"Sympathy! Sympathy!" She turned on him blazing. "A lot you know about sympathy! I suppose I didn't give you any sympathy when you were in the penitentiary in Philadelphia, did I? A lot of good it did me--didn't it? Sympathy! Bah! To have you come out here to Chicago and take up with a lot of prostitutes--cheap stenographers and wives of musicians! You have given me a lot of sympathy, haven't you?--with that woman lying in the next room to prove it!"
She smoothed her lithe waist and shook her shoulders preparatory to putting on a hat and adjusting her wrap. She proposed to go just as she was, and send Fadette back for all her belongings.
"Aileen," he pleaded, determined to have his way, "I think you're very foolish. Really I do. There is no occasion for all this--none in the world. Here you are talking at the top of your voice, scandalizing the whole neighborhood, fighting, leaving the house.
It's abominable. I don't want you to do it. You love me yet, don't you? You know you do. I know you don't mean all you say.
You can't. You really don't believe that I have ceased to love you, do you, Aileen?"
"Love!" fired Aileen. "A lot you know about love! A lot you have ever loved anybody, you brute! I know how you love. I thought you loved me once. Humph! I see how you loved me--just as you've loved fifty other women, as you love that snippy little Rita Sohlberg in the next room--the cat!--the dirty little beast!--the way you love Antoinette Nowak--a cheap stenographer! Bah! You don't know what the word means." And yet her voice trailed off into a kind of sob and her eyes filled with tears, hot, angry, aching.
Cowperwood saw them and came over, hoping in some way to take advantage of them. He was truly sorry now--anxious to make her feel tender toward him once more.
"Aileen," he pleaded, "please don't be so bitter. You shouldn't be so hard on me. I'm not so bad. Aren't you going to be reasonable?" He put out a smoothing hand, but she jumped away.
"Don't you touch me, you brute!" she exclaimed, angrily. "Don't you lay a hand on me. I don't want you to come near me. I'll not live with you. I'll not stay in the same house with you and your mistresses. Go and live with your dear, darling Rita on the North Side if you want to. I don't care. I suppose you've been in the next room comforting her--the beast! I wish I had killed her--Oh, God!" She tore at her throat in a violent rage, trying to adjust a button.
Cowperwood was literally astonished. Never had he seen such an outburst as this. He had not believed Aileen to be capable of it.
He could not help admiring her. Nevertheless he resented the brutality of her assault on Rita and on his own promiscuous tendency, and this feeling vented itself in one last unfortunate remark.
"I wouldn't be so hard on mistresses if I were you, Aileen," he ventured, pleadingly. "I should have thought your own experience would have--"
He paused, for he saw on the instant that he was making a grave mistake. This reference to her past as a mistress was crucial.
On the instant she straightened up, and her eyes filled with a great pain. "So that's the way you talk to me, is it?" she asked.
"I knew it! I knew it! I knew it would come!"
She turned to a tall chest of drawers as high as her breasts, laden with silverware, jewel-boxes, brushes and combs, and, putting her arms down, she laid her head upon them and began to cry. This was the last straw. He was throwing up her lawless girlhood love to her as an offense.
"Oh!" she sobbed, and shook in a hopeless, wretched paroxysm.
