“Oh, Aileen,” called Norah, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.  Where have you been?”

“Dancing, of course.  Where do you suppose I’ve been?  Didn’t you see me on the floor?”

“No, I didn’t,” complained Norah, as though it were most essential that she should.  “How late are you going to stay?”

“Until it’s over, I suppose.  I don’t know.”

“Owen says he’s going at twelve.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter.  Some one will take me home.  Are you having a good time?”

“Fine.  Oh, let me tell you.  I stepped on a lady’s dress over there, last dance.  She was terribly angry.  She gave me such a look.”

“Well, never mind, honey.  She won’t hurt you.  Where are you going now?”

Aileen always maintained a most guardian-like attitude toward her sister.

“I want to find Callum.  He has to dance with me next time.  I know what he’s trying to do.  He’s trying to get away from me.  But he won’t.”

Aileen smiled.  Norah looked very sweet.  And she was so bright.  What would she think of her if she knew?  She turned back, and her fourth partner sought her.  She began talking gayly, for she felt that she had to make a show of composure; but all the while there was ringing in her ears that definite question of his, “You like me, don’t you?” and her later uncertain but not less truthful answer, “Yes, of course I do.”

Chapter XIX

The growth of a passion is a very peculiar thing.  In highly organized intellectual and artistic types it is so often apt to begin with keen appreciation of certain qualities, modified by many, many mental reservations.  The egoist, the intellectual, gives but little of himself and asks much.  Nevertheless, the lover of life, male or female, finding himself or herself in sympathetic accord with such a nature, is apt to gain much.

Cowperwood was innately and primarily an egoist and intellectual, though blended strongly therewith, was a humane and democratic spirit.  We think of egoism and intellectualism as closely confined to the arts.  Finance is an art.  And it presents the operations of the subtlest of the intellectuals and of the egoists.  Cowperwood was a financier.  Instead of dwelling on the works of nature, its beauty and subtlety, to his material disadvantage, he found a happy mean, owing to the swiftness of his intellectual operations, whereby he could, intellectually and emotionally, rejoice in the beauty of life without interfering with his perpetual material and financial calculations.  And when it came to women and morals, which involved so much relating to beauty, happiness, a sense of distinction and variety in living, he was but now beginning to suspect for himself at least that apart from maintaining organized society in its present form there was no basis for this one-life, one-love idea.  How had it come about that so many people agreed on this single