Butler saw that Cowperwood had the advantage. He might as well go up. Otherwise it was plain he would get no information.
“Very well,” he said.
Cowperwood led the way quite amicably, and, having entered his private office, closed the door behind him.
“We ought to be able to talk this matter over and reach an understanding,” he said again, when they were in the room and he had closed the door. “I am not as bad as you think, though I know I appear very bad.” Butler stared at him in contempt. “I love your daughter, and she loves me. I know you are asking yourself how I can do this while I am still married; but I assure you I can, and that I do. I am not happily married. I had expected, if this panic hadn’t come along, to arrange with my wife for a divorce and marry Aileen. My intentions are perfectly good. The situation which you can complain of, of course, is the one you encountered a few weeks ago. It was indiscreet, but it was entirely human. Your daughter does not complain—she understands.” At the mention of his daughter in this connection Butler flushed with rage and shame, but he controlled himself.
“And ye think because she doesn’t complain that it’s all right, do ye?” he asked, sarcastically.
“From my point of view, yes; from yours no. You have one view of life, Mr. Butler, and I have another.”
“Ye’re right there,” put in Butler, “for once, anyhow.”
“That doesn’t prove that either of us is right or wrong. In my judgment the present end justifies the means. The end I have in view is to marry Aileen. If I can possibly pull myself out of this financial scrape that I am in I will do so. Of course, I would like to have your consent for that—so would Aileen; but if we can’t, we can’t.” (Cowperwood was thinking that while this might not have a very soothing effect on the old contractor’s point of view, nevertheless it must make some appeal to his sense of the possible or necessary. Aileen’s present situation was quite unsatisfactory without marriage in view. And even if he, Cowperwood, was a convicted embezzler in the eyes of the public, that did not make him so. He might get free and restore himself—would certainly—and Aileen ought to be glad to marry him if she could under the circumstances. He did not quite grasp the depth of Butler’s religious and moral prejudices.) “Lately,” he went on, “you have been doing all you can, as I understand it, to pull me down, on account of Aileen, I suppose; but that is simply delaying what I want to do.”
“Ye’d like me to help ye do that, I suppose?” suggested Butler, with infinite disgust and patience.
“I want to marry Aileen,” Cowperwood repeated, for emphasis’ sake. “She wants to marry me. Under the circumstances, however you may feel, you can have no real objection to my doing that, I am sure; yet you go on fighting me—making it hard for me to do what you really know ought to be done.”