This man, he concluded, must be intelligent beyond ordinary standards.  It would be worth while making his acquaintance.  America is notoriously the land of youthful precocity.  But it is not every American who, as a stripling of fourteen summers, puzzling in callow boyish perplexity upon the thousand ills that afflict mankind and burning with desire for their betterment, makes a discovery in Malthusian methods destined to convulse the trade and the social life of a continent.  Not everybody is like young Koppen—­he attached a van to his name on reaching his seventy-fifth million—­who, possessed at that time of barely three dollars in the world and not even the shadow of a moustache, had both the wit to realize the hygienic importance of a certain type of goods and the pertinacity to insist on cheapening their price, in the interest of public health, to such an extent that—­to quote from subsequent advertisements—­they should be “within reach of the humblest home.”  It is not everybody—­no, not every American—­who, after revolutionizing the technique of manufacture and shattering the Paris monopoly, dares boldly to advertise the improved article across the length and breadth of the land, and to thrust his commodity upon a reluctant market in the teeth of popular prejudice and commercial rivalry.  Van Koppen had done all this.  And it was noted that he had done it without ever for a moment losing sight of his dual aim—­mercantile and philanthropic; for if he was a humanitarian by natural disposition, he became what he called “a tradesman by force of circumstance”—­and not a bad tradesman, either.  He had done all this and more.  Unlike most self-made men who remain yoked like oxen to their sordid affairs (in harness, they aptly call it) he had been shrewd enough to retire from business in the heyday of his age, on a relatively modest competence of fifteen million dollars a year.  He was spending his time at present in the gratification of personal whims, and leaving the remaining millions to be picked up by whoever cared to take the trouble.  Manifestly an unusual type of millionaire—­this man who had lived down half a century of obloquy and was now hailed, in well-informed circles, as the saviour of his country.

Nor was this all.  Van Koppen was described as a brisk, genial, talkative old fellow, rather fat, with a clear complexion, sound teeth, shrubby grey beard, a twang barely sufficient to authenticate his transatlantic descent, and the digestion of a boa-constrictor.  He was tremendously fond of buttered tea-cakes—­so the Duchess said; a man who, in the words of Madame Steynlin, “really appreciated good music” and who, as the parroco never ceased to declare, could be relied on to give a handsome contribution towards the funds for supporting the poor and repairing a decrepit parish organ. (The parish poor were never in such dire distress, the parish organ never so hopelessly deranged, as during that annual week when the FLUTTERBY rode at anchor.)