little sick of the women of the streets and the bagnio. There were
too many coarse, evil features in connection with such contacts. For
a little while, the false tinsel-glitter of the house of ill repute
appealed to him, for there was a certain force to its luxury--rich, as
a rule, with red-plush furniture, showy red hangings, some coarse but
showily-framed pictures, and, above all, the strong-bodied or sensuously
lymphatic women who dwelt there, to (as his mother phrased it) prey on
men. The strength of their bodies, the lust of their souls, the fact
that they could, with a show of affection or good-nature, receive man
after man, astonished and later disgusted him. After all, they were not
smart. There was no vivacity of thought there. All that they could do,
in the main, he fancied, was this one thing. He pictured to himself the
dreariness of the mornings after, the stale dregs of things when only
sleep and thought of gain could aid in the least; and more than once,
even at his age, he shook his head. He wanted contact which was more
intimate, subtle, individual, personal.

So came Lillian Semple, who was nothing more to him than the shadow of
an ideal. Yet she cleared up certain of his ideas in regard to women.
She was not physically as vigorous or brutal as those other women
whom he had encountered in the lupanars, thus far--raw, unashamed
contraveners of accepted theories and notions--and for that very
reason he liked her. And his thoughts continued to dwell on her,
notwithstanding the hectic days which now passed like flashes of light
in his new business venture. For this stock exchange world in which
he now found himself, primitive as it would seem to-day, was most
fascinating to Cowperwood. The room that he went to in Third Street, at
Dock, where the brokers or their agents and clerks gathered one hundred
and fifty strong, was nothing to speak of artistically--a square
chamber sixty by sixty, reaching from the second floor to the roof of a