The Rich are DIfferent, by Susan Howatch

This is one of Howatch's family sagas, set in 20th Century America and England. She wrote several before she started to write her series about the Church of England. The story is loosely based on the history of Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. Dinah Slade, the Cleopatra figure, is the daughter of a landowner in East Anglia. She wants to hold onto her family home, Mallingham, when her father died, leaving her with nothing but debts. She decides to set up a business and make money but she needs cash to start up and to buy the house from her infant brother who was the male heir. Paul Van Zale is a middle aged American investment banker, in the glory days of the 1920s, when millions were being made on the stock exchange.. and banking was unregulated. He comes from a branch of an Old Money family in New York, but he himself went through a period of being very poor. His father did not leave much money, but at the age of 18, Paul went to college in England. He liked England but he met a working class girl and got her pregnant. He wanted to do the right thing and married her, then found that his richer relatives would not help him to get a start in business, unless he divorced his pregnant working class wife. Paul found that his wife, Dolly had married him because she thought that all Americans were rich, and he becomes much more cynical about life and women. He manages to get a low ranking job in a Jewish bank and makes a little money on the stock exchange. His wife has a daughter, Vicky, and then dies giving birth to another child, who also dies. Paul gives his loyalty to his Jewish employers, who have been kind to him, and he works his way up in the bank, while his daughter is looked after by his own elderly mother... who like many upper class New Yorkers, is not favourable to Jews. However, he knows that he can only go so far in a Jewish bank - and in the end, he marries Marietta Chalmers, whose father owns a small investment house. Paul sets up in his own bank. He takes in as partner a distant relative, Jason Da Costa, and is very successful. However, he is not a happy man. He gets a divorce from Marietta, and marries a young upper class widow, Sylvia Woodard. But his only child, Vicky has died in childbirth. He is very fond of Sylvia but she and he are not very close. He has always been a womaniser. When Dinah hears that he is in London, she decides to try and meet him and see if he would help her to start up her own business. She has heard that he is interested in British history and literature, and she has a valuable book that she uses to get him to take notice of her.