“Nonsense, Paternus,” said Watts. “You don’t know anything about the old chap. You’ve only seen him as a cool clever lawyer. If your old definition of romance is right: that it is ‘Love, and the battle between good and evil,’ Peter has had more true romance than all the rest of us put together.”
“No,” said Mr. Pierce. “You have merely seen Peter in love, and so you all think he is romantic. He isn’t. He is a cool man, who never acts without weighing his actions, and therein has lain the secret of his success. He calmly marks out his line of life, and, regardless of everything else, pursues it. He disregards everything not to his purpose, and utilizes everything that serves. I predicted great success for him many years ago when he was fresh from college, simply from a study of his mental characteristics and I have proved myself a prophet. He has never made a slip, legally, politically, or socially. To use a yachting expression, he has ‘made everything draw.’ An idealist, or a man of romance and fire and impulse could never succeed as he has done. It is his entire lack of feeling which has led to his success. Indeed—”
“I can’t agree with you,” interrupted Dorothy, sitting up from her collapse as if galvanized into life and speech by Mr. Pierce’s monologue. “You don’t understand Peter. He is a man of great feeling. Think of that speech of his about those children! Think of his conduct to his mother as long as she lived! Think of the goodness and kindness he showed to the poor! Why, Ray says he has refused case after case for want of time in recent years, while doing work for people in his ward which was worth nothing. If—”
“They were worth votes,” interjected Mr. Pierce.
“Look at his buying the Costell place in Westchester when Mr. Costell died so poor, and giving it to Mrs. Costell,” continued Dorothy, warming with her 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 of his success. I spoke to him once of a rather curious line of argument, as it seemed to me, which he was taking in a case, and he said: ‘Ogden, I take that course because it is the way Judge Potter’s mind acts. If you want to convince yourself, take the arguments which do that best, but when you have to deal with judges or juries, take the lines which fit their capacities. People talk about my unusual success in winning cases. It’s simply because I am not certain that my way and my argument are the only way and the only argument. I’ve studied the judges closely, so that I know what lines to take, and I always notice what seems to interest the jury most, in each case. But, more important than this study, is the fact that I can comprehend about how the average man will look at a certain thing. You see I am the son of plain people. Then I am meeting all grades of mankind, and hearing what they say, and getting their points of view. I have never sat in a closet out of touch with the world and decided what is right for others, and then spent time trying to prove it to them. In other words, I have succeeded, because I am merely the normal or average man, and therefore am understood by normal or average people, or by majorities, to put it in another way.’”
“But Mr. Stirling isn’t a commonplace man,” said another of the charmingly dressed girls. “He is very silent, and what he says isn’t at all clever, but he’s very unusual and interesting.”