r subject. "Look at his going to those strikers' families, and
arranging to help them. Were those things done for votes? If I could
only tell you of something he once did for me, you would not say that he
was a man without feeling."

"I have no doubt," said Mr. Pierce blandly, "that he did many things
which, on their face, seemed admirable and to indicate feeling. But if
carefully examined, they would be found to have been advantageous to
him. Any service he could have done to Mrs. Rivington surely did not
harm him. His purchase of Costell's place pleased the political friends
of the dead leader. His aiding the strikers' families placated the men,
and gained him praise from the press. I dislike greatly to oppose this
rose-colored view of Peter, but, from my own knowledge of the man, I
must. He is without feeling, and necessarily makes no mistakes, nor is
he led off from his own ambitions by sentiment of any kind. When we had
that meeting with the strikers, he sat there, while all New York was
seething, with mobs and dead just outside the walls, as cool and
impassive as a machine. He was simply determined that we should
compromise, because his own interests demanded it, and he carried his
point merely because he was the one cool man at that meeting. If he had
had feeling he could not have been cool. That one incident shows the
key-note of his success."

"And I say his strong sympathies and feeling were the key-note,"
reiterated Dorothy.

"I think," said Pell, "that Peter's great success lay in his ability to
make friends. It was simply marvellous. I've seen it, over and over
again, both in politics and society. He never seemed to excite envy or
bitterness. He had a way of doing things which made people like him.
Every one he meets trusts him. Yet nobody understands him. So he
interests people, without exciting hostility. I've heard person after
person say that he was an uninteresting, ordinary man, and yet nobody
ever seemed to forget him. Every one of us feels, I am sure, that, as
Miss De Voe says, he had within something he never showed people. I have
never been able to see why he did or did not do hundreds of things. Yet
it always turned out that what he did was right. He makes me think of
the Frenchwoman who said to her sister, 'I don't know why it is, sister,
but I never meet any one who's always right but myself.'"

"You have hit it," said Ogden Ogden, "and I can prove that you have by
Peter's own explanation o