The event was potent as the cross Constantine saw, or dreamed he saw, in the sky, in the conversion of party workers to the new Administration.  Everybody looked forward to an eminent future for the potent partisan and millionaire, the first of that—­now not uncommon—­hierarchy that replace the feudal barons in modern social forces.  Had he listened to the eager urging of Kate, his daughter and prime minister, Boone would have accepted the foreign mission; but he stubbornly refused to listen to her in this.

Kate Boone was like her father only in strong will, vehement purpose, and a certain humorous independence that made her a great delight among even the anti-Boone partisans in both Acredale and Warchester.  Since the death of her mother, Kate had been head of her father’s household—­an imperious, capricious, kind-hearted tyrant, who ruled mostly by jokes and persuasions of the gentler sort.  It was her father’s one lament that Kate was not “the boy of the family, for she had more of the stuff that makes the man in her little finger than Wes had in his whole body.”  She kept him in a perpetual unrest of delight and dismay.  She espoused none of his piques or prejudices; she was as apt to bring people he disliked to his dinner-table as those he liked.  She was forever making him forgive wrongs, or what he fancied to be wrongs, and causing him seem at fault in all his squabbles, so that he was often heard to say, when things went as he didn’t want them: 

“I don’t know whether I am to blame or the other fellow until Kate hears the story.”

His illiteracy and lack of polish were the secret grief of the rich man’s life.  Kate was quick in detecting this.  Much of it she saw was due to the shyness that unschooled men feel in the presence of college men, or those who have been trained.  On returning from her seminary life, the young girl set about remedying the single break in her father’s perfections.  She was far too clever to let him know her ambitious purpose.  With a patience almost maternal and an exquisite adroitness, she interested him in her own reading, which was comprehensive, if not very well ordered.  But she won the main point.  During the long winter evenings her father found no pleasure like that Kate had always ready for him in the cheery library.  He was soon amazed at his keen interest in the world of mind unrolled to his understanding; more than all, he retained with the receptivity of a boy all that was read to him.  Kate made believe that she needed his help in reviewing her own studies, and so carried him through all she had gone over in the seminary classes.  Boone began presently to see that education is not the result of mere attendance in schools and the parroting of the classics in a few semesters in college.  Without suspecting it, his varied business enterprises and his wide experience of men had grounded him as well in the ordinary forms of knowledge as nine in ten college men attain.