"But how do you expect to convince him?" asked the girl. "If he never has insured the system, the chances are that he doesn't believe in insurance, or that he doesn't think the system is likely to burn up, or that he has some other good reason for not insuring it."

"That's exactly why I'm asking your advice," her companion replied. "Probably you are correct in all three of your conjectures. What I want is some way to make him do something that he doesn't believe in and from which he never expects to get his money back and that he has some other perfectly proper argument for turning down—and make him do it, just the same. Eventually he's got to do it—it's a case of sheer necessity—for me."

"Why don't you ask Isabel? I think I hear her coming."

And Isabel entered, the teakettle boiling in her wake. As she dispensed the material concomitants, the conversation went on.

"We have been talking about fire insurance and trolley systems," said Helen. And she summarized Wilkinson's remarks for her friend's benefit. Isabel listened with interest but skepticism.

"If you really expect father to insure anything, Charlie, I'm afraid you will be disappointed," she said frankly. "I hope you're not serious about it."

"Serious! I should think I was! I would naturally be just a little serious about something on which depended the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of Charles S. Wilkinson, Esquire. It is a matter of most vital necessity, I assure you—nothing less. And now having acquainted you with the salience of the situation, I will allow you a period for reflection undisturbed by pleasantries or philosophic observations from myself which might conceivably divert the currents of your minds. Meanwhile I shall devote this period to an intelligent appreciation of Isabel's compendious and soul-satisfying tea."

The two girls looked blankly at one another.

"My dear Charlie," Miss Hurd said, "it is very painful to have to overturn the family water cooler on your ambitious young hopes, but are you aware that for thirty years my mother—or her representative—has carried the silver upstairs every night because as a family we did not believe in insuring it? Burglary insurance, life insurance, fire insurance—father has never paid a dollar for any one of them. And do you happen to recall the line of my distinguished parent's jaw? If I were you, Charlie, I would try to insure somebody else's trolley system."

Wilkinson shook his head sadly.

"No, that won't do, Isabel. John M. is the only relative I have who owns a trolley system, or much of anything else. Most of the other systems are insured already, anyway, and the people who own them undoubtedly insure them through their own connections—I was about to say poor relations. No, my only hope is here, and it grieves me deeply, Isabel, to see you take so pessimistic a view. Nevertheless, I am not downcast; I will arise buoyantly to ask whether you cannot do better?—whether you cannot devise some expedient whereby the heart of your worthy father may be melted and become as other men's hearts. I don't demand a permanent or even a protracted melting—all I ask is a temporary thaw, just long enough to let me extract a promise from him to let me insure those car barns and power houses. Then he can revert to adamant and be—and welcome, so far as I am concerned. Now, Miss Maitland, have you nothing to suggest?"

"Wouldn't it be more satisfactory to succeed by your own ideas and devices?" Helen inquired.

"All very pretty, my plausible girl, but what if one has no ideas or devices? That is very nearly my case, and it is a hard one. I've only one real shot in my locker, and if that doesn't reach its mark, I'm lost."

"And what is that?" Helen and Isabel asked almost simultaneously.

"In my single way I will endeavor to answer both these interrogations at once. It is, then, the suggestion of a man I met in the office of Silas Osgood and Company, a man by the wild, barbaric, outre name of Smith. Richard Smith, I believe. And his suggestion—I tell it to you in confidence, relying on your honor not to steal my stolen thunder—was, very briefly, to put before my distinguished relation the sad, disheartening effect it would have on the popularity of the trolley stock in the banks and on the stock exchange if it became generally noised abroad that the road carried no insurance and maintained no proper insurance fund. What do you think of that?"

"I begin to see," said Isabel, thoughtfully. "People have bought the stock and banks have lent money on it without knowing whether the property was protected by insurance or not?"

"On the contrary, rather assuming that it was. Your father's antipathy to insurance is a little unusual, you know. So far no one has ever made a point of bringing it strongly before the public. And banks and stock markets are queer things—and confidence is jarred with singular ease. There are a number of pretty important men in this town who would dislike to have some of their loans called or to have Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction drop ten or fifteen points. Of course this needn't happen—and for a preventative, apply to Charles Wilkinson, Esquire, restorer of lost confidences."

Helen spoke.

"Whose idea was this, did you say?" she asked.

"His name was Smith," said Wilkinson, soberly.

Helen started to ask another question; then changed her mind, and was silent. What surprised her was the fact that she found herself interested, sharply interested, in the problem Charles had presented. She was, in fact, more interested than she had been in anything for some time. She was astonished to find this to be so. She had always been under the impression, common enough among the more sheltered of her class, that business was a thing in which only the men who carried it on could possibly be absorbed. Yet here she had been interested to the exclusion of all else in a matter that was of absolutely no aesthetic value and with the terms and locale of which she was quite unfamiliar. As it had been presented to her and she had tried, at Charles's demand, to find a way out for him—she stated the problem over more clearly—she admitted feeling a trifle piqued when she racked her brain for a solution only to find it barren of expedients and a hopeless blank. Yet this chance acquaintance of Charlie's had apparently hit on his expedient casually enough. Once more she restrained the impulse to ask another question, although she scarcely knew why she did so, and she remained silent until, a few moments later, she was roused by the departure of the satiated Wilkinson.

"Wish me luck," he said, as he turned to go. "More depends upon this than you pampered children of luxury can ever guess. Isabel, I congratulate you on the educational advance of your butler. Miss Maitland, I am your very devoted."

The curtains of the drawing room shut him from sight and sound, except the faint rumor of his descending feet upon the steps.



CHAPTER IV

There are, in the side streets of many if not all the greater cities of the civilized world, shops where skilled artisans are busily at work in the manufacture of "antiques"—antique furniture, antique rugs or brasses or clocks or violins. The ingenious persons engaged in this reprehensible activity have developed their skill to such a point that it seems probable that fully half their deceit never comes to light at all, and it is certain that their products rarely suffer much by contrast with the things which they seek to imitate. It is only when the maker of the original was a great master that his modern counterfeiter fails—and not always then.

It is, at first thought, a strange business—not so strange that men should give their lives to it as that there should be so much demand for a purely apocryphal product. Looked at more carefully, however, the oddness disappears, and these men are found to be catering to a most legitimate appetite—an appetite which had its origin deep in the early mind of the race, even though it is now, perhaps, passing from the control of one of man's senses into that of another.

Latinism, as a creed, is dead, or dying. There are not many Latinists left, find the pessimistic, melancholy folk who found all the beauty of the world in "youth and death and the old age of roses" have appeared, probably never to return. Latinism was a flavor of the soul, and the modern soul rarely, if ever, assumes that flavor. What Latinism did, however, was to teach the appreciation of the dignity of time, the beauty of the passing years, and their enriching effect on things and men. This quality is now extant as a matter of taste, a mental attribute, and it is widely conceived to be a sign of cultivation to "pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new" in favor of something which has at least the appearance of age with or without the richness and mellowness thereof. After all, the mellowness is the essence; if the years merely age without mellowing a thing, they have done it no good; the same thing new is the more desirable article.

The larger and more important a thing is, the less effect the years have upon it, and the more difficult becomes the task of the enterprising workman who seeks to simulate the wrinkles time would leave. In the case of cities, the task is practically hopeless. There is only one way for a city to attain the beauty and the haunting charm of age, and that is to wait patiently until time has finished his slow work. It is hard to wait, and a new city is a crude and painful thing. One can easily imagine the older cities looking scornfully or pityingly down upon it, themselves secure in the grim or the delicate beauty of their age. Only once in many generations does a city rise which achieves a character, an individuality, without waiting for the lingering years to bestow it. It happens so seldom as to come almost into the realm of the miraculous. Yet to him who for the first time sees New York at night, or as the declining sun sets ten thousand roofs for the moment aflame—a miracle seems not more wonderful than this.

There are miles on miles of roofs in many a town, stretching away beyond the reach of sight; there is, especially in the great cities of the old world, an immensity of movement which is at once alien and akin to the great movements of earth and sea; there are cities which seem great because of the multiplicity of things—men and ships and creeds and costumes which jostle one another in every market place. New York has all these things—yet they do not explain New York—they are almost inconsiderable elements in the greater thing that is the city itself. Wherein the essence lies—whether it is the purely superficial aspect of it, the imaginative daring of its architecture, or some deeper and more subtle thing—no man can surely say.

There are strewn about in a thousand niches of the city little groups of buildings which seem to have assembled themselves, by some lonesome impulse, into communities. Primarily, of course, these groupings are ethnological, these cities within a city being originally created largely by the timidity of strangers in a strange land. There are little Italys, and Chinatowns, and diminutive Bohemias, all swung together by the action of this great centripetal force of loneliness. The buildings in these communities, inflexible enough in all conscience as regards design, contrive none the less to take on in some way a character and appearance peculiar to their inhabitants; this may be a matter only of red Turkey turbans flapping in the breeze, or perhaps of the haunting aroma of some national staple of food—but certainly it is there. Scattered through Manhattan, from the Battery to the Bronx, these five centers are witnesses as they stand to the effect of circumstance on bricks and mortar. And that there should be this visible effect is no doubt natural enough, for the difference between nation and nation is a salient thing. It would be far stranger were it to fail of effect even on so unimpressionable a thing as a six-story red-brick tenement house.

There are forces, however, which prove themselves hardly less potent than this force of fellow-nationality, but which would at first thought be denied any vital molding power over people or over things. These are the trades, and—less distinctive in their outward aspects, at least—the professions. It is not odd that a fishing village or a mining camp should take on a certain character unique to itself, but surely one would not expect a lawyer to impress on his environment a stamp so unmistakable that one could say, observing it from without, "In this building lawyers plot." Superficially there would be said to be scant difference between a lawyer and a broker or a real estate dealer or an insurance man. Yet in New York City, where communities of these professions mesh and intermesh and overlap, there are still streets which are, and which could be, to a trained eye, the habitat of financiers alone, and where at once all other wayfarers are seen to be interlopers, or at best mere visitors at a fair.

Such a street is Wall Street, and such is Broad. And on the eastern rim of this same zone runs a street which, despite the countless changes that the years untiringly bring, could not possibly be mistaken for anything but what it is, the great aorta of the fire insurance world. William Street is as distinctly a fire insurance street as any street could possibly be distinctive of its profession.

Scattered along the intersecting ways, but lining William Street from Pine to Fulton, are gathered the fire insurance companies and the brokers, respectively the sellers and the buyers of insurance. There you will find the homes of the big alert New York companies whose lofty steel and granite buildings stand as fit monuments to their strength and endurance and enterprise, and the United States headquarters of the dignified but aggressive British fire offices whose risks are scattered over every portion of the earth where there is property to insure, and the metropolitan departments of the great corporations that have made the name of Hartford, Connecticut, almost symbolic of fire insurance. There are also the agencies, in each of which from one to a dozen smaller companies have intrusted their local underwriting to some agency firm. There too are the offices of the world's leading reinsurance companies, most of them German or Russian, who accept their business not from agents or property owners, but entirely from other insurance companies. There are the elaborately equipped offices of the local inspection and rating bureau maintained by all the companies, and there are the offices of the dealers in automatic sprinklers, fire alarms, extinguishers, and hose. And throughout the whole district the buildings are honeycombed with the almost countless brokers—from firms who transact as much business as a large insurance company down to shabby men who have failed to succeed in other lines and who eke out an existence on the commissions from an account or two handed them in friendship or in charity—all of them the busy intermediaries between the insurers and the insured.

From morning till night these insurance men throng William Street, most of them representing the brokers who feed the business into the great machine. And it is no wonder that the street is thronged, for the amount of detail requisite for every insurance effected is surprisingly great. Let us suppose that Brown, owning a building, desires to insure it. He sends his order to Jones, a broker who has solicited the business. Jones's clerk enters up the order and makes out a slip called a binder, which is an abbreviated form of contract insuring the customer until a complete contract in the form of a policy can be issued. This binding slip is given to a clerk called the placer, whose duty it is to place the risk, or in other words to secure the acceptance of the insurance by some company or companies. The placer then goes into the street, returning when his binder is completed by the acceptance of the amount desired, the name of each company with the amount assumed and the initials of its representative being signed in the spaces left for that purpose. Forms must then be prepared by the broker to suit the conditions of the risk and delivered to the companies, the rate schedule must be scrutinized to see whether in any way a lower rate can be obtained, and as soon as possible the policies themselves must be secured and delivered to the assured. The premium must then be collected and remitted, less the broker's commission, to the companies. And the broker's duty does not end even here. He must watch the risk for changes in occupancy, protect his client's interests in the event of a loss, and constantly fight like a tiger before the rating bureau to reduce the rate lest some alert rival offer his customer better terms.

All this detail is quite smoothly transacted, supposing the business to be in the companies' opinion desirable, but when the risk offered is what the street terms a "skate" or a "target," there is a sudden halt, and the completion of the binder becomes a more difficult matter. Then the really astute placer has a chance to demonstrate his efficiency. It is his function to persuade with winged words his adversary, the company's local underwriter or "counterman," that the stock of cheap millinery belonging to the Slavonic gentlemen with the unfortunate record of two fires of unknown origin and two opportune failures is even more desirable—at the rate—than the large line on the substantial office building which he half exhibits, holding suggestively back. It is his duty to place all his business, not the good alone, and generally he succeeds in eventually doing so, although some binders become tattered and grimy with age and from having been handed futilely back and forth over the company counters. The owner of many a Fifth Avenue dwelling would be surprised could he know that the insurance on his property had been utilized to force on some reluctant company a small line covering the sewing machines in Meyer Leshinsky's Pike Street sweatshop. Many an ingenious placer has had the binders of his very worst risks—that he had been totally unable to cover—freshly typewritten every morning in order to convey the impression that the order had that moment been secured by his firm and that the hesitating counterman to whom it was being presented with elaborate indifference was the first—the best friend of the placer—to whom the line had been offered.

On an eligible corner on the west side of William Street, at the very center of the Street's activity, stood, in the year 1912, a gray stone structure of dignified though scarcely decorative appearance. On the stone slabs each side of the doorway, old style brass letters proclaimed—if so modest an announcement could be termed a proclamation—that here were the offices of

THE GUARDIAN FIRE INSURANCE COMPANY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Over this portal gray walls rose to the height of eight stories. Such was the headquarters, from an external aspect, of one of the oldest, safest, and best of local companies, which invariably, for brevity, was known to friends and foes alike as "The Guardian of New York."

Entering the somewhat narrow vestibule, the visitor found himself in a small and gloomy hall, confronted by two debilitated grille elevator doors which seemed sadly to need oiling, the elevators behind which carried conservatively and without precipitancy those who wished to ascend. The two individuals who directed the leisurely progress of these cars were elderly men who, like most of those in the Guardian's employment, had been in the service of the company since it moved into the "new" building. This migration had occurred about the time that torch-light parades were marching up Broadway to the rhythmic cheers for "Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!" It is a melancholy truth that in a generation and a half eyes grow dim and limbs falter, but in the opinion of the Guardian's management the fact that a man was no longer as young as he had once been was no valid reason, unless he were actually incompetent, why he should not be allowed to continue doing the best he could. President Wintermuth himself had once been considerably younger, and he knew it. He called all his old employees by their first names, and unless there rose a question of fidelity, he would no sooner have thought of discharging one of them than he would have thought of going home and discharging his wife. Some of the older ones, indeed, antedated Mr. Wintermuth himself, and still regarded him with the kindly tolerance of the days when they were the cognoscenti, and he the neophyte, learning the ropes at their hands.

One of the oldest in tenure, but a man incurably young for all that, was James Cuyler, the head of the company's local department, in charge of all the business of the Metropolitan District, and an underwriter as well known to the fraternity as the asphalt pavement of the street. The Guardian's local department, which occupied the entire first floor of the building, except the elevator space, was a busy place from nine o'clock till five on ordinary days and from nine till one on Saturdays. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, Mr. Cuyler stood behind his long map counter, his genial but penetrating eye instantly assessing each man that approached, sifting with quick glance the business offered, and detecting almost automatically any trick or "joker" in that which his visitors presented. Most of the men across the counter naturally were brokers or their placing clerks, armed with binders on risks of all kinds, some good and many more bad, for the good risks are usually snapped up in large amounts by the first companies to whom they are taken, but the bad ones make their weary and often fruitless tour of the entire street. All of them, the good and bad alike, the placers commonly presented to Mr. Cuyler with a bland innocence which deceived that astute veteran not at all. The purpose of the average broker was to induce the Guardian to accept his chaff with as little wheat as he could possibly bestow, while Mr. Cuyler's, on the contrary, was to take the wheat and the wheat alone. The chaff he declined in three thousand manners, in every case fitting his refusal to the refused one, always bearing in mind that that worthy's affections must not be permanently and hopelessly alienated.

"John," he would say with a smile, "I'll write thirty-five thousand on that fireproof building for you, but I can't take that rag stock. I'd like to help you out, you understand, but I simply can't touch the class. Two years ago I wrote an accommodation line for Billy Heilbrun—some old junk shop in Sullivan Street—and she smoked for a total loss in about a month, and I can still recall the post-mortem I had with the President."

And under cover of this painful but purely fictitious incident he would whisk away the binder on the fireproof building, returning it signed with one and the same movement, and smiling a smile of chastened sorrow over his inability to assist his friend with the undesirable rag offering. Or else the office would see him lean forward impressively, and say, in a hushed whisper, across the counter: "Now, Mr. Charles Webb, you're wasted in the insurance business. If you have the cold nerve to offer me that old skate that's been turned down by every company from the Continental down to the Kickapoo Lloyds—well, you ought to be in the legislature, that's where you ought to be!"

"But here's something to go with it—to sweeten it up," the unabashed Mr. Webb would probably protest, producing another risk of equally detrimental description. Then Mr. Cuyler would turn.

"Harry," he would say, "put on your hat and take Mr. Webb back to his office. He's not himself; the heat is too much for him."

And Mr. Webb would smile—and be lost.

There are very few positions which make greater demands upon one's judgment, one's diplomacy, and one's temper than this one which Mr. Cuyler had filled so long and so inimitably. To pick a man's pocket of all its contents, deliberately selecting those of sufficient value to retain and throwing the remainder back in his face, is a matter for fine art, for the broker must not be angered or a good connection is lost to the office.

And there are artists in both galleries. There are placers who have all the fine frenzy of a starving poet in a midnight garret, men who would make the fortune of a country hotel if they would but write for it a single testimonial advertisement, men whose flow of persuasive talk is almost hypnotic, whose victims are held just as surely as ever was Wedding Guest—and with this difference, that while that classic personage merely turned up late to the ceremony, these charmed men listen to the siren tongue until they find themselves doing things which may very readily—if fate is unkind and the risk burns—cost them their repute and their positions as well.

When such a Pan-Hellenic meeting occurred, Mr. Cuyler rose to his highest triumphs. It was perhaps a frame celluloid goods factory in Long Island City, which some soul-compelling voice had just finished describing, accoutering the grisly thing in all the garments of verbal glory. One gathered that the Guardian's fate hung on the acceptance of this translucent risk, that it was a prize saved from the clutches of a hundred grasping competitors and brought to the counter of the Guardian like a pure white lamb to the altar of the gods. When it was all over, and nothing was wanting except Mr. Cuyler's signature to the binder—then Mr. Cuyler came into his own.

"Joe," the organ note would start—"Joe, that looks as if it might be a first-rate risk of its class, and some folks think it's not a bad class, too, when the hazards are properly arranged. I've always thought myself that the bad record on celluloid workers was largely accidental. And I don't see how I can turn down anything that comes from your office—I guess I'll have to help you out with a small line, anyway. Where's your binder? Wait a second, though. Let me look at that map again—I forgot my exposing lines. Well! we seem to be pretty full in that block—eighty-five, ten, twelve-five, sixteen—by Jove! I'm afraid I'll have to pass that up, after all—I didn't think I had so much around there. Awfully sorry, old man; I'd take it for you if I could for any man in the world."

And the binder was affably passed back over the counter. But when, as probably developed at this point, Mr. Cuyler was advised that his remarks bore convincing traces of the proximity of an active steam-radiator and that the broker knew perfectly well that the Guardian hadn't a dollar at risk within three blocks—it was then that the real contest began. Celluloid was a mighty hazardous article—was Joe aware that in New York State alone the losses had been nearly three times the premiums on the class? Perhaps this was accidental, but it was a fact just the same. But after all, what else could one expect? Celluloid was very much like gun-cotton—made out of practically the same constituents—and only a little less dangerous to handle. It also appeared that celluloid works all over the country had for the last year been unusually disastrous to the underwriters, and that the President himself had written a letter on the subject to the various rating bureaus. Honestly, it would be more than Cuyler, with all his extreme desire to oblige, would dare do—to tell the old man that the local department had written a celluloid factory. His good friend, the caller, Mr. Cuyler felt certain, would not wish to see the venerable hairs of the Guardian's local secretary trampled into the dust by the infuriate heels of the board of directors, led by the outraged President Wintermuth himself. No, he was extremely sorry, but he simply—could not—take—the risk.

And take it he would not. Such was James Cuyler. For thirty years he had stood at the Guardian's local threshold, fidelity personified, a watch-dog extraordinary that could not have been duplicated in all watchdogdom. He had but one superstition and but one grievance.

His superstition was that he would not allow a customer to enter the office after the clock struck the first blow of five. At that moment, if no employee was at hand, he himself would step out from behind the counter, close the door, and turn the key in the lock. And the best friend of the office could not have gained admission once the key was turned.

"Why do I do it?" he would say. "My boy, at about half-past five P.M. on June fourteenth, eighteen eighty-nine, I was alone in the office, and Herman White, who used to be placer for Schmidt and Sulzbacher, came in with a ten thousand dollar line on coffee in one of those Brooklyn shorefront warehouses. I guess all the other offices must have shut up, for Herman never gave me anything he didn't have to. He banged on the door, and I let him in, and the risk was all right and we were wide open, and I took his ten thousand. . . . And about twenty minutes later, as I stood on the front deck of the Wall Street ferryboat crossing the river, the flames burst out of the roof of that warehouse, and we paid nine thousand two hundred and thirty-seven dollars for that coffee. . . . This office closes at five P.M."

This was his superstition, and he lived up to it with absolute consistency. His one grievance was not quite so deep, which probably explained his lesser insistence upon it. This grievance was simply that the conservative policy of the company would not let him accept more than a fraction of what he would have wished to write on the island of Manhattan. Like all men who constantly live in the presence of a peril and grow thus to minimize it, Mr. Cuyler had grown to think and to feel that New York, his New York, could never have a serious, sweeping fire, a conflagration. This being so, and the local business being profitable, to write so small an amount in the city was equivalent to throwing money sinfully away. Why, companies not half so large were doing double the Guardian's business, and with golden results. But only at long intervals did he permit himself the luxury of articulately bemoaning his fate, for in spite of his own conviction he felt that any implied criticism of his chief was disloyal. Occasionally, however, his feelings would overcome him, and then he would burst forth into a hurricane of lamentations.

"The finest town in the country," he would say; "and look at what we write! I could double our income in a week if the old man would let me. But he won't. He keeps talking 'conflagration hazard' and 'keep your lines down in the dry goods district' and 'aggregate liability,' and I can't get him to loosen up a particle. He always says we have enough at risk now. Enough at risk! Look at what the company writes in Boston! Why, the Guardian must have half as much at risk in the congested district of Boston as I write here! And Boston! Of all towns in the world!"

Mr. Cuyler was not a Bostonian.

It was perfectly true; Mr. Wintermuth was not a strictly consistent underwriter, and perhaps some day he would adopt Mr. Cuyler's viewpoint. And then, the flood-gates open, the local secretary would come into his metropolitan own. Certainly, if the Guardian's line in Boston was safe, its liability in New York was small indeed. But the Boston business had always shown a profit, and James Wintermuth and Silas Osgood had grown up together in the insurance world; and so for the present the Boston line would stand. And it was impossible to satisfy Mr. Cuyler,—he was continually moaning about the restrictions under which he labored,—and so it was likely that nothing would be done in New York, either. James Wintermuth was a conservative man.

One could have told it at his first glance about the President's office, on the top floor of the Guardian building. In the first place, the office, although it was located in the sunniest corner of the building, preserved nevertheless a kind of cathedral gloom. Dark shades in the windows reduced the light across Mr. Wintermuth's obsolete roll-top desk to never more than that of a dull afternoon. No impertinent rays of the sun could further fade the faded rug which clothed the center of the room. On the wall hung likenesses of the former heads of the company, now long since in their graves. Over the desk was an old print of the Lisbon earthquake; the germaneness of this did not at once appear,—in fact, it never appeared,—but the picture had always hung there, and in Mr. Wintermuth's opinion that was ample cause and justification.

Only in the corner, almost out of sight behind the desk, was the room's single absolute incongruity. There the surprised visitor saw, reposing quietly in its shadowy retreat, a hundred pound dumb-bell. This was the President's sole remaining animal joy, the presence of this dumb-bell. He rarely touched it now, although the colored janitor's assistant scrupulously dusted it each morning, but it was an agreeable reminder of the days when the old lion was young and when his teeth, metaphorically speaking, were new and sharp. For years it had been his custom to lift this ponderous object three times above his head before opening his mail in the morning—and he would never hire a field man or inspector who could not do likewise.

Now, of course, these trials of strength were over for Mr. Wintermuth—and what he no longer did himself he asked none other to do. But there the relic lay, a substantial memorial of Spring in the veins. Once in a while, at long intervals, Smith, in whom the old man had a sort of shamefaced pride, would eye the thing respectfully.

"Put it up, Richard," Mr. Wintermuth would direct; "I used to do it every morning for twenty years." And Smith—with considerable effort—would put it up.

"I'd never have let you go to work for the Guardian, when you came and struck me for a position, if you hadn't been able to do that, my boy," said the President, reflectively.

And Smith would listen patiently to the oft-told tale. He was sincerely fond of the old autocrat, and able to bear with his growing acerbity better than he could have done had he not known the real spirit of the man. During the past year or two it seemed to Smith that his chief was showing his age more plainly than ever before. He was still under sixty-five, but he was coming to live more than ever in the past, and was growing more and more impervious to the new ideas and new methods which modern conditions constantly brought.

"The greatest trouble with the old man is," as Cuyler was heard to say on one occasion, "he has the 4 per cent bond habit."

It was perfectly, true. What was safe and what was sure appealed more strongly to James Wintermuth with the passage of every year. Not for him were the daring methods of those companies who employed their resources in tremendous plunges in and out of the stock market, not for him the long chances in which most of his competitors gloried. The Guardian was doing well enough. Its capital of $750,000 was ample; its surplus of $500,000 very respectable; its premium income of a million and three quarters perfectly adequate, in Mr. Wintermuth's opinion. And the stockholders, receiving dividends of 12 per cent per annum, lean years and fat alike, never audibly complained.

In appearance the Guardian's President upheld the best traditions of the old school from which he sprang. Above middle height, his erect figure gave him still much the air of a cavalier. His acute black eyes and trim white mustache made him certain to attract notice wherever he went—a fact of which he was not wholly unconscious. Even now, when gradually, almost imperceptibly, the springiness was fading from his step, he seemed a strong and virile man. His directors, most of them his contemporaries and whose insurance knowledge was limited to what they had learned on the Guardian directorate, trusted and believed in him with absolute implicitness. Any act on behalf of the company, when done by the President, they promptly ratified; and indeed they had for many years made it palpable to the meanest intelligence that they considered James Wintermuth the head, brain, heart, and all the other vital organs of the company which they—nominally—directed. In short, James Wintermuth was the Guardian.

There was in all the Street one man alone who would have taken exception to this analysis—and he kept his opinion securely locked in his secretive, his very secretive brain. This man was F. Mills O'Connor, Vice-President of the Guardian.



CHAPTER V

"Turn up Providence Two," said Mr. O'Connor. As the gentleman in question appeared at his office door en route to the map desk, his asperity of manner seemed to Herbert, the map clerk, even more pronounced than usual, and his voice was fully accordant. It was never a dulcet organ, at best; but its owner rarely felt that his business transactions could be assisted by the employment of flute notes; when he did, he sank his tones to a confidential whisper intended to flatter and impress his auditor, and it usually seemed to serve the purpose. But with his map clerks and his subordinates generally he gave free play to his natural raucousness, and he probably acted upon excellent judgment.

Herbert, whose eye and ear from long practice had grown to detect the exact degree of urgency in every call, with the agility of his Darwinian ancestry quickened by his native wit, dashed over to the desk under which the Rhode Island maps reposed. He swung the big gray-bound volume up onto the broad, flat counter with all the skill of a successful vaudeville artist, and none too soon, for he who had demanded it was at his elbow.

"What page do you want, Mr. O'Connor?" asked Herbert.

The Vice-president glanced at the daily report he held in his hand, and turned back the yellow telegraph blank that was pinned to it.

"Sheet one fifty-six," he said shortly. "No—one fifty-six. That will do." He turned to a boy. "Find out for me if Mr. Wintermuth is in his office."

The boy, whose name was Jimmy, sped off, soliloquizing as he went: "Gee, there must be somethin' up to get O'C. as hot as that!" Arrived at the opposite end of the big room, he reconnoitered for a view of the President's office. By virtue of some little strategy he presently managed to catch sight of Mr. Wintermuth, seated at his desk, pen in hand, in his most magisterial attitude, listening judicially to the remarks of some visitor. Jimmy, who was no fool, recognized the stranger as the business manager of an insurance paper about half whose space was given to articles highly eulogistic of certain insurance companies whose advertisements, by some singular coincidence, invariably appeared further on in the publication. From the position of the two Jimmy deduced that the conversation was not likely to be terminated very soon, and dashed back to Mr. O'Connor with that intelligence. The Vice-President was still studying the many-colored sheet.

"Busy, eh? Well, leave that map turned up, and let me know as soon as he is at liberty." And he strode back to his own office and shut the door with a slam that disturbed the serene spectacles of Mr. Otto Bartels, who was sedulously studying a long row of figures on a reinsurance bordereau.

Mr. Bartels was Secretary of the Guardian, and his office adjoined that of the Vice-president. Mr. Bartels, who was very short and stout, and very methodical, and Teutonic beyond all else, looked up with mild surprise in his placid eyes and the hint of something on his face which in a more mobile countenance would have been an expression of gentle remonstrance. His place was lost, in the column he was scanning, by the dislodgment of his spectacles, which he wore well down toward the lower reaches of his nose—it would have been out of place to speak of that organ as possessing an end or a tip, for it was much too bulbous for any such term to fit. Taking the spectacles with both hands, he replaced them at their wonted angle, and with that phantom of disapproval still striving for expression and outlet among his features, he resumed his employment.

Otto Bartels was a discovery of Mr. Wintermuth's, many years before, when that gentleman occupied a less conspicuous position with the corporation of which he was now long since the head. One day, sitting at his desk, he looked up to observe a youth who stood gravely regarding him in silence for at least three minutes before his speech struggled near enough the surface to make itself audible. It appeared that the stranger was in need of a position, that he was accurate, though not quick at figures, and that he would begin work for whatever wage was found proper. He was given a trial in the accounts department, and for five years his sponsor heard no more of him. At the end of that time he found that his protege had worked up to the position of assistant chief clerk. Three years later the drinking water of the New Jersey suburb where he resided terminated the earthly career of the chief clerk, and Bartels became chief clerk, managing the department as nearly as was humanly possible without speech of any kind. And when, twenty years from the time the Guardian saw him first, Otto Bartels found himself authorized to write Secretary after his flowing signature, it was an appointment inevitable. He had simply pushed his way out of the crowd by grace of his unremitting thoroughness, his industry, which was really not especially creditable, as nothing but work ever occurred to him, and a gratifying inability to make errors of detail. He knew the name of every agent on the company's list, when each one was expected to pay his balances, and how much in premiums each annually reported. He never wrote letters, for it was impossible for him to dictate to a stenographer; he rarely took a vacation, for he had nowhere to go and nothing to do outside the office; he never engaged in discernible social intercourse of any sort, for he had never known how to begin. Such was the methodical man who so efficiently kept the books and records of the Guardian. He knew and cared nothing about underwriting, regarding the insurance operations of the company as a possibly important but purely secondary consideration. In Mr. Bartels's opinion the company's records were the company.

The underwriting department of the Guardian occupied, with the officers' quarters, the upper two floors of the rather narrow building. On the top floor were the East and the South, under the immediate supervision of Smith, the General Agent, and the offices of Mr. Wintermuth, Mr. O'Connor, and Mr. Bartels. The President occupied the southeast corner and the two others the northeast end, while Smith's desk was out in the open office, with the maps and files and survey cases and his subordinates under his eye.

On the floor below Assistant-Secretary Wagstaff held forth; he was in charge of the Western Department, which comprised the states from Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee westward to the coast. Mr. Wagstaff was a competent, careful, unimaginative, unambitious man who did his work from day to day. He enters this story virtually not at all; be it enough to say that he had a red mustache and a bald, bright head and wore shoes with cloth tops. He took good care of his territory, and if he never made much money for the company, he never lost any. So much for Edgar Wagstaff.

Before returning to the top floor, however, one character in Mr. Wagstaff's entourage must be brought majestically forward into view. This dignified personage was Jenkins, the clerk of the Pacific Coast accounts. Mr. Jenkins was, in his youth, a mathematician of remarkable promise. His dexterity with arithmetic and algebra was such that his family began to think that could this ability at figures be translated into terms of Wall Street there might be a Napoleon of finance bearing the proud if somewhat homely name of Jenkins. But unfortunately it seemed otherwise to the fates, for Mr. Jenkins, with advancing years, found his Napoleonic onrush irresistibly diverted toward pleasant byways frequented in the golden age by one Bacchus, god of wine. Apparently the disinclination for the dusty road of duty had resulted in much satisfaction and no lasting damage to Bacchus, but far otherwise was it with Jenkins. He fared as conscientiously in Bacchus's footsteps as he could, but his was not the true Bacchanalian temperament. Under the influence of the grape Jenkins, instead of becoming gay, waxed ever more portentous and sublime. When he was almost sober, say of a Friday afternoon, he was grave, merely creating the impression that some long-past tragedy had clouded his life. When he was by way of being what one may denominate half-interested, his face assumed the saturnine expression of an ancient misanthrope, but when at last he reached the full flower of his magnificent endeavors, the silent severity of his countenance became so forbidding and sinister as to freeze the smile from the lips of a happy child. By his face you might know him, but it would of necessity be by the face alone, for so perfect was his control of his dominated limbs that never a quiver betrayed him, and no degree of saturation seemed to affect at all the impeccable footing of his columns.

A spiral staircase connected the seventh and eighth floors of the Guardian building, constructed for the convenience of the clerks who had to do with several departments. It was near the top of this staircase that Smith had his desk, in the center of the maelstrom. Smith strongly believed in being in the center of things, and from where he sat he could overlook every foot of the space occupied by the Eastern Department. As he was supervisor, he intended to supervise—wherein lay one of the chief sources of his value.

"Jimmy, bring me the Journal of Commerce," he said to the invaluable and ubiquitous one.

"Mr. O'Connor's got it on his desk, sir," replied that youth, almost breathlessly. Speed in action had so demanded equivalent celerity in diction that often speech came badly second in endurance, causing him to sputter and gasp for completed utterance.

"Well, go and see if he isn't through with it," Smith directed. "I haven't seen the losses yet this morning."

Almost immediately, a modern Manhattan Mercury, Jimmy was again at his side.

"No, sir—he says he's still usin' it," he reported.

"Bring it to me when he's finished," Smith closed the matter, devoting himself to other things. Those requiring his attention were numerous enough, but first of all came an interruption in the shape of a caller.

All manner of men come into the agency department of an insurance company. Smith's field covered the whole Atlantic Coast and Gulf sections of the country, and the agents from these states alone made quite an army, and any one of these agents was likely at any time to appear from a bland blue sky, completely upsetting the General Agent's continuity of work. Then there were the placers from the brokerage firms, offering out-of-town risks which most of them had personally never seen and knew little or nothing about, and whose descriptive powers were all the greater for being unhampered by any blunt facts, a few of which are so often fatal to a successful rhetorical ascension. Then there were the various clients of the company who came straggling in to have a New York City policy transferred to cover for six days at Old Point Comfort, or to ask whether the presence of a Japanese heater—size two by three and one half inches—would destroy the validity of their policy; and there was the lady whose false teeth fell into the kitchen stove while she was putting on a scuttle of coal, and who thought the company should reimburse her for the loss under her policy which covered all her personal effects and wearing apparel; and then there was the suspicious individual who called to make sure that his premium had been properly transmitted to the company, for the local agent in his town has strange ways and looked very peculiar when accepting the money.

These and a hundred others, all in the way of business; and in addition there were the shifting atoms of humanity who float in and out of the office buildings of a great city, pensioners for the most part on either the bounty or the carelessness of busy men—waifs in the industrial orbit who gain their living by various established or ingenious variations of the more indirect forms of brigandage. There were men selling books that probably no one in the world would ever wish to buy or to read; women soliciting funds for charitable institutions which might or might not exist; salesmen positively enthusiastic in their desire to give the Guardian the benefit of their patent pencil sharpeners, or gas crowns, or asbestos window shades, or loose-leaf ledgers, or roach powder of peculiar pungency and efficiency. Of course the elevator attendants were supposed to distinguish between the sheep and the goats, and to let only legitimate callers ascend, but the discretionary power of the Ethiopian is scarcely subtle—or at least such was the case with the Guardian's staff of watchdogs—and as a result many a visitor reached the floor where Smith presided only to have his disguise fall from him at his first word and to be politely ejected by the invaluable Jimmy, who was accustomed to accompany the gentle strangers as far as the street door in order that there might be no misapprehension on their part.

This particular morning Smith disposed with more or less ease of several claimants to his attention, before he was finally brought to a pause by the appearance of Mr. Darius Howell of Schuyler, Maine, who had come to New York in connection with his potato business, and who had incidentally decided to call at the office of the Guardian which he also had the honor locally to represent. Years before, Smith had once visited Schuyler, and at that time had met the small, grizzled individual who now stood before him. He had not, however, the slightest idea of the identity of his visitor, and waited a brief moment for a clew to aid him.

"You don't remember me, I reckon," said the caller. "I remember you, though, Mr. Smith. My name is Darius—"

"Howell," said Smith, instantly, getting up to shake hands. Of all the agents reporting to him there was only one Darius. "I remember you very well. I hope you haven't come to tell me that Schuyler has burned up. Come in and sit down. It must be five years since I've seen you."

"Six years come next July," agreed the other, cautiously. It would have been impossible for him to admit the simplest proposition without some sort of qualification; he never had done so, and there seemed no valid reason to suppose that he ever would.

"And how is Schuyler coming along?" inquired the General Agent, with decided deference to the conventionalities of such interviews.

"Oh, so so," replied the man from Maine. "There ain't been much change up there since you was there. That is, not what you'd really call a change. How's things with you? The company still pays dividends, I see."

Mr. Howell was the owner of four shares of the company's stock.

"Doing all right," Smith responded. "The Guardian believes in making haste slowly, you know; we don't go ahead very fast, but we keep plugging along. Mr. Wintermuth feels it's always best to be on the safe side. Occasionally it's discouraging when we see some competitor build up an income in three or four years as big as ours that it's taken three or four generations to establish, but when we read some morning that our enterprising friends have had to reinsure their liability with some stronger concern and retire from business because their losses have caught up to them, we don't feel quite so badly. Personally I think we could travel a little faster, and I'd like to see our premiums twice what they are now. And I hope you'll double them this year in Schuyler, anyway."

"Maybe so, but you never can tell. Business is liable to slack up just when you think it's going along all right. And there ain't been any new building in Schuyler of any account for two years back but Dodge's feed mill and the new Union School. You've got a line on both of them."

At this point their conversation was interrupted because of the departure of the persistent gentleman, who had been closeted with Mr. Wintermuth. As the door closed on him, Jimmy disappeared around the corner and thrust his head and fore quarters, so to speak, into O'Connor's open doorway.

"Th' President's at liberty now," he announced.

Without replying, the Vice-President picked up the Journal of Commerce and the daily report with the yellow telegram affixed to it, and strode over, past Smith's desk, to the office of his chief.

"Can you come out and look at the map a minute, sir?" he asked respectfully.

"Certainly. What is it? A loss?" replied Mr. Wintermuth, noticing the telegraph slip as he rose from his chair and followed O'Connor toward the map counter.

"Yes," said the Vice-president. He was passing the desk of the General Agent, and he took care that his remark might be overheard. "And it looks to me like something we ought not to have had."

"What's that?" rejoined the older man, quickly. "We're not accepting business that we shouldn't write, are we? What is it? And who passed it?"

"Smith seems to have approved the line," O'Connor said slowly. "Herbert, I thought I told you to leave that Providence map out for me."

"It's right there, sir," said the map clerk; "right where you left it, sir."

"Here's the risk," said the Vice-president, pointing it out to his superior with every sign of decent regret. "It seems to be a mattress factory, a class we never write. . . . Smith appears to have passed it—there's his initial. Of course, he may have had some special reason for—"

Mr. Wintermuth interrupted him.

"Herbert, ask Mr. Smith if he will not step this way for a moment, please."

To the man from Maine the General Agent said: "You'll excuse me for a minute?"

And Darius Howell, with astonishing definiteness, replied: "Sure—go ahead."

Smith found his two officers awaiting him by the open map. From the expression on O'Connor's face he suspected that that gentleman had discovered something not displeasing to him, and unconsciously he found his own shoulders squaring themselves as though for a conflict.

"We have here," began the President, slowly, "a loss at Providence on a risk which Mr. O'Connor seems to think we should not have written."

"Where is the risk, sir?" Smith asked quietly.

"Here. Here is the daily report. It is approved by you. . . . Probably there is something about the risk which does not appear on the face of it. Do you remember the circumstances?"

Smith looked the daily report over carefully. It certainly showed the risk, just as plainly as the map also showed it, to be a mattress factory, a class prohibited by the Guardian, and there were Smith's own interwoven initials. Then, suddenly, at the sight of the hieroglyph, he remembered. "Why, you passed this line yourself, Mr. O'Connor," was on his lips to say. But he did not say it. For by the cold light in the eyes of the Vice-President he knew that course useless.

"I remember the risk," he said, addressing himself to Mr. Wintermuth. "It was a direct line of our local agents, and they were very anxious to have us take a small amount. It was accepted as an accommodation, and I reinsured one half, as you see, sir. Is it a bad loss?"

"Reported total," replied the other, turning over the telegram. "My boy, you're usually so careful, I don't understand how you came to put through such business. You ought at least to have referred it to Mr. O'Connor or myself."

Smith glanced again at the Vice-president, but that gentleman remained silent, and the General Agent again swallowed what was on his tongue to utter.

"Yes, sir, I should have done so," he substituted.

Mr. Wintermuth continued: "We cannot write such risks as that and hope to make an underwriting profit. They say I am a believer in 4 per cent bonds—perhaps I am, but I am not a believer in 4 per cent mattress factories." The old gentleman softened his criticism with a smile.

But to Smith, feeling rather than seeing the half-hidden satisfaction of the Vice-president, the President's kindly manner proved of little comfort. For Smith and O'Connor knew that the line in question had been submitted to O'Connor, and that in view of the competition of several very liberal companies in the Providence agency, the Vice-president had authorized its acceptance. With his wonted caution, however, he had refrained from putting himself on record, other than orally.

"Reinsure half, and put it through, Smith," he had directed; and Smith had done so.

In cases where his own security was involved, Mr. F. Mills O'Connor was an exceedingly cautious man. Looking before he leaped was with him almost a passion; and if he expected to leap on a Thursday, it was generally estimated that he began his preliminary looking on Monday of the week before.

He was a large, clean-shaven, dark-haired man of indeterminate age. By his profession at large he was little known, but in the Guardian office he was very well known indeed and excellently understood, and an appreciation of his character and qualities truthfully set down by the observant Jimmy or by Herbert, the map clerk, would never have been selected by the O'Connor family as satisfactory material for a flattering obituary notice.

It appeared likely, however, that it would be a long time before his obituary would be written. He was probably, at this time, a year or two the other side of forty, and his care of himself was unimpeachable, for he guarded his health as carefully as he did his other assets. He had become Vice-President and underwriting head of the company several years before this story opens, and it seemed probable that he would hold that position indefinitely—or perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say until some more advantageous position lay open to him.

Mr. O'Connor was what is commonly termed a cold proposition, and if there was any sentiment in him it was so carefully secreted that for ordinary purposes it was non-existent. Yet he was not unpopular. When he so desired, he could assume a spurious geniality so closely resembling the genuine article that few persons, and none of his agents, ever discovered the difference. And his business efficiency was commonly taken for granted.

Indeed, there was but one man in the insurance fraternity who assessed Mr. O'Connor at very nearly his proper value, and that man O'Connor disliked and feared as vividly as his rather apathetic nature would admit. The one man was Smith. Whoever might sail the seas in ships of illusion regarding the Vice-president of the Guardian, Smith saw the facts clear and looked at them squarely.

The principal cause of Smith's own position in the company was his own vitality and industry, but next to that was the fact that Mr. Wintermuth had originally given him a chance and then declined to permit any one to impede his natural progression. This attitude was due principally to the President's conviction of his own ability to judge men. Having once made up his mind, he allowed no one to tell him anything about any of his employees. He always said: "I watch the boys myself, and what I can't see I don't want to know." In the old days what he did not see was of no especial importance to the Guardian Insurance Company, but the eyes of an old lion grow also old. Yet the habit remained, and thus all Mr. O'Connor's efforts to discredit his ambitious young assistant had so far fallen on ears stone-deaf and hermetically sealed. But the Vice-president could never forgive the younger man for looking at him with so unimpressed a gaze, and never missed an opportunity to show his prejudice to their mutual chief.

There had been several incidents of a similar nature previous to the mattress factory loss, where Smith had been either indirectly advised or permitted by O'Connor to take a certain course, only to find himself excoriated when the risk burned or the outcome proved otherwise disastrous. Only a short time before, Smith had been sent into New York State, acting under vice-presidential order of procedure, to straighten out the Guardian's relations with the local division of the Eastern Conference. The Eastern Conference was an organization to which most of the leading companies belonged. Its function was the orderly regulation of all matters affecting its members' relations with their agents. Theoretically its primary purpose was to prevent the overcompensation of some agents at the expense of others. If it did not always succeed in doing this, it did at least succeed in making extremely embarrassing the lot of any company operating outside of its organization. It was everywhere an arbitrary body, and its New York State branch was perhaps the least disciplined of any of its constituent parts, and was moreover suspected of favoring some of its own members at the expense of others. President Wintermuth, loyal to his associates, but patient only up to a certain point, had of late begun to consider that his company was decidedly in the latter class. It was easy to see that a diplomat's hand was needed to accomplish what Smith was sent to accomplish, and Smith could be a diplomat of parts when the need arose; but his instructions from Mr. O'Connor had left him so little latitude that he was obliged to return without securing any positive action of any sort.

"They will take the matter up at the next meeting," he reported.

O'Connor transmitted this report to the President with an expression of disappointment.

"We ought to have had that thing fixed up. And if it had been handled right, it would have been fixed up now," he said.

Whereat the President, with one of his flashes of clear vision, replied suavely, "And who gave Smith his instructions?"

It was only a chance shot on Mr. Wintermuth's part, but it went straight to the mark, and it rankled. O'Connor knew—or felt reasonably sure—that Smith had not mentioned the matter to any one but himself, yet the chief had struck unerringly the nail's head. And all this endeared Smith but little to the man who had never liked him.

It is none too comfortable to work for a man who will covertly begrudge you your successes and indifferently conceal his satisfaction at your mistakes; for the stoutest hearted it is a discouraging business. This Smith found it, and he would have found it still more discouraging had it not been for the exuberance of his enthusiasm for his profession and his healthy appetite for most real things that came his way—real work, real pleasures, real sport, and perhaps a few real follies. Many times, after a bad hour spent in a futile defense against the only half-perceptible hostility of O'Connor, he would find himself seriously questioning whether he would not do more wisely to leave the Guardian and hazard a new fortune in another field. Yet all the while he knew that this course of speculation was idle and a waste of time and cerebral tissues. He was a Guardian man, and with the Guardian he was going to stay—unless the Company itself took a different view. Of course there was a time coming when Mr. Wintermuth would lay down his badge of office, but before that time much would occur. Sufficient unto that day would be its own evil, without enhancing it by imaginary additions. So Smith stood by his post, but there was at times an expression in his face which gave F. Mills O'Connor himself cause for careful consideration.

But to Darius Howell, somewhat awkwardly saying good-by at the Guardian's door, Smith's smile was as sunny as the skies of Schuyler, Maine. For troubles often turned out to be largely imaginary, while Darius was indubitably real.



CHAPTER VI

Promptly at nine o'clock in the morning of every business day for fifteen years, Hannibal G. Pelgram, uncle of Stanwood Pelgram, had seated himself at his desk in the office of the Pelgram Plumbers' Supply Company, and it was rarely that he left before his stenographer had begun to show signs of impatience and anxiety. But in the sixteenth year of his reign his liver, which up to that time had acted with the most commendable regularity, began to develop alarming eccentricities of behavior. Mr. Pelgram became gradually less certain in his attendance, and finally his struggle with the refractory liver ended in the victory of that inconspicuous but important organ, and he passed peacefully away at a German spa in the course of taking a cure which would very likely have killed him even had he been in perfectly normal health.

His will began by the customary direction to his executor to pay his just debts and funeral expenses—exactly as though the executor was assumed to be a thoroughly unscrupulous person who, although not benefiting himself in the least by his dishonesty, would try in every possible way to evade settlement with all the dead man's legitimate creditors, including the undertaker. Then he left a small bequest to a faithful cook and another to an endowed retreat for tuberculous Baptists which already had more money than it could hope ever to use. The residue, consisting principally of stock in the Plumbers' Supply Company, went to Stanwood, with the earnest wish that his nephew enter and eventually assume the direction of the business with which the family name had been so long and so honorably identified.

Stanwood received the news with modified rapture. He was grateful for financial independence, but the idea of taking up the bathtub business struck him with dismay. So with prudent forethought he sought out Amory Carruth, a lawyer of his acquaintance; and to him explained his dilemma. It required some measure of specious ingenuity to explain his errand as he wished; but Mr. Carruth, being used to squirming legatees, understood and came to the point with a candor which made Pelgram wince. After first flippantly suggesting that the plumbing business would at least afford Pelgram the chance to indulge his taste in porcelains, he eased the artist's mind by a phrase as soothing as it was noncommittal.

"You can follow your uncle's will as regards the disposition of his property. That part is sane enough. Whether it was equally sagacious, equally sane, to try to plunge you into the plumbing business is not so clear. We are, therefore, clearly justified if we say that he knew how he wished to dispose of his estate, but his mental condition was such that his legatee felt justified in modifying—in some degree—certain of his requests."

This apologetic theory was finally accepted. Dawes, the manager, whose surplus income had gone into the bank rather than into his liver, purchased the estate's interest, and on the proceeds Stanwood had now for five years been conducting his elaborate studio on Copley Square.

The completion of Miss Maitland's portrait was marked by one of the artist's characteristic functions. By any person in the ordinary walks of life it would have been called a tea, but Pelgram preferred to denominate it a private view. Every time he completed a work that he considered of real importance—relatively more often than modesty might have prescribed—he celebrated the birth of the masterpiece by one of these oddly termed baptisms in tannin. Possibly they were entitled to be called views, as the opus bravely challenged the tea table in popularity, and occasionally won by superior powers of endurance over a necessarily limited supply of edibles, but certainly the privacy was questionable, as to each one of them Stanwood invited nearly every one who might be expected to come.

Fortunately not a large proportion of these actually turned up. Some came because they were under obligations to the artist, and some because he was under obligations to them; some from vague curiosity, and others from sheer ignorance. Those who appeared at such a one as this, where the portrait of a young girl was displayed, were roughly limited to a few easily identified classes. There was centrally the young girl herself, and then there were the members of her family, all radiant except the purchaser of the picture, who customarily showed traces of sobriety and skepticism. There were one or two prospective patrons lured to the trap; some ephemeral sycophants, volunteer or mercenary; a few idle fellow artists who enjoyed seeing a colleague make what they considered to be an exhibition of himself; some inevitable people who went everywhere they were asked, especially when there was a prospect of something to eat; and a few puzzled and lonely-looking souls who could furnish no explanation of their attendance, did not stay very long, and never came a second time.

At this view the role of sycophants was to be played by two young girls who had taken up self-cultivation as a sort of fad, and had somehow become obsessed with the curious idea that art such as was found in Pelgram's studio could assist them in their commendable pursuit of culture. Their host was consequently delighted when, at an early hour, Miss Heatherton and Miss Long arrived, as they had promised to do. Their manifest adoration would produce an admirable spot light in which he might stand during the function, but more than that, he hoped that Helen herself would be impressed by the deep regard in which these fair disciples evidently held him and his work. Miss Heatherton was to pour the tea, and Miss Long was to distribute the thin lettuce sandwiches which formed its somewhat unsubstantial accompaniment.

Miss Heatherton's initial remark demonstrated the fact that, despite her plunge into what her family considered a dangerous part of Bohemia, she had managed to preserve intact her adherence to the traditional in conversational matters. When Pelgram escorted her to the tea table, she bleated a pathetic protest against his positive inhumanity in placing her where the great work was invisible.

"Oh, Mr. Pelgram, you are really cruel! Eleanor, don't you think he might have put me where I could sit and look at that beautiful portrait, and not down here at the other end of the room?"

Miss Long, a tall girl with large liquid eyes and a weak red mouth, languidly murmured a sympathetic assent, and their host smiled deprecatingly, but with an inward glow of satisfaction; such a remark was obviously not inspired by the exact truth, but it was nevertheless pleasant to hear.

"Ah, Miss Heatherton," he replied, "perhaps after all it is better as I have ordered it. For its little hour the picture should reign with its sovereignty unquestioned, while if you were near by—" he broke off meaningly, and Miss Long rewarded his compliment with a bovine glance of rapture, while Miss Heatherton looked modestly down at the teapot. Even to an unaesthetic person the arrangement seemed very good indeed, but rather for the more practical reason that the proximity of food and drink would very likely have distracted the attention of some of the more hungry visitors to such a degree that the work of art might have been comparatively ignored.

The next to arrive were Isabel Hurd and Wilkinson. Wilkinson had not been invited, but on hearing his cousin say that she was starting for the studio, he promptly announced that he would accompany her. He knew that Pelgram disliked him intensely, but he did not feel the slightest hesitation on that account in accepting the artist's hospitality, and in fact quite enjoyed the prospect of a dash into the enemy's country. To be sure, he saw little chance of loot except a trifling modification of his chronic afternoon hunger; but Isabel's society was desirable, and Pelgram appealed vividly to his sense of the ludicrous. His reception was all he could have hoped; his host greeted him with outward affability, but when he extended his hand from the black velvet cuff with the handkerchief tucked into it, his face expressed the hidden anguish of anticipated ridicule to such a degree that Wilkinson felt his visit already justified.

"It is very good of you to come," said the artist, with a forced smile. "I had no idea you were interested in art."

"Oh, but I am, though," returned the other, confidently. "I have no idea what it is, but I'm very much interested in it. And every one says I have the artistic temperament in the highest degree. By the way, what is art, anyway? No one ever told me."

Pelgram gave a preliminary cough, and glanced hastily about the room, but calculating that his audience would be larger later on, he restrained himself.

"What is art?" he slowly repeated, half-closing his eyes and smiling mystically on his guests. "What is art?" Miss Long hung breathlessly on his words.

As, however, he seemed more interested in the question than apt to reply to it, Wilkinson moved on toward Miss Heatherton and the tea table, while his place was taken by Miss Maitland and her mother, who had just come into the room.

The studio was presently quite full, and conversation rose to a shriller pitch. The talk was mostly of art. Catch phrases indicative of informality and intimacy with the manufacture of the beautiful were recklessly flung about. The pace quickened. The operations of Miss Heatherton and Miss Long threatened speedily to be terminated because of exhausted resources as well as insufficient space. It was warmer, and there was a queer mixed odor of tea, roses, and paint. John M. Hurd, greatly relieved after he discovered that he was not immediately expected to buy anything, was recounting with animation to a fat man in a frock coat how the basis of the family fortune had been laid by Mr. Hurd's grandfather whose one life rule was never to invest his money in anything west of Albany, New York. One of Pelgram's colleagues had pinned Miss Maitland into a corner and was raptly telling her how great an influence a certain old master of whom she had never heard had exerted on the work of an extraordinarily talented young man from Fall River whose name and pictures alike were entirely unknown to her.

Pelgram went by with his arm familiarly passed through that of a phlegmatic-looking young Chinaman whom he led up to Miss Maitland's portrait. Ling Hop had been cook on a yacht, when an artistic friend of Pelgram's and a parasite of the yacht's owner had discovered one day that the guardian of the galley was a fair draughtsman with some little imagination; and much to his own surprise the Oriental had been snatched from the cook stove and thrust into the artistic arena. It was lucky for him that his scene was set in Boston, which is always sympathetically on edge to embrace exotic genius. In a society delicately attuned to intellectual harmonies from all sources, however strange or weird, the success of a Chinaman possessing the slightest facility with the brush was assured from the first. His industrious compatriots in the local laundries, themselves more impassionate critics, doubtless regarded Ling Hop as an impudent charlatan; but Boston in its most restricted and exclusive sense looked at his work with interest and respect, though sadly without humor. The guest stood silently before the portrait, scanning it earnestly, almost with anxiety, blinking his almond eyes behind his shell-rimmed glasses. As, however, he did not know enough about the technique of painting to offer a sensible appreciation, he wisely confined himself to a very few vaguely eulogistic monosyllables, which seemed greatly to gratify the artist.

"Ah," said Ling Hop, "delicate—delicate!" the adjective being pronounced with a haunting repetition of its most melodious letter. Years of more or less familiarity with the English language had not been able to efface his racial penchant for the labial. One might naturally suppose that to compress a native alphabet of some one hundred and twenty-six letters into one of twenty-six would result in much confusion and some inexplicable preferences, but no one has ever been able to point out why the functions of the extra hundred should have to be assumed by the letter "l" alone.

But to Pelgram the vague liquid sound fell dulcetly on the ear, and by Miss Long and Miss Heatherton no flaw in this art criticism could be discerned. And the artist, glancing about him, saw with gratification that, in addition to the two young ladies, there had by some vague current of motion been swept into his immediate vicinity human flotsam to the extent of perhaps half a dozen irresponsible souls, ignorant that their immediate fate was to be not guests, but auditors.

"Do you feel that? I strove for it," he said in a clear, penetrating voice, calculated to attract the attention, if not the interest, of those even outside the charmed though widening circle. "I strove for just that, feeling that here, above all, it was the one desideratum. At times I feared—" he turned to the impassive Mongolian a puckered forehead—"that I might be sacrificing somewhat of the virile. But no! I said—surely I can sacrifice all things, all considerations, save one."

"You were right," said Ling Hop, cryptically, feeling that he was called upon to say something, but still with that faint adumbration of the inevitable letter.

"In these days of strange, wild gods, in whose temples the heathen riot in flames and flares and orgies of color, it seems to me incumbent upon the saner among the craft to cling perhaps closer than ever to the great canons that the great masters have set forth for us. What do these new men worship? Color—color—blobs and blotches of raw, crude color! They think of nothing else, these barbarians. Let drawing, arrangement, construction even, go—they say—and with bloodshot eyes they dance in one wild debauch of life and light! It is not art!"

Casting an imperceptibly alert eye to right and left, Pelgram saw that he was now in possession of the maximum audience he was likely to achieve. In a near-by corner, blockaded by three attentive gentlemen who seemed much less interested in art than in nature, sat Miss Maitland, within easy though obstructed earshot. She could hardly help hearing, and with an inward sigh of satisfaction the artist gave himself over utterly to the exordium which for some inexplicable reason formed the nucleus of his idea of a properly conducted studio affair. He felt that he was going to be very eloquent, and he felt reasonably secure from interruption, for no one in that company would have the temerity to question, on his own hearthstone, his pronunciamentos. No one,—except perhaps the irrepressible Wilkinson,—and it was with the greatest relief that he beheld Charlie safely out of hearing and engaged in rapt converse with Isabel.

"Yes, those of us who believe, who still hold the immortal things sacred, have a great trust vested in us. It is for us, the few still faithful, to keep the lustral fires pure from defilement by the unbelievers. What would the great draughtsmen of old, the great true colorists among the masters, say if we should betray them to the wild, criminal vagaries of these falsest of false prophets?"

He turned savagely upon Ling Hop, who replied, with entire truth, and with a certain feeling for caution which showed that he could be trusted in any crisis:—

"Yes. What?"

"They swarm with muddy feet through the safest, surest halls of art of all time. They do not hesitate to say that arrangement—arrangement!—is not a necessity in a work of art. They say construction is not vital. They care nothing of whether nature at the moment is right or wrong—whether there is a combination of circumstances worthy of reproduction—but they throw their pictures on the canvas in any way they chance to come. And what pictures! Raw, flaunting things, with no care given to balance, none to line, none to color! It would be unbelievable—if it were not true."

Miss Heatherton, on whom his inspired gaze at this juncture rested, closed her eyes, as though she feared to disturb even by a glance the continuity of this astonishing harangue. At the footstool of Olympus sat Miss Long, in patient ecstasy.

"These painters—anarchists of the craft, I call them—would force us to leave off painting quiet interiors," continued Pelgram, lowering his voice with mournful impressiveness, "because, forsooth, interiors are inane, undramatic things unless relieved by color! Not our color, but the bright, blazing color that roars and raves. Still-lifes they condemn unless they swim in seas of pure emotion. For with them color is emotion, emotion color. . . . To be sure, we know better, but I repeat that a heavy charge is on us. We must march loyally forward, keeping our banners high. We must go on painting a modest lady, dressed in dark blue, sitting on a gray chair with a shiny wooden floor beneath her—to show that these things can sometimes make an artistic harmony worthy of being translated for all time into a picture that shall never die. What if this has been done ten thousand times before? The old gods are jealous gods, and at the ten thousandth time they take their own at last."

"Yes. At last," said Ling Hop, observing that a response was expected of him.

Pelgram turned to the portrait.

"And this!—portrait painting!—to which all the masters finally turn. What would they—these colorists—make out of portrait painting?"

Evidently his mind recoiled from the thought, for he turned aside with a gesture of resignation. And Miss Long and Miss Heatherton were never to know what horrid fate awaited portrait painting at their hands, for from the rim of the circle came the cheerful voice of Wilkinson:—

"Money, old chap, money. That's what they'd make out of portrait painting. And after all, that's the only satisfactory standard of success, established for every school of art—what will the picture bring? Now isn't that so?"

Pelgram's upper lip drew viciously back from his teeth; Wilkinson, pleasantly advancing, smiled with content; the flotsam had floated away as noiselessly as youth; and the artist, collecting his forces to reply, saw that, except for the two rapt sycophants at his elbow, he was alone. He laughed a short laugh.

"With many, no doubt it is," he snapped.

His adversary continued his placid progress down the room until he reached the tea table, where immediately he could be heard inquiring whether the diminutive "arrangements in green and white" were intended for lettuce sandwiches.

Pelgram glanced quickly toward where Miss Maitland still sat, surrounded by her attentive friends. It seemed hardly likely that she could have missed Charlie's distressing incursion into a monologue to which he had not been invited, but the girl seemed so wholly occupied that the painter took heart. His ruffled self-esteem preened itself anew, and he moved circuitously toward the object of his concern in as disinterested a manner as he could assume. At the sight of their host, the other members of Miss Maitland's group took occasion inconspicuously to drift away, being moved either by hunger or by good nature or by fear lest the monologue recommence. All but one obtuse youth who neither stirred nor displayed any tendency so to do.

"Before you go I want to show you that full length of Mrs. Warburton," the artist suggested pointedly to Helen. Her only attitude was affable resignation; she accepted the inevitable as gracefully as possible, and they strolled across the end of the studio to an alcove where a number of canvases stood coyly awaiting beholders. Several tall potted plants nearly hid the alcove from the studio at large, and Pelgram noted with satisfaction that the remaining guests were mostly grouped about Wilkinson at the other end. He turned, to gain time for thought, to the pile of frames in the corner, and presently pulled forth the portrait of which he had spoken.

"Not so interesting an arrangement as I made of you," he commented.

"I might just as well have been a sandwich," was the girl's immediate thought, but she replied politely, "No."

"I would certainly have been hopelessly lacking in talent of any sort if I had not been able to do something really fine from the chance you offered me," he went on.

Feeling quite uncomfortable and not knowing exactly what to say to this, Helen said nothing. The artist, assuming that her silence implied her permission for him to continue, cleared his throat for what he felt should be a master effort.

"Miss Maitland," he said, regarding her gravely, "it is naturally not for me to say, but I sincerely believe that your portrait is a work of real merit. And whatever slight ability I may possess has of course been freely spent on it. But there is something else to consider—there is ability, but there is also the element of inspiration, and whatever I may have lacked in the one you have bountifully given me in the other. If others should think the portrait a success, I must thank not myself but you. And beyond the success of the picture itself, which at best can only be for a day, you have given me what no one ever gave me before—you must know what that may be."

"You are entirely welcome, I'm sure," his visitor replied, in considerable embarrassment. It was not exactly what she meant to say, and the egotism of the artist immediately misconstrued it.

"Helen," he said, "the painting of your portrait has been a perilous adventure for me. Up to the time I began it, I lived in a world alone, and I thought only of my art. My model was always a thing wholly subordinate; after the picture was completed I never cared whether I ever saw the subject again. But as you came here day after day, my art seemed of less importance, and you came forward more and more. And finally I have found that nothing matters—nothing counts—but you."

Miss Maitland did not answer. She was conscious only of wondering whether she were going to be able to escape from that alcove before she had expressed to her host her actual opinion of him and all his works, and she rather feared her powers of repression would prove unequal to the occasion. And her opinion of him was at its nadir. With unerring maladroitness Pelgram had chosen the time of all others when his star was burning with its feeblest flame. She continued to sit passively, while the waves of the artist's eloquence rolled over her.

"I will not ask you if you love me—it is enough to tell you that I love you more than all the world. But can you not give me one single word of hope?"

He paused expectantly.

Helen hesitated. Still persisted the naughty longing to break forth and say her will, but she knew it would be wrong. After all, there had been in Pelgram's plea as much genuine sincerity as there could be in anything of his, and she felt that her wish to be utterly candid was a childish and unworthy one.

"Mr. Pelgram," she said at length, "if I should give you any hope, it would be unjust and unkind to you, for I feel that I could never care for you in the way you wish me to. I respect your ability, but that is not enough. Please do not speak of this again. You are an artist, and there ought to be for you enough in the world to keep you happy—even without me."

Pelgram grew a little pale. To him, who had such difficulty in being real, this was very real. And seeing it, the girl softened.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm really more sorry than I can tell you."

And then she had cause for repentance, for the artist, with an effort, drew all his pride to aid him. And his proud mood was by no means his best. The only redeeming feature of the valedictory was that finally it was over.

Helen, looking a trifle jaded, walked homeward under the escort of Isabel and Wilkinson. She was quite silent, and Isabel, suspecting trouble, said little for her part.

Not so Charlie, who held forth fluently, with the exhilaration one feels on coming out of a hot church and dashing off in a touring car.

"Well," he said, "certain unfriendly persons have studiously circulated the impression that I am eligible for the Paresis Club—a chucklehead, in fact. But you will have to admit that I never give Private Views. You must concede that I do not inflict on my friends my opinions about crude color. Why, there must be several hundred things I don't do!"

"Thank Heaven you don't!" remarked Miss Maitland.



CHAPTER VII

It was one minute before eleven when the card of Mr. Charles Wilkinson was borne gingerly, by a large youth from South Framingham who served as door boy, into the presence of Mr. Hurd. That gentleman, reading the bit of pasteboard with a grunt which might have been indicative of any one of a dozen invidious sentiments, opened the proximate corner of his mouth.

"Send him in," came from the brief orifice.

A moment later Mr. Wilkinson stood in the presence of his prey. Or perchance—but no, this was to be Marengo, not Waterloo—and above all, not Moscow. Something of this was in his eyes when he lifted them to meet those of his distinguished relation.

"Are you at liberty for a few moments?" he soberly inquired. He took care to delete every vestige of animation from his tone and manner, and so radical a change did this effect that his step-uncle blinked. A man as keen as John M. Hurd could not be blind to a mutation so great. He looked Mr. Wilkinson over with more care than he had ever employed before, for he recognized at once that this was no ordinary visit.

"I am as much at liberty as I am likely to be," he replied noncommittally.

His visitor wistfully and somewhat suggestively eyed a chair, but made no move to be seated. He felt that, no matter how the interview was to close, punctiliousness should begin it.

"Be seated," said Mr. Hurd, briefly.

"I have come to see you, sir," his young relative began, feeling his way cautiously, "with reference to a matter that I have never mentioned to you, although I have been studying it for some time. Perhaps you may be of the opinion that if it were of paramount importance I could have presented it to you without a long preliminary investigation. But each of us has to work in his own way, and this affair was of a sort in which I had little or no previous experience. The result was that it has taken me a considerable time to formulate my idea, and I want you to give it a fair opportunity to sink in, so to speak, before you reach any decision."

With his curiosity somewhat stirred, his hearer grunted a qualified assent.

"I have, of course, fortified myself by the possession of facts,—actual facts, sir,—and without them I should not have trespassed on your time, for I must tell you at once that my proposition concerns itself with the fire insurance of the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company."

The knowledge that this was probably the most perilous point in his passage would have caused Wilkinson to hurry past with all possible speed, but his uncle interrupted him with a grim laugh.

"That need give you no concern, my young friend," he said curtly, "for the company does not carry any insurance."

A trace of Mr. Wilkinson's normal impudence returned momentarily to his tone when he replied:—

"My dear sir, didn't I say that I had made a long preliminary investigation of this? You can scarcely hold my intelligence at so low a figure as to think that I didn't know that fact. That's why I'm here—because I do know it."

It may have been the effect of the return to the normal in his step-nephew's tone, or it may have been merely Mr. Hurd's business method, which expelled his next remark from sardonic lips.

"Then you need but one more fact to make your knowledge of the subject complete, and that I will now give you. Not only does my company carry no insurance, but it never intends or expects to. Is there anything else this morning?"

Charlie smiled calmly, unmoved.

"Now we are ready to begin, sir. You have disbelieved in insurance so strongly and so long that such a remark was exactly what I expected you to make. In fact, I should have been not only surprised, but positively embarrassed, had you not made it. Now, I repeat, we are ready to talk business. And I have your promise to listen to my plan."

It did not occur to the magnate that he had made no such promise, until Wilkinson was well launched; after that, he forgot about it.

"Did any one ever call to your attention, sir, the fact that the statistics show that the fire losses on traction schedules in the Eastern states exceed the insurance premiums on those schedules by nearly thirty-five per cent?"