red with irritation--"still it is not
worth while to attempt to hold him to a strict account. You know"--and
Mr. Steger opened his thin, artistic hands in a deprecatory way--"what
sort of a man Mr. Cowperwood is, and whether he can be coerced or not.
He is not an ordinary man, Mrs. Cowperwood. No man could have gone
through what he has and be where he is to-day, and be an average man.
If you take my advice you will let him go his way. Grant him a
divorce. He is willing, even anxious to make a definite provision for
you and your children. He will, I am sure, look liberally after their
future. But he is becoming very irritable over your unwillingness to
give him a legal separation, and unless you do I am very much afraid
that the whole matter will be thrown into the courts. If, before it
comes to that, I could effect an arrangement agreeable to you, I would
be much pleased. As you know, I have been greatly grieved by the
whole course of your recent affairs. I am intensely sorry that things
are as they are."

Mr. Steger lifted his eyes in a very pained, deprecatory way. He
regretted deeply the shifty currents of this troubled world.

Mrs. Cowperwood for perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth time heard him
to the end in patience. Cowperwood would not return. Steger was as
much her friend as any other lawyer would be. Besides, he was socially
agreeable to her. Despite his Machiavellian profession, she half
believed him. He went over, tactfully, a score of additional points.
Finally, on the twenty-first visit, and with seemingly great distress,
he told her that her husband had decided to break with her financially,
to pay no more bills, and do nothing until his responsibility had been
fixed by the courts, and that he, Steger, was about to retire from the
case. Mrs. Cowperwood felt that she must yield; she named her
ultimatum. If he would fix two hundred thousand dollars on her and the
children (this was Cowperwood's own suggestion) and later on do
something commercially for their only son, Frank, junior, she would let
him go. She disliked to do it. She knew that it meant the triumph of
Aileen Butler, such as it was. But, after all, that wretched creature
had been properly disgraced in Philadelphia. It was not likely she
could ever raise her head socially anywhere any more. She agreed to
file a plea which Steger would draw up for her, and by that oily
gentleman's machinations it was finally wormed through