It was a rough passage, however, and Aileen was sick. It was hard to make herself look just nice enough, and so she kept to her room.
She was very haughty, distant to all but a few, and to these careful of her conversation. She felt herself coming to be a very important person.
Before leaving she had almost exhausted the resources of the Donovan establishment in Chicago. Lingerie, boudoir costumes, walking-costumes, riding-costumes, evening-costumes she possessed in plenty. She had a jewel-bag hidden away about her person containing all of thirty thousand dollars' worth of jewels. Her shoes, stockings, hats, and accessories in general were innumerable. Because of all this Cowperwood was rather proud of her. She had such a capacity for life. His first wife had been pale and rather anemic, while Aileen was fairly bursting with sheer physical vitality. She hummed and jested and primped and posed. There are some souls that just are, without previous revision or introspection. The earth with all its long past was a mere suggestion to Aileen, dimly visualized if at all. She may have heard that there were once dinosaurs and flying reptiles, but if so it made no deep impression on her.
Somebody had said, or was saying, that we were descended from monkeys, which was quite absurd, though it might be true enough.
On the sea the thrashing hills of green water suggested a kind of immensity and terror, but not the immensity of the poet's heart.
The ship was safe, the captain at table in brass buttons and blue uniform, eager to be nice to her--told her so. Her faith really, was in the captain. And there with her, always, was Cowperwood, looking at this whole, moving spectacle of life with a suspicious, not apprehensive, but wary eye, and saying nothing about it.
In London letters given them by Addison brought several invitations to the opera, to dinner, to Goodwood for a weekend, and so on.
Carriages, tallyhoes, cabs for riding were invoked. A week-end invitation to a houseboat on the Thames was secured. Their English hosts, looking on all this as a financial adventure, good financial wisdom, were courteous and civil, nothing more. Aileen was intensely curious. She noted servants, manners, forms. Immediately she began to think that America was not good enough, perhaps; it wanted so many things.
"Now, Aileen, you and I have to live in Chicago for years and years," commented Cowperwood. "Don't get wild. These people don't care for Americans, can't you see that? They wouldn't accept us if we were over here--not yet, anyhow. We're merely passing strangers, being courteously entertained." Cowperwood saw it all.
Aileen was being spoiled in a way, but there was no help. She dressed and dressed. The Englishmen used to look at her in Hyde Park, where she rode and drove; at Claridges' where they stayed; in Bond Street, where she shopped. The Englishwomen, the majority of them remote, ultra-conservative, ****** in their tastes, lifted their eyes. Cowperwood sensed the situation, but said nothing.
He loved Aileen, and she was satisfactory to him, at least for the present, anyhow, beautiful. If he could adjust her station in Chicago, that would be sufficient for a beginning. After three weeks of very active life, during which Aileen patronized the ancient and honorable glories of England, they went on to Paris.
Here she was quickened to a child-like enthusiasm. "You know," she said to Cowperwood, quite solemnly, the second morning, "the English don't know how to dress. I thought they did, but the smartest of them copy the French. Take those men we saw last night in the Cafe d'Anglais. There wasn't an Englishman I saw that compared with them."
"My dear, your tastes are exotic," replied Cowperwood, who was watching her with pleased interest while he adjusted his tie.
"The French smart crowd are almost too smart, dandified. I think some of those young fellows had on corsets."
"What of it?" replied Aileen. "I like it. If you're going to be smart, why not be very smart?"
"I know that's your theory, my dear," he said, "but it can be overdone. There is such a thing as going too far. You have to compromise even if you don't look as well as you might. You can't be too very conspicuously different from your neighbors, even in the right direction."
"You know," she said, stopping and looking at him, "I believe you're going to get very conservative some day--like my brothers."
She came over and touched his tie and smoothed his hair.
"Well, one of us ought to be, for the good of the family," he commented, half smiling.
"I'm not so sure, though, that it will be you, either."
"It's a charming day. See how nice those white-marble statues look. Shall we go to the Cluny or Versailles or Fontainbleau?
To-night we ought to see Bernhardt at the Francaise."
Aileen was so gay. It was so splendid to be traveling with her true husband at last.
It was on this trip that Cowperwood's taste for art and life and his determination to possess them revived to the fullest. He made the acquaintance in London, Paris, and Brussels of the important art dealers. His conception of great masters and the older schools of art shaped themselves. By one of the dealers in London, who at once recognized in him a possible future patron, he was invited with Aileen to view certain private collections, and here and there was an artist, such as Lord Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Whistler, to whom he was introduced casually, an interested stranger.
These men only saw a strong, polite, remote, conservative man.
He realized the emotional, egotistic, and artistic soul. He felt on the instant that there could be little in common between such men and himself in so far as personal contact was concerned, yet there was mutual ground on which they could meet. He could not be a slavish admirer of anything, only a princely patron. So he walked and saw, wondering how soon his dreams of grandeur were to be realized.
