She was not quite maternal enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.
He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.
"Dear me," he said, "I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just about where that factory is now." He found she knew very little about the history of New York.

She had been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in France.

It was a subject which he liked to expound.

He loved his native city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a village.

He and his ancestors--and Mr.Lanley's sense of identification with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little shaped the growth.
"I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then," she said, trying to take an interest.
"Dutch." Mr.Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their Dutch predecessors.