"Oh," she said, in her Philadelphia home, when she read it, "isn't
that splendid! Now I'll be Mrs. Cowperwood. Oh, dear!"

Mrs. Frank Algernon Cowperwood number one, thinking over her
husband's liaison, failure, imprisonment, pyrotechnic operations
at the time of the Jay Cooke failure, and his present financial
ascendancy, wondered at the mystery of life. There must be a God.
The Bible said so. Her husband, evil though he was, could not
be utterly bad, for he had made ample provision for her, and the
children liked him. Certainly, at the time of the criminal
prosecution he was no worse than some others who had gone free.
Yet he had been convicted, and she was sorry for that and had
always been. He was an able and ruthless man. She hardly knew
what to think. The one person she really did blame was the wretched,
vain, empty-headed, ungodly Aileen Butler, who had been his
seductress and was probably now to be his wife. God would punish
her, no doubt. He must. So she went to church on Sundays and
tried to believe, come what might, that all was for the best.




Chapter VI



The New Queen of the Home

The day Cowperwood and Aileen were married--it was in an obscure