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the beauty of womanhood he was beginning to see how necessary it was to add the beauty of
life-- the beauty of material background--how, in fact, the only background for great beauty was
great art. This girl, this Aileen Butler, her raw youth and radiance, was nevertheless creating in
him a sense of the distinguished and a need for it which had never existed in him before to the
same degree. It is impossible to define these subtleties of reaction, temperament on
temperament, for no one knows to what degree we are marked by the things which attract us. A
love affair such as this had proved to be was little less or more than a drop of coloring added to
a glass of clear water, or a foreign chemical agent introduced into a delicate chemical formula.
In short, for all her crudeness, Aileen Butler was a definite force personally. Her nature, in a
way, a protest against the clumsy conditions by which she found herself surrounded, was
almost irrationally ambitious. To think that for so long, having been born into the Butler family,
she had been the subject, as well as the victim of such commonplace and inartistic illusions and
conditions, whereas now, owing to her contact with, and mental subordination to Cowperwood,
she was learning so many wonderful phases of social, as well as financial, refinement of which
previously she had guessed nothing. The wonder, for instance, of a future social career as the
wife of such a man as Frank Cowperwood. The beauty and resourcefulness of his mind, which,
after hours of intimate contact with her, he was pleased to reveal, and which, so definite were
his comments and instructions, she could not fail to sense. The wonder of his financial and
artistic and future social dreams. And, oh, oh, she was his, and he was hers. She was actually
beside herself at times with the glory, as well as the delight of all this.
At the same time, her father's local reputation as a quondam garbage contractor ("slop-
collector" was the unfeeling comment of the vulgarian cognoscenti); her own unavailing efforts
to right a condition of material vulgarity or artistic anarchy in her own home; the hopelessness of
ever being admitted to those distinguished portals which she recognized afar off as the last
sanctum sanctorum of established respectability and social distinction, had bred in her, even at
this early age, a feeling of deadly opposition to her home conditions as they stood. Such a
house compared to Cowperwood's! Her dear, but ignorant, father! And this great man, her lover,
had now condescended to love her--see in her his future wife. Oh, God, that it might not fail!
Through the Cowperwoods at first she had hoped to meet a few people, young men and
women--and particularly men--who were above the station in which she found herself, and to
whom her beauty and prospective fortune would commend her; but this had not been the case.
The Cowperwoods themselves, in spite of Frank Cowperwood's artistic proclivities and growing
wealth, had not penetrated the inner circle as yet. In fact, aside from the subtle, preliminary
consideration which they were receiving, they were a long way off.
None the less, and instinctively in Cowperwood Aileen recognized a way out--a door--and by the
same token a subtle, impending artistic future of great magnificence. This man would rise
beyond anything he now dreamed of--she felt it. There was in him, in some nebulous,
unrecognizable form, a great artistic reality which was finer than anything she could plan for
herself. She wanted luxury, magnificence, social station. Well, if she could get this man they
would come to her. There were, apparently, insuperable barriers in the way; but hers was no
weakling nature, and neither was his. They ran together temperamentally from the first like two
leopards. Her own thoughts--crude, half formulated, half spoken--nevertheless matched his to a
degree in the equality of their force and their raw directness.
"I don't think papa knows how to do," she said to him, one day. "It isn't his fault. He can't help it.
He knows that he can't. And he knows that I know it. For years I wanted him to move out of that
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