No one knows where he comes from, but suddenly there he is in Apex, Kansas - first behind the counter at Luckabuck's Dollar Shoe Store, then at the office of the coal merchants, then at the Apex Water Works. Quickly he becomes “a leading figure in the youthful world of Apex,” and, despite some scandals, he is clearly a man of destiny. “Great men,” as he notes, “always gravitate to the metropolis,” (696), so, though he is red and glossy and balding and swaggering, he makes it to New York. His rise goes beyond the meteoric stage to a kind of stability:

As he becomes ever more successful, indeed a billionaire, he develops “a growing passion for pictures and furniture” and a burning “desire to form a collection which should be a great representative assemblage of unmatched specimens” (976). His goal is “to have the best . . . not just to get ahead of the other fellows, but because I know it when I see it” (976).