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Updated: May 18, 2025
Mrs. Sohlberg felt that this was going to be a wonderful evening. The dinner was at the Park an open-air chicken a la Maryland affair, with waffles and champagne to help out. Aileen, flattered by Sohlberg's gaiety under her spell, was having a delightful time, jesting, toasting, laughing, walking on the grass.
And a lot of satisfaction Antoinette would get the cheap upstart when she learned, as she would, that Cowperwood loved her so lightly that he would take an apartment for Rita Sohlberg and let a cheap hotel or an assignation-house do for her. But in spite of this savage exultation her thoughts kept coming back to herself, to her own predicament, to torture and destroy her. Cowperwood, the liar!
It was amusing, typically American, naive, almost impossible from many points of view. Rita Sohlberg was of the semi-phlegmatic type, soft, full-blooded, with a body that was going to be fat at forty, but which at present was deliciously alluring.
Sohlberg for the moment for some little time, in fact was under the impression that Aileen had truly lost her mind, had suddenly gone crazy, and that those shameless charges he had heard her making were the emanations of a disordered brain. Nevertheless the things she had said haunted him. He was in a bad state himself almost a subject for the doctor. His lips were bluish, his cheeks blanched.
He knew it was useless to brood over Rita Sohlberg she would not return and yet he could not help it; but he could work hard, and that was something. His natural aptitude and affection for street-railway work had long since been demonstrated, and it was now making him restless.
Very well, then. Supposing for argument's sake that Mrs. Cowperwood was not insane; that every word she said was true; that I had been misconducting myself with your wife? What of it? What will you do?" He looked at Sohlberg smoothly, ironically, while the latter flared up. "Haw!" he shouted, melodramatically. "Why, I would keel you, that's what I would do. I would keel her.
So long, indeed, as Cowperwood was genuinely promiscuous, so long as he trotted here and there, not snared by any particular siren, she could not despair, for, after all, she had ensnared him and held him deliciously without variation, she believed, for all of ten years a feat which no other woman had achieved before or after. Rita Sohlberg might have succeeded the beast!
For something over a year neither Sohlberg nor Aileen was aware of the intimacy which had sprung up. Sohlberg, easily bamboozled, went back to Denmark for a visit, then to study in Germany. Mrs. Sohlberg followed Cowperwood to Europe the following year. At Aix-les-Bains, Biarritz, Paris, even London, Aileen never knew that there was an additional figure in the background.
There would be the same ostensible reason additional means from her relatives. Mrs. Sohlberg, thus urged, petted, made over, assured, came finally to accept his liberal rule to bow to him; she became as contented as a cat. With caution she accepted of his largess, and made the cleverest use of it she could.
He had followed the Sohlbergs almost immediately from his office, and, chancing to glance in the reception-room, he had observed Sohlberg smiling, radiant, an intangible air of self-ingratiating, social, and artistic sycophancy about him, his long black frock-coat buttoned smoothly around his body, his silk hat still in his hands.
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