The Intern thought about that for a minute, but their musings were suddenly cut off by a vision.

"My God," said the Foreign Car Driver. "Look over there. Do you see what I see?"

The Intern look around, a bit confused.

"What are you talking about?"

"Coming up the escalator."

"Oh my God," said the Intern.

Pei's glass and steel machine ascended slowly to the second level, and on its polished chrome steps, it carried the Colonel.

Most people equate Colonels with the Air Force or truckstop chicken, but in reality, a Colonel is something far more intangible. As he came gliding up the escalator in a blue suit and a string tie, his white hair and goatee perfectly groomed, you realized that no interplay of advertising could create something like this. There was something magnanimous in his eyes, and yet something discriminating. He walked with a timeless dignity that made you feel just too post-modern for words. He smiled and mused over the building. He was alone, but everyone here seemed to be his responsibility.

The Foreign Car Driver had seen the Colonel once before, but he had passed it off as a apparition. He had been walking one night in Savannah, Georgia in the midsts of a raging black mood, and the Colonel had suddenly appeared, as if by magic, on the porch of an old brownstone. He had looked at the driver and said, "Good Evening." There was something in the way he said it that made you feel as if he knew the drear shit and persiflage and yet could still be amiable. He wasn't one of those hereditary Kentucky Colonels who, in reality, are just civic club boosters. No, he was a Colonel who probably lived in Vicksburg. He probably living in an old tumble-down mansion that he had farmed scientifically in his youth. He was an excellent marksman, though he only killed what was necessary. His study was full of timeless books. He had seen the horrors of the twentieth century and yet remained devout. His hand was firm and when he slowly walked through the chemical smells of Savannah, he still took careful note of everything. Life for him was a matter of honor.

"Jesus," said the Intern. "I didn't know they still existed."

The Driver smiled. The yachters leaned on glass cases filled with bronzes from the Sung Dynasty. They were talking about options and Parents' Day at Groton. The Colonel smiled at them and moved on

"What's he doing here?" asked the Intern.

The Driver didn't know. In J.T. Trowbrige's 1866 book The South, A Tour of its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, a Journey Through the Desolate States, and Talks with the People, of which there was still one copy in Lamont Library--though it hadn't been checked out since 1978--the author had talked about the remnants of gentlemen soldiers, and mused that they had all but disappeared and that the region was full of the worse kinds of blackguards and hucksters and promoters. If there was anything good about the Confederacy, he said, it was an old ethos, which, though mired in the horrors of the mid nineteenth-century South, had at least bothered to aspire to something while in the North industrialization ran amok. After the Civil War, the North took up the ideal of the gentleman planter for a while, and the legend of Lee--a fundamentally Northern myth--was born in cities full of coal and smoke. But the North was never serious about it. They took it up for fun. They took it up as a style. They took it up as a style. They took it up because they hadn't heard of Ukrania yet.

"What do we do?" asked the Intern.

"Nothing," said the Driver. "He'll find us if he wants to."