His posing began on his father's death in the year 1898. Up to that time he had represented the house in England, the post being occupied now by his younger brother James. Polished manners, a splendid appearance, and an authoritative air imported to New York a touch of the Court of St. James's. Mrs. Billing had called him a dolt. Perhaps he was one. If so he was a dolt raised up and sustained by all that was powerful in the United States. It was with these vast influences rather than with the man himself that, as Larry Strangways talked, I began to see I was in conflict.
In Stacy Grainger, I gathered, the contemporaneous development of the country had produced something different, just as the same piece of ground will grow an oak or a rose-bush, according to the seed. People with a taste for social antithesis called him the grandson of a peddler. Mr. Strangways considered this description below the level of the ancestral Grainger's occupation. In the days of scattered farms and difficult communications throughout Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota he might better have been termed an itinerant merchant. He was the traveling salesman who delivered the goods. His journeys being made by river boats and ox-teams, he began to see the necessity of steam. He was of the group who projected the system of railways, some of which failed and some of which succeeded, through the regions west of Lake Superior. Later he forsook the highways for a more feverish life in the incipient Chicago. His wandering years having given him an idea of the value of this focal point, he put his savings into land. The phoenix rise of the city after the great fire made him a man of some wealth. Out of the financial crash of 1873 he became richer. His son grew richer still on the panic of 1893, when he, too, descended on New York. It was he who became a power on the Stock Exchange and bought the big house with which parts of my narrative will have to do.
All I want to say now is that as I strolled with Larry Strangways along that sunny walk, and as he ran on about Brokenshires and Graingers, I got my first bit of insight into the immense American romance which the nineteenth century unfolded. I saw it was romance, gigantic, race-wide. For the first time in my life I realized that there were other tales to make men proud besides the story of the British Empire.