“Poor Toussaint,” Frederick said, “hoped to find mountains of gold here, though, you may say, he was nothing but a fancy-cake genius.”

“And yet I assure you,” said Lobkowitz, “there was something grand about him as a man.  In spite of his success, he was always poor.  He suffered from having a wife who was too fond of society and from having to associate with the persons who bestowed favours upon him and were so much richer than himself.  That dandyism of his was not natural.  Had he reached America, he would probably have ignored his wife and become an entirely different man.  All he wanted to do was to create, to work.  What he loved best was to be perched on a scaffolding, with shirt sleeves tucked up, among first-rate workmen.  Once he said to me, ’If you should happen to see a mason resembling me in New York, sitting on the pavement eating his lunch and drinking a can of beer, don’t hesitate to believe I am that mason, and don’t pity me.  Congratulate me.’”

“Another one,” thought Frederick, “who kept the best part of himself hidden beneath the conventional foppishness of his time; another one who, like me, may always have been trying in vain to reach a definite decision between being and seeming.”

IX

Ritter’s dog-cart was waiting in front of the door.  He suggested that Frederick and Schmidt drive down in it to the railroad station, where Schmidt was to get the train back to Meriden.  The two men squeezed in beside the Austrian horse-trainer, valet, or whatever Ritter’s coachman was.  The trotter went off at a swift gait, and again the wild, noisy phantasmagoria of the streets of the new Babylon went flashing by Frederick’s eyes.

Ritter had introduced his coachman as Mr. Boabo.  He wore a small round hat of brown felt, brown gloves, and a short brown jockey’s overcoat.  His chin was heavy, his nose finely chiselled, and his moustache dark and downy.  He was a handsome man, or lad, since boyish naivete still predominated in his expression.  He was about the same age as Ritter.  While guiding the magnificent grey through the medley of cabs, trucks, and street-cars, he smiled faintly, as if delighted by it all.

Notwithstanding the city’s excesses of architecture and engineering, its distinctive characteristic was unimaginativeness.  The hurry and bustle, “business,” the chase after the dollar had lashed the technical arts on to audacious attempts; for example, the skyscrapers, or the elevated railroad, with its unfenced tracks high overhead, its trains thundering along incessantly in two directions, winding sharply about the corners like an illuminated snake, and writhing into streets so narrow that a person in one of the upper stories of the houses can almost touch the coaches with his hands.

“Madness, lunacy!” Frederick exclaimed in his amazement.

“Not altogether,” said Schmidt.  “Back of it all is a very sane, unscrupulous practicality, riding down every obstacle in its way.”