He had what Gibbon was wont to call "the most amiable of our vices," a passion for women, and he cared no more for the cool, patient, almost penitent methods by which his father had built up the immense reaper business, of which he was supposedly the heir, than he cared for the mysteries or sacred rights of the Chaldees.

He realized that the business itself was a splendid thing.

He liked on occasion to think of it with all its extent of ground-space, plain red-brick buildings, tall stacks and yelling whistles; but he liked in no way to have anything to do with the rather commonplace routine of its manipulation.
The principal difficulty with Aileen under these circumstances, of course, was her intense vanity and self-consciousness.

Never was there a vainer or more sex-troubled woman.

Why, she asked herself, should she sit here in loneliness day after day, brooding about Cowperwood, eating her heart out, while he was flitting about gathering the sweets of life elsewhere?
Why should she not offer her continued charms as a solace and a delight to other men who would appreciate them?
Would not such a policy have all the essentials of justice in it?
Yet even now, so precious had Cowperwood been to her hitherto, and so wonderful, that she was scarcely able to think of serious disloyalty.