Dealer profile.(Peter Pap)

At Peter Pap's booth at the Green wich Antiques Show in Connecticut, a woman is examining an enormous Mughal carpet with an unusual green ground that has been attracting passersby all morning. Looking down, the woman asks, "How much is it?" Pap replies, with a courtly nod, "fifty-four thousand dollars."

Peter Pap is recognizable to followers of Antiques Roadshow as the expert from San Francisco wirh rhe scholarly refinement of a private school headmaster. He has graying hair, a beard of a very short nap, and watchful eyes redoubled by owlish glasses. As the woman toes the binding of the Mughal, he leans forward, anticipating what is coming next. "And how old are you saying?" the woman asks.

"It is," he replies, "late nineteenth century." After the woman drifts away, Pap looks in exasperation at his booth's walls. "Did you hear the implication? 'How old are you saying?' The interaction starts our with two strikes against you."

The woman's suggestion--that antique rugs are never as old or worth as much as their sellers maintain--is something that Pap has long wanted to put to rest. Every category of the antiques industry has its scandals, but what brings Pap close to despair is his sense that some parts of the rug trade have lived up to the public's perception.

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Pap, who has been in the business since 1975, has watched in recent years as auction houses and retailers have chased trends favored by interior designers and their well-heeled clients. In particular, the pale gold-toned Ushaks from Turkey, once considered an inferior, less durable style, have soared in popularity. More insidiously, deeply colored rugs have often been doctored with acid washes to soften their tones, a practice that Pap finds equivalent to defacing a fine painting. And yet Mary Jo Otsea, who heads the Rugs and Carpets Department at Sotheby's, says that altering rugs to suit decorative tastes is nothing new. She points out that in the 1920s Oriental rugs were treated to make them pinker, a vogue at the time. "We haven't found that the chemicals harm the fabric," Otsea says.

Pap disagrees, insisting that the rugs she refers to were not antiques and that he has seen the deleterious effects of chemical washes, especially on loose-weave rugs. He goes on to say that the current alteration of rugs does not stop at tinting. Decorators, and dealers trying to please them, sometimes have parts of a rug rewoven to tame the pattern or remove a center medallion so the rug can be placed off-center in a room. "If the rug has been cut down, or rewoven so that the background is not the one the weaver created, the rug doesn't make sense," Pap insists. "They are in effect making a new rug and it should cost what a new rug does."