s had been emotional makeshifts at best--more or
less idle philanderings in which his deeper moods and feelings were not
concerned. In the case of Mrs. Sohlberg all this was changed. For the
present at least she was really all in all to him. But this
temperamental characteristic of his relating to his love of women, his
artistic if not emotional subjection to their beauty, and the mystery
of their personalities led him into still a further affair, and this
last was not so fortunate in its outcome.

Antoinette Nowak had come to him fresh from a West Side high school and
a Chicago business college, and had been engaged as his private
stenographer and secretary. This girl had blossomed forth into
something exceptional, as American children of foreign parents are wont
to do. You would have scarcely believed that she, with her fine, lithe
body, her good taste in dress, her skill in stenography, bookkeeping,
and business details, could be the daughter of a struggling Pole, who
had first worked in the Southwest Chicago Steel Mills, and who had
later kept a fifth-rate cigar, news, and stationery store in the Polish
district, the merchandise of playing-cards and a back room for idling
and casual gaming being the principal reasons for its existence.
Antoinette, whose first name had not been Antoinette at all, but Minka
(the Antoinette having been borrowed by her from an article in one of
the Chicago Sunday papers), was a fine dark, brooding girl, ambitious
and hopeful, who ten days after she had accepted her new place was
admiring Cowperwood and following his every daring movement with almost
excited interest. To be the wife of such a man, she thought--to even
command his interest, let alone his affection--must be wonderful.
After the dull world she had known--it seemed dull compared to the
upper, rarefied realms which she was beginning to glimpse through
him--and after the average men in the real-estate office over the way
where she had first worked, Cowperwood, in his good clothes, his remote
mood, his easy, commanding manner, touched the most ambitious chords of
her being. One day she saw Aileen sweep in from her carriage, wearing
warm brown furs, smart polished boots, a street-suit of corded brown
wool, and a fur toque sharpened and emphasized by a long dark-red
feather which shot upward like a dagger or a quill pen. Antoinette
hated her. She conceived herself to be better, or as good at least.
Why was life divided s