"Well, yes, they are," he conceded: "but none of us ever think of that. I doubt if even they do. They leave their estate to their agents to manage, and we leave the story of it to the yellow press to talk about." "I never knew there was any story connected with it." "No? Well, for my part, I don’t believe there is. Some labor-agitator searched the records and tried to prove they made their first fortune buying condemned muskets from the British garrisons just before the Revolution and selling them as good arms to the Continental Congress. He said they invested the profits in New York land as soon as prices fell after the Declaration of Independence was signed." "Was it true?" asked Luke. Porcellis shrugged. "It was all a long time ago, at any rate," he said, "and the Ruysdaels are very nice people now: you would never guess they were worth more than a million. Besides, Charley—that’s my Wall Street cousin—says they’ve somehow funded their landholdings with one of Old Nap’s concerns. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to understand finance." Luke felt extremely ignorant. "Old Nap?" he wondered. "Who’s he?" In reply, Porcellis mentioned the name of the man of whom Luke’s father had spoken so highly that morning at the railway station in Americus. Huber pushed forward a chair. "Sit down," he said, "and have a cigarette. I want to ask you one question more. You’ve been all over the map. You’ve got the cosmopolitan point of view. What do you think of this man?" "I think," said Porcellis, accepting both the chair and the cigarette, "that it doesn’t make any difference what I think of him." He lit the cigarette. "But I’m quite sure," he presently added, "he is the sort of man nobody can help thinking _something_, about. Why do you ask?" "Because——" Luke was not certain why he did ask. He could not politely inquire of Porcellis whether he believed that his brother-in-law had accepted, to aid his election, money from a power that could not but be interested in the official actions of a District-Attorney of New York. "Because," he compromised, "my father was speaking to me about him only this morning." "So were a lot of other fathers. So are a lot of other fathers every morning. That’s greatness. What I think is that Old Napoleon is the greatest man this country has ever produced." "You think so well of him as that!" Luke was amazed. "I didn’t say I thought he was good," Porcellis defined; "I said I thought he was great. Greatness hasn’t anything to do with good or bad, or only accidentally. The greatest national figure a country produces is the figure that most intensely and—well, and powerfully—expresses that country. That’s why Shakespeare was the greatest man produced by Elizabethan England." "Oh—Shakespeare!" laughed Luke.