Mr. Copley frowned a moment without replying. ‘Well Marcia, he’s a good deal older than I, and we’re not particularly congenial.’ He straightened his shoulders with a laugh. ‘Oh, well, there’s no use concealing disagreeable truths. It appears they will out in the end. As a matter of fact, your father and I haven’t had anything to do with each other for the past ten years. The first move was on his part, when he wrote about you last fall—you didn’t know that you came as an olive-branch, did you?’ ‘I didn’t know; he didn’t tell me anything about it, but I—well, I sort of guessed. I’m sorry about it, Uncle Howard. I’m sure that it’s just because you don’t understand each other.’ ‘I’m afraid we never have understood each other, and I doubt if we ever can, but we’ll make another effort.’ ‘It’s so hard to like people when you don’t understand them, and so easy when you do,’ said Marcia. ‘It facilitates matters,’ he agreed. ‘I think I’m beginning to understand Mr. Sybert,’ she added somewhat vaguely. ‘He’s different, when you understand him, from the way you thought he was when you didn’t understand him.’ ‘Ah, Sybert!’ Mr. Copley raised his head and brought his eyes back from the edge of the landscape. ‘I thought I knew him, but he’s been a revelation to me this spring.’ ‘How do you mean?’ Marcia asked, striving to keep out of her tone the interest that was behind it. ‘Oh, the way he’s taken hold of things. It seems an absurd thing to say, but I believe he’s had almost as much influence as the police in quieting the trouble. He has an unbelievably strong hold on the people—how he got it, I don’t know. He understands them as well as an Italian, and yet he is a foreigner, which gives him, in some ways, a great advantage. They trust him because they think that, being a foreigner, he has nothing to make out of it. He’s a marvellous fellow when it comes to action.’ ‘You never would guess it to look at him!’ she returned. ‘Why does he pretend to be so bored?’ ‘Be so bored? Well, I suppose there are some things that do bore him; and the ones that don’t, bore other people. His opinions are not universally popular in Rome, and being a diplomatist, I dare say he thinks it as well to keep them to himself.’ ‘What are his opinions?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I don’t like to accuse him of being an anarchist, since he assures me that he’s not. But when a man wants to overthrow the government——’ ‘Nonsense! Sybert doesn’t want to overthrow the government any more than I do. Just at present it’s under the control of a few corrupt politicians, but that’s a thing that’s likely to happen in any country, and it’s only a temporary evil. The Italians will be on their feet again in a year or so, all the better for their shaking-up, and Sybert knows it. He’s got more real faith in the government than most of the Italians I know.’ ‘But he talks against it terribly.’