In person, I.M. Pei was dapper, good-humored, charming and unusually modest. His working process was evolutionary, but innovation was never a conscious goal.
There are large billboards directed at them both: the tough, " take-charge, " or dapper older man, the glamorous, " worldly" young woman, both puffing away.
He had great neatness of person, and he continued to wear his spruce black coat and his bowler hat, always a little too small for him, in a dapper, jaunty manner.
He never looked as dapper as Prince Albert, though; he continued to look like a poor, overweight, overworked colored man with too large a family; black, with a very white cigarette stuck in his mouth.
Marsh, the elder of the two by eight years, was a retiring and bookish fellow, with a trim beard and dapper manner, who spent little time in the field and was seldom very good at finding things when he was there.