Sohlberg could never earn it for her." Aileen sympathized with Harold because of his temperament, but she knew that what Cowperwood said was true.
Another time, at a box-party at the theater, she had noted the rich elaborateness of Mrs.Sohlberg's dainty frock, the endless pleatings of pale silk, the startling charm of the needlework and the ribbons--countless, rosetted, small--that meant hard work on the part of some one.
"How lovely this is," she had commented.
"Yes," Rita had replied, airily; "I thought, don't you know, my dressmaker would never get done working on it." It had cost, all told, two hundred and twenty dollars, and Cowperwood had gladly paid the bill.
Aileen went home at the time thinking of Rita's taste and of how well she had harmonized her materials to her personality.

She was truly charming.
Now, however, when it appeared that the same charm that had appealed to her had appealed to Cowperwood, she conceived an angry, animal opposition to it all.

Rita Sohlberg! Ha! A lot of satisfaction she'd get knowing as she would soon, that Cowperwood was sharing his affection for her with Antoinette Nowak--a mere stenographer.

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! Cowperwood, the pretender! Cowperwood, the sneak! At one moment she conceived a kind of horror of the man because of all his protestations to her; at the next a rage--bitter, swelling; at the next a pathetic realization of her own altered position.

Say what one will, to take the love of a man like Cowperwood away from a woman like Aileen was to leave her high and dry on land, as a fish out of its native element, to take all the wind out of her sails--almost to kill her.