The Financier a novel by Theodore Dreiser

 
 

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Chapter XIX 
The growth of a passion is a very peculiar thing. In highly organized 
intellectual and artistic types it is so often apt to begin with keen 
appreciation of certain qualities, modified by many, many mental 
reservations. The egoist, the intellectual, gives but little of himself and asks 
much. Nevertheless, the lover of life, male or female, finding himself or 
herself in sympathetic accord with such a nature, is apt to gain much. 
Cowperwood was innately and primarily an egoist and intellectual, though 
blended strongly therewith, was a humane and democratic spirit. We think 
of egoism and intellectualism as closely confined to the arts. Finance is an 
art. And it presents the operations of the subtlest of the intellectuals and of 
the egoists. Cowperwood was a financier. Instead of dwelling on the works of 
nature, its beauty and subtlety, to his material disadvantage, he found a 
happy mean, owing to the swiftness of his intellectual operations, whereby 
he could, intellectually and emotionally, rejoice in the beauty of life without 
interfering with his perpetual material and financial calculations. And when 
it came to women and morals, which involved so much relating to beauty, 
happiness, a sense of distinction and variety in living, he was but now 
beginning to suspect for himself at least that apart from maintaining 
organized society in its present form there was no basis for this one-life, 
one-love idea. How had it come about that so many people agreed on this 
single point, that it was good and necessary to marry one woman and cleave 
to her until death? He did not know. It was not for him to bother about the 
subtleties of evolution, which even then was being noised abroad, or to ferret 
out the curiosities of history in connection with this matter. He had no time. 
Suffice it that the vagaries of temperament and conditions with which he 
came into immediate contact proved to him that there was great 
dissatisfaction with that idea. People did not cleave to each other until 
death; and in thousands of cases where they did, they did not want to. 
Quickness of mind, subtlety of idea, fortuitousness of opportunity, made it 
possible for some people to right their matrimonial and social infelicities; 
whereas for others, because of dullness of wit, thickness of comprehension, 
poverty, and lack of charm, there was no escape from the slough of their 
despond. They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of 
force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to 
shuffle off this mortal coil—which under other circumstances had such 
glittering possibilities—via the rope, the knife, the bullet, or the cup of 
poison. 
"I would die, too," he thought to himself, one day, reading of a man who, 
confined by disease and poverty, had lived for twelve years alone in a back 
bedroom attended by an old and probably decrepit housekeeper. A darning-

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needle forced into his heart had ended his earthly woes. "To the devil with 
such a life! Why twelve years? Why not at the end of the second or third?" 
Again, it was so very evident, in so many ways, that force was the answer—
great mental and physical force. Why, these giants of commerce and money 
could do as they pleased in this life, and did. He had already had ample 
local evidence of it in more than one direction. Worse—the little guardians of 
so-called law and morality, the newspapers, the preachers, the police, and 
the public moralists generally, so loud in their denunciation of evil in 
humble places, were cowards all when it came to corruption in high ones. 
They did not dare to utter a feeble squeak until some giant had accidentally 
fallen and they could do so without danger to themselves. Then, O Heavens, 
the palaver! What beatings of tom-toms! What mouthings of pharisaical 
moralities—platitudes! Run now, good people, for you may see clearly how 
evil is dealt with in high places! It made him smile. Such hypocrisy! Such 
cant! Still, so the world was organized, and it was not for him to set it right. 
Let it wag as it would. The thing for him to do was to get rich and hold his 
own—to build up a seeming of virtue and dignity which would pass muster 
for the genuine thing. Force would do that. Quickness of wit. And he had 
these. "I satisfy myself," was his motto; and it might well have been 
emblazoned upon any coat of arms which he could have contrived to set 
forth his claim to intellectual and social nobility. 
But this matter of Aileen was up for consideration and solution at this 
present moment, and because of his forceful, determined character he was 
presently not at all disturbed by the problem it presented. It was a problem, 
like some of those knotty financial complications which presented 
themselves daily; but it was not insoluble. What did he want to do? He 
couldn't leave his wife and fly with Aileen, that was certain. He had too 
many connections. He had too many social, and thinking of his children and 
parents, emotional as well as financial ties to bind him. Besides, he was not 
at all sure that he wanted to. He did not intend to leave his growing 
interests, and at the same time he did not intend to give up Aileen 
immediately. The unheralded manifestation of interest on her part was too 
attractive. Mrs. Cowperwood was no longer what she should be physically 
and mentally, and that in itself to him was sufficient to justify his present 
interest in this girl. Why fear anything, if only he could figure out a way to 
achieve it without harm to himself? At the same time he thought it might 
never be possible for him to figure out any practical or protective program 
for either himself or Aileen, and that made him silent and reflective. For by 
now he was intensely drawn to her, as he could feel—something chemic and 
hence dynamic was uppermost in him now and clamoring for expression. 
At the same time, in contemplating his wife in connection with all this, he 
had many qualms, some emotional, some financial. While she had yielded to 

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his youthful enthusiasm for her after her husband's death, he had only 
since learned that she was a natural conservator of public morals—the cold 
purity of the snowdrift in so far as the world might see, combined at times 
with the murky mood of the wanton. And yet, as he had also learned, she 
was ashamed of the passion that at times swept and dominated her. This 
irritated Cowperwood, as it would always irritate any strong, acquisitive, 
direct-seeing temperament. While he had no desire to acquaint the whole 
world with his feelings, why should there be concealment between them, or 
at least mental evasion of a fact which physically she subscribed to? Why do 
one thing and think another? To be sure, she was devoted to him in her 
quiet way, not passionately (as he looked back he could not say that she had 
ever been that), but intellectually. Duty, as she understood it, played a great