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 doubt this was what was intended, as well as being enforced, by the Governing Power of the world.