



Produced by Kirk Pearson <kpearson@nyx.net> and the Online
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The Titan


by

Theodore Dreiser




CONTENTS

       I  The New City
      II  A Reconnoiter
     III  A Chicago Evening
      IV  Peter Laughlin & Co.
       V  Concerning A Wife And Family
      VI  The New Queen of the Home
     VII  Chicago Gas
    VIII  Now This is Fighting
      IX  In Search of Victory
       X  A Test
      XI  The Fruits of Daring
     XII  A New Retainer
    XIII  The Die is Cast
     XIV  Undercurrents
      XV  A New Affection
     XVI  A Fateful Interlude
    XVII  An Overture to Conflict
   XVIII  The Clash
     XIX  "Hell Hath No Fury--"
      XX  "Man and Superman"
     XXI  A Matter of Tunnels
    XXII  Street-railways at Last
   XXIII  The Power of the Press
    XXIV  The Coming of Stephanie Platow
     XXV  Airs from the Orient
    XXVI  Love and War
   XXVII  A Financier Bewitched
  XXVIII  The Exposure of Stephanie
    XXIX  A Family Quarrel
     XXX  Obstacles
    XXXI  Untoward Disclosures
   XXXII  A Supper Party
  XXXIII  Mr. Lynde to the Rescue
   XXXIV  Enter Hosmer Hand
    XXXV  A Political Agreement
   XXXVI  An Election Draws Near
  XXXVII  Aileen's Revenge
 XXXVIII  An Hour of Defeat
   XXXIX  The New Administration
      XL  A Trip to Louisville
     XLI  The Daughter of Mrs. Fleming
    XLII  F. A. Cowperwood, Guardian
   XLIII  The Planet Mars
    XLIV  A Franchise Obtained
     XLV  Changing Horizons
    XLVI  Depths and Heights
   XLVII  American Match
  XLVIII  Panic
    XLIX  Mount Olympus
       L  A New York Mansion
      LI  The Revival of Hattie Starr
     LII  Behind the Arras
    LIII  A Declaration of Love
     LIV  Wanted--Fifty-year Franchises
      LV  Cowperwood and the Governor
     LVI  The Ordeal of Berenice
    LVII  Aileen's Last Card
   LVIII  A Marauder Upon the Commonwealth
     LIX  Capital and Public Rights
      LX  The Net
     LXI  The Cataclysm
    LXII  The Recompense




Chapter I

The New City


When Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from the Eastern District
Penitentiary in Philadelphia he realized that the old life he had lived
in that city since boyhood was ended.  His youth was gone, and with it
had been lost the great business prospects of his earlier manhood.  He
must begin again.

It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a
tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second
fortune in his hands.  This restored wealth softened him in some
degree.  Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge.  He was
sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now
decided that he would leave it once and for all.  He would get in
something else--street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless
opportunities of the far West.  Philadelphia was no longer pleasing to
him.  Though now free and rich, he was still a scandal to the
pretenders, and the financial and social world was not prepared to
accept him.  He must go his way alone, unaided, or only secretly so,
while his quondam friends watched his career from afar.  So, thinking
of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, now only
twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off.  He looked at her
quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain type of
feminine beauty.

"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching
departure.  "You and I will get out of this shortly.  Don't grieve.
I'll be back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you.  I'd take you
now, only I don't know how that country is out there. We'll fix on some
place, and then you watch me settle this fortune question.  We'll not
live under a cloud always.  I'll get a divorce, and we'll marry, and
things will come right with a bang.  Money will do that."

He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, and she
clasped his cheeks between her hands.

"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, "I'll miss you so! You're all I have."

"In two weeks," he smiled, as the train began to move, "I'll wire or be
back.  Be good, sweet."

She followed him with adoring eyes--a fool of love, a spoiled child, a
family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, the type so strong a man
would naturally like--she tossed her pretty red gold head and waved him
a kiss.  Then she walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy strides--the
type that men turn to look after.

"That's her--that's that Butler girl," observed one railroad clerk to
another.  "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that, would
he?"

It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably pay to
health and beauty.  On that pivot swings the world.

Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther west
than Pittsburg.  His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant as they
were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of
Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to
American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional
leadership in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth,
unctuous respectability, and all the tastes and avocations which these
imply.  He had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and
made its sacred precincts his own when the crash came.  Practically he
had been admitted.  Now he was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a
millionaire.  But wait! The race is to the swift, he said to himself
over and over.  Yes, and the battle is to the strong.  He would test
whether the world would trample him under foot or no.

Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the second
morning.  He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then provided--a
car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences of its
arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured glass--when
the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began to appear.  The
side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was speeding became more
and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more and more hung with arms and
strung smoky-thick with wires.  In the far distance, cityward, was,
here and there, a lone working-man's cottage, the home of some
adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in order to
reap the small but certain advantage which the growth of the city would
bring.

The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of brown
grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly in the
morning breeze.  Underneath were signs of the new green--the New Year's
flag of its disposition.  For some reason a crystalline atmosphere
enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the latter like
a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety which touched him.
Already a devotee of art, ambitious for connoisseurship, who had had
his joy, training, and sorrow out of