Rolfe was a cheerful, pleasant-mannered youth, well bred, genial, and courteous, but not very brilliant intellectually.
Cowperwood's judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk, possibly in a bank.

Berenice, on the other hand, the child of the first husband, was a creature of an exotic mind and an opalescent heart.

After his first contact with her in the reception-room of the Brewster School Cowperwood was deeply conscious of the import of this budding character.

He was by now so familiar with types and kinds of women that an exceptional type--quite like an exceptional horse to a judge of horse-flesh--stood out in his mind with singular vividness.
Quite as in some great racing-stable an ambitious horseman might imagine that he detected in some likely filly the signs and lineaments of the future winner of a Derby, so in Berenice Fleming, in the quiet precincts of the Brewster School, Cowperwood previsioned the central figure of a Newport lawn fete or a London drawing-room.

Why?
She had the air, the grace, the lineage, the blood--that was why; and on that score she appealed to him intensely, quite as no other woman before had ever done.
It was on the lawn of Forest Edge that Cowperwood now saw Berenice.