‘Uncle Howard, do you and papa—that is—do you mind my asking?—are you very good friends?’
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.’