s. Once she met him in Merrill's
store at noon, and he invited her to lunch; but she felt obliged to
decline. Always he looked at her with such straight, vigorous eyes.
To think that her beauty had done or was doing this! Her mind, quite
beyond herself, ran forward to an hour when perhaps this eager,
magnetic man would take charge of her in a way never dreamed of by
Harold. But she went on practising, shopping, calling, reading,
brooding over Harold's inefficiency, and stopping oddly sometimes to
think--the etherealized grip of Cowperwood upon her. Those strong
hands of his--how fine they were--and those large, soft-hard, incisive
eyes. The puritanism of Wichita (modified sometime since by the art
life of Chicago, such as it was) was having a severe struggle with the
manipulative subtlety of the ages--represented in this man.

"You know you are very elusive," he said to her one evening at the
theater when he sat behind her during the entr'acte, and Harold and
Aileen had gone to walk in the foyer. The hubbub of conversation
drowned the sound of anything that might be said. Mrs. Sohlberg was
particularly pleasing in a lacy evening gown.

"No," she replied, amusedly, flattered by his attention and acutely
conscious of his physical nearness. By degrees she had been yielding
herself to his mood, thrilling at his every word. "It seems to me I am
very stable," she went on. "I'm certainly substantial enough."

She looked at her full, smooth arm lying on her lap.

Cowperwood, who was feeling all the drag of her substantiality, but in
addition the wonder of her temperament, which was so much richer than
Aileen's, was deeply moved. Those little blood moods that no words
ever (or rarely) indicate were coming to him from her--faint
zephyr-like emanations of emotions, moods, and fancies in her mind
which allured him. She was like Aileen in animality, but better, still
sweeter, more delicate, much richer spiritually. Or was he just tired
of Aileen for the present, he asked himself at times. No, no, he told
himself that could not be. Rita Sohlberg was by far the most pleasing
woman he had ever known.

"Yes, but elusive, just the same," he went on, leaning toward her. "You
remind me of something that I can find no word for--a bit of color or a
perfume or tone--a flash of something. I follow you in my thoughts
all the time now. Your knowledge of art interests me. I like your
playing--it is like you. You make me thi