“No.” She smoothed her fan with her fingers.
“Are you happy at all?”
“I thought I was once. I’m not any more, I think.”
“It is so plain why,” he commented. “You are so much more wonderful than your place gives you scope for. You are an individual, not an acolyte to swing a censer for another. Mr. Sohlberg is very interesting, but you can’t be happy that way. It surprises me you haven’t seen it.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, with a touch of weariness, “but perhaps I have.”
He looked at her keenly, and she thrilled. “I don’t think we’d better talk so here,” she replied. “You’d better be—”
He laid his hand on the back of her chair, almost touching her shoulder.
“Rita,” he said, using her given name again, “you wonderful woman!”
“Oh!” she breathed.
Cowperwood did not see Mrs. Sohlberg again for over a week—ten days exactly—when one afternoon Aileen came for him in a new kind of trap, having stopped first to pick up the Sohlbergs. Harold was up in front with her and she had left a place behind for Cowperwood with Rita. She did not in the vaguest way suspect how interested he was—his manner was so deceptive. Aileen imagined that she was the superior woman of the two, the better-looking, the better-dressed, hence the more ensnaring. She could not guess what a lure this woman’s temperament had for Cowperwood, who was so brisk, dynamic, seemingly unromantic, but who, just the same, in his nature concealed (under a very forceful exterior) a deep underlying element of romance and fire.