Peek listened to this opinion politely, but when I had finished he patted my leg once more.

"Watch," said he. "He will end up president."

In other circumstances I would have thought this insolent or mad. However, I beheld his high forehead, his noble nose, his strong chin, and recognized the proud man who told me he would not break the rules of his bank and that he held its laws above all those of common friendship. I had thought him the perfect specimen of Yankee Puritan, and indeed I had recently discovered that he and his family were very strict about the Sabbath, and I had already seen him upset by a neighbor who had used a Sunday to split wood for his wife's oven.

"This boy was not a criminal," he told me now. "He was an innocent witness, and as such he was in great danger. It is better done like this."

"He will end up president?"

"As Americans, we must allow the possibility. He may simply end up rich. My dear Olivier, this is not your ancient France. But if it were, that boy-if he showed similar initiative-might take possession of half the lands along the Loire. If he works hard. There are countless acres of America owned by no one, waiting to be taken. You want our American Avignon, it is empty. It is yours. I give it to you."

I thought this childish and ignorant. I reminded him I had seen this boy. There had been not one fine thing about him, not even a cheap facsimile of nobility. While one might possibly take Peek and cast him in a play and have him, so long as he spoke only English, play the part of a comte, you could do no such thing with that lumpen child.

"That boy, Peek," I said, properly eschewing the use of his Christian name, "you cannot hold him up as the seed of a new nation. If he is your exemplar, the experiment is doomed."

"Experiment," he cried, laughing too violently for my taste. "There is no experiment. We make this transformation every day. It is called rags to riches. Have you never heard of it? Why, I could put him in a house. I have a house for him. I could make that boy a loan. He could work and pay it back."

"I do not believe you."

"Well, don't frown so, my dear Olivier. If you do not like this boy, why not your valued servant or his buxom little wife?"

"I am not sure she is his wife."

"So much the better," he said, and I caught an odd excitement in those careful gray eyes. As so often, when we detect signs of base passions in those whom we expect to be beyond the siren call, I was discomforted. "There," he said. "I will put her in a house."

I must have blushed, for he caught himself.

"Sir," he said, "you misunderstand me. Actuarially, she is superior. She is a better credit risk than her mate."

I was becoming very weary of this national manner of joking, where the main point, by dint of boastfulness and exaggeration, was to make the visitor appear a fool. And all this in the service of some ignorant notion of American superiority.

"Why lend to either of them?"

"Did you not observe her on the ship?"

I thought, What did he see? What does he know? "She was a dreadful flirt," I said, "as you must know yourself."

"I thought her very able at her business."

I suppose I made a face. Certainly I found the whole conversation so disagreeable that I expected he would understand and let it drop. But he was not French.

"Do you know how many women run boardinghouses in this city?" he persisted. "Let me tell you: one hundred and fifty. I would lend to almost all of them. This girl. She painted you."

Yes, I thought, and now I was embarrassed. In any case, she never finished anything one could put on the wall at rue Saint-Dominique.

"I know how much you paid her," he insisted. "I know how much the others paid. Now, do you know how many of her portraits one could commission in this city this afternoon?"

"If one were a fine painter, hundreds possibly." I thought, Money, money, money.

"Did I not hear you declare yourself very happy with your likeness?"

Peek had been born on Staten Island but he was clearly of the Anglo-Saxon race, which, in these matters, likes nothing better than a pile of dead rabbits as the subject of their art. In any case, I could not discuss the art of painting with a farmer.

Peek was smiling amiably, and one could deny neither the deep power revealed by those gray eyes, nor the amiability of his character and I reminded myself that he was indeed a rich man and a banker. Had I not seen his Doric columns?

We left the cobblestones. We journeyed through a dismal streetscape of vacant lots and raw timber structures in such disarray that one could not tell if these were new houses being constructed or old ones pulled by dentist's pliers.

I had not known America would look like this. In my innocence I had hoped to find here a model for the future of France, or at least some sign as to how, if democracy was unstoppable, we might at least safeguard our future with certain principles or institutions.

Yet all I had learned was that when the mob was allowed to rule, a second mob sprang up beneath them, and the difference between the Americans and French is that the Americans do not need to steal from their fellows when they can roam the countryside in bands, cutting trees and taking wealth. Anyone can claim a site for his chateau, whether he be a night soil man or a portraitist.

"Look here," Peek cried, and thumped his fist on the roof. His driver brought us to a halt in a forlorn place: the intersection of many tracks and roads, vacant lots, a blacksmith's forge, brambles, a stand of maples.

"See," he cried. "I could set her up there. She could have a studio."

Mr. Peek had seemed such a straight stick, but his stick now seemed to be like a dog's or duck's. In thinking this, of course, I was aware of what passions the woman had aroused in my own loins.

"Perhaps," I said, "it would be more sensible to lend it to her husband."

"But you said he is not her husband. In any case, you might need to take that man away, no?" I refused to look at him. "But she has a future here. I'll show you another spot," he cried, banging on the roof until we left the desolate sight behind us.

I believe that was Union Place, which later made Mr. Ruggles such a grand man in New York.

As we rolled and bucked our way farther up the island, I was at once shocked and relieved to find evidence that the Protestant was not quite as severe as I had feared. I thought, He is going to put his Marianne in a petite maison. It was a joke on Delacroix, at least.

"Mr. Peek," I said, "my English is poor and sometimes I make a foreigner's mistake. I know you are a banker, monsieur. Am I right in thinking that you are suggesting you will loan money to my servant's mistress in order solely that she buy a house, and you do this-forgive me, I must be plain-with no ulterior motive?"

He looked at me and roared with laughter, slapping my knee again. I thought he laughed much too loud and slapped too hard. My knee was rather stung.

"You mean, sir, am I a scoundrel or a fool? I am neither. Now look." He drew a pencil from his pocket and thumped upon the ceiling, and when the coach had stilled he opened a notebook and began to write, speaking as he formed his letters.

"The business of land in Manhattan," he said, "is mathematical. I am a mathematical man. It is my hobby and my interest, and I do not mean arithmetic. Do you read Mr. Newton's calculus, sir?"

"I know of it."

"Well, first the A plus B. Arithmetic. Immigration to America increases thirty thousand persons annually. Seventy percent of these immigrants come through New York."

"I understand."

"Then you understand too quickly. The workers stay close to jobs; the people with the money are moving out, here and here, farther from the city. Now can you read what I have written?"