“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.’”