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man's delusion that women of color—or women in general—were slightly incompetent.
“He stole nearly four million dollars, of which about a hundred thousand was in gold.”
    Rose's eyebrows shot up. “That's a
lot
of gold.”
    “About six hundred pounds of it,” Granville replied. “The rest is in notes and drafts on other banks—including the Bank of Pennsylvania, which as you know received a great deal of the Federal gold—and the Bank of England. There are also sight-drafts on a number of the plantations hereabouts against next winter's crop. Any single trunk containing the gold would be too heavy to lift, so it has to be spread out among several, padded up with the paper.”
    “You say Weems came to you with the highest recommendations,” said January. “From whom? What do you know about the man? Where is he from?”
    “Philadelphia,” said Granville like a New Yorker:
Philadelphier,
a trick of speech that made January wonder whether there was a still-more-brotherly town of
Philadelphiest
somewhere even farther north. “He was a clerk when I was vice-president of the Broadway Bank and Trust, and worked his way up after I was sent down here. Everyone spoke highly of his abilities.”
    Granville scowled, as if everyone had conspired to lie and would, if he had anything to say in the matter, suffer the consequences.
    “It probably paid him to have abilities when the whole country's economic system wasn't being run by wildcat private banks,” remarked January dryly. Granville opened his mouth to protest—the Bank of Louisiana, though private, had been chartered by the State—and January asked, “Drink?”
    Granville's square face darkened, and he looked as if he were about to demand what the hell business it was of January's. Then he subsided a little, like porridge coming off the boil, and sipped his coffee. “I've seen Weems look down his nose at drunkards on the street,” he answered. “I've never seen him go into a public house. But I don't keep company with the man, so in fact I don't know whether he drinks or not.”
    “Women?”
    Again Granville's beady eyes flashed at the suggestion that an employee of his bank would chase trollops up and down Gallatin Street, but since that employee had almost certainly walked off with large sums of the bank's money, there wasn't a great deal he could be self-righteous about. “He was engaged to the daughter of the President of the Jersey Trust Bank,” he said slowly. “She married someone else. That's when he came here. He looks down upon women as he looks down upon drunkards. Looks down on a great many things, for a man who's only five feet five inches tall himself.” Granville gave out a bearlike rumbling guffaw. “Nor does he gamble, beyond a hand or two of whist. He often said how he despised waste and wastrels.”
    “Which must have made it easier,” remarked Rose, “for him to walk off with the money—if he gave the matter a second thought at all. I'm sure he considers he has better uses for the money than its legal owners.” She folded her long-fingered hands on her knee, a tall, angular woman who moved as if she were perpetually about to trip. She had the light medium-brown hair of her white father and grandfather, worn in a neat chignon as long as she was out of sight of the laws that required her to cover it in a slave's headcloth. Behind the gold reflections of candle-light on her spectacles, her eyes were gray-green. “What does he look like? How will we know him?”
    Granville raised his eyebrows a bit at the “we,” but January—though he experienced his usual sense of protesting shock at the thought of Rose sharing his danger—felt no surprise. A spinster into her late twenties and a woman who had operated her own school for several years, Rose was not one to watch knight-errantry from the dull safety of a bower window.
    He knew, too, that there were things a woman could learn in conversation with other women, that would be