“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.”

“Nevertheless,” said Ogden, “I believe he was right.  He has a way of knowing what the majority of people think or feel about things.  And that is the secret of his success, and not his possession or lack of feeling.”

“You none of you have got at the true secret of Peter’s success,” said Ray.  “It was his wonderful capacity for work.  To a lazy beggar like myself it is marvellous.  I’ve known that man to work from nine in the morning till one at night, merely stopping for meals.”