no
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