“To make you see the point, I must give you a little history of Siegmund Stein.  Any one who has seen him never forgets him.  He is one of the most hideous men in New York, but it’s not at all the common sort of ugliness that comes from over-eating and automobiles.  He isn’t one of the fat horrors.  He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tell anything; a long nose, flattened as if it had been tied down; a scornful chin; long, white teeth; flat cheeks, yellow as a Mongolian’s; tiny, black eyes, with puffy lids and no lashes; dingy, dead-looking hair—­looks as if it were glued on.

“Stein came here a beggar from somewhere in Austria.  He began by working on the machines in old Rosenthal’s garment factory.  He became a speeder, a foreman, a salesman; worked his way ahead steadily until the hour when he rented an old dwelling-house on Seventh Avenue and began to make misses’ and juniors’ coats.  I believe he was the first manufacturer to specialize in those particular articles.  Dozens of garment manufacturers have come along the same road, but Stein is like none of the rest of them.  He is, and always was, a personality.  While he was still at the machine, a hideous, underfed little whippersnapper, he was already a youth of many-coloured ambitions, deeply concerned about his dress, his associates, his recreations.  He haunted the old Astor Library and the Metropolitan Museum, learned something about pictures and porcelains, took singing lessons, though he had a voice like a crow’s.  When he sat down to his baked apple and doughnut in a basement lunch-room, he would prop a book up before him and address his food with as much leisure and ceremony as if he were dining at his club.  He held himself at a distance from his fellow-workmen and somehow always managed to impress them with his superiority.  He had inordinate vanity, and there are many stories about his foppishness.  After his first promotion in Rosenthal’s factory, he bought a new overcoat.  A few days later, one of the men at the machines, which Stein had just quitted, appeared in a coat exactly like it.  Stein could not discharge him, but he gave his own coat to a newly arrived Russian boy and got another.  He was already magnificent.

“After he began to make headway with misses’ and juniors’ cloaks, he became a collector—­etchings, china, old musical instruments.  He had a dancing master, and engaged a beautiful Brazilian widow—­she was said to be a secret agent for some South American republic—­to teach him Spanish.  He cultivated the society of the unknown great:  poets, actors, musicians.  He entertained them sumptuously, and they regarded him as a deep, mysterious Jew who had the secret of gold, which they had not.  His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patron of the arts, a credit to the garment trade.

“One of Stein’s many ambitions was to be thought a success with women.  He got considerable notoriety in the garment world by his attentions to an emotional actress who is now quite forgotten, but who had her little hour of expectation.  Then there was a dancer; then, just after Gorky’s visit here, a Russian anarchist woman.  After that the coat-makers and shirtwaist-makers began to whisper that Stein’s great success was with Kitty Ayrshire.