Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men.  The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal.  It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative.  Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation.  In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile.  The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought—­the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this.  She may change—­Hell hath no fury, etc.—­but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter.  The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note.  It approaches vast distinction in life.  It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration—­namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.  Hence the significance of this particular mood in Aileen.

All the subtleties of the present combination were troubling Cowperwood as he followed Butler into the room upstairs.

“Sit down, sit down.  You won’t take a little somethin’?  You never do.  I remember now.  Well, have a cigar, anyhow.  Now, what’s this that’s troublin’ you to-night?”

Voices could be heard faintly in the distance, far off toward the thicker residential sections.

“Extra!  Extra!  All about the big Chicago fire!  Chicago burning down!”

“Just that,” replied Cowperwood, hearkening to them.  “Have you heard the news?”

“No.  What’s that they’re calling?”

“It’s a big fire out in Chicago.”

“Oh,” replied Butler, still not gathering the significance of it.

“It’s burning down the business section there, Mr. Butler,” went on Cowperwood ominously, “and I fancy it’s going to disturb financial conditions here to-morrow.  That is what I have come to see you about.  How are your investments?  Pretty well drawn in?”

Butler suddenly gathered from Cowperwood’s expression that there was something very wrong.  He put up his large hand as he leaned back in his big leather chair, and covered his mouth and chin with it.  Over those big knuckles, and bigger nose, thick and cartilaginous, his large, shaggy-eyebrowed eyes gleamed.  His gray, bristly hair stood up stiffly in a short, even growth all over his head.