; but he stubbornly refused to listen
to her in this.

Kate Boone was like her father only in strong will, vehement purpose,
and a certain humorous independence that made her a great delight among
even the anti-Boone partisans in both Acredale and Warchester. Since the
death of her mother, Kate had been head of her father's household--an
imperious, capricious, kind-hearted tyrant, who ruled mostly by jokes
and persuasions of the gentler sort. It was her father's one lament that
Kate was not "the boy of the family, for she had more of the stuff that
makes the man in her little finger than Wes had in his whole body." She
kept him in a perpetual unrest of delight and dismay. She espoused none
of his piques or prejudices; she was as apt to bring people he disliked
to his dinner-table as those he liked. She was forever making him
forgive wrongs, or what he fancied to be wrongs, and causing him seem at
fault in all his squabbles, so that he was often heard to say, when
things went as he didn't want them:

"I don't know whether I am to blame or the other fellow until Kate hears
the story."

His illiteracy and lack of polish were the secret grief of the rich
man's life. Kate was quick in detecting this. Much of it she saw was due
to the shyness that unschooled men feel in the presence of college men,
or those who have been trained. On returning from her seminary life, the
young girl set about remedying the single break in her father's
perfections. She was far too clever to let him know her ambitious
purpose. With a patience almost maternal and an exquisite adroitness,
she interested him in her own reading, which was comprehensive, if not
very well ordered. But she won the main point. During the long winter
evenings her father found no pleasure like that Kate had always ready
for him in the cheery library. He was soon amazed at his keen interest
in the world of mind unrolled to his understanding; more than all, he
retained with the receptivity of a boy all that was read to him. Kate
made believe that she needed his help in reviewing her own studies, and
so carried him through all she had gone over in the seminary classes.
Boone began presently to see that education is not the result of mere
attendance in schools and the parroting of the classics in a few
semesters in college. Without suspecting it, his varied business
enterprises and his wide experience of men had grounded him as well in
the ordinary forms of knowledge as nin