Mr. Hurd shook his head shortly.

"I did not know it."

Wilkinson did not know it either, but it could not be disproved, and served excellently as a gambit.

"And I am not interested in other traction companies' fires," added his uncle.

"No, of course not. But the law of average works in the end. Your properties are subject to exactly the same conditions and hazards as others, and in the end the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company will incur more in losses than it would ever have to pay in premiums. In the long run the average wins. So far you have been surprisingly fortunate, and that is another reason why you should begin now to insure. The law of average is perfectly inexorable, and every year of low losses brings you nearer the big losses that are bound to come. You've been gambling, and now is the time to play safe."

"Perhaps, my boy," Mr. Hurd replied with amusement, "you believe these things that you quote so glibly. Perhaps not. Let us assume that you do. Therefore let me ask you this: if the insurance companies pay more losses than they get in premiums on traction schedules, why don't they cut off this loss by ceasing to insure them? Hey?"

"Oh, lots of them do," Wilkinson returned easily. "A few of the others may have had a streak of luck for a few years, just as you have had, but the rest take it all in the day's work, think that the rates may go up on account of the bad record of the class and then it would be an advantage to have the business on their books, or else they try to make it up on other better paying classes. And besides, they have the use of the money which is paid in premiums during good years when losses are light." Not for nothing had he listened to the painstaking explanations of Cole, and whatever his eccentricities, Charlie had a native shrewdness hardly second to that of old John M. himself. Perhaps the older man was thinking of this when he next spoke.

"Then it has probably occurred to you that the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company can do the same thing—and does. I use the interest and profits of my insurance fund which I have accumulated by not paying premiums, to pay losses. How about that?"

"That would be all right if your properties were widely enough distributed. But they're not. Some day you'll get a big loss, which will wipe out your interest, profits, and fund all together for twenty years. Your fund's all right for cars that burn on the road or for small fires; but what if something big went? And the insurance money would come in very nicely when you most needed it. You'd have trouble enough on your hands without having to go out and raise money, too, if your new Pemberton Street barn should burn up with half a million dollars' worth of cars in it—which it is quite possible it may do at almost any time."

"What! The new barn?" said the magnate, incredulously. "Why, my boy, that barn is the latest thing in fireproof construction! There isn't a stick of wood in that building from cellar to attic."

"And the cars, are they fireproof, too?"

John M. Hurd looked up sharply.

"No," he said slowly. "No, I don't suppose they are. . . . Still, there's nothing to set the cars afire. They're safe enough in that building. Nothing can happen to them there."

"The building itself is not located on a desert island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean," said his nephew, thoughtfully. "It might be exposed to a serious fire in some of the neighboring buildings—that big paper-box factory, for example, across the alley to the south. There might, in fact,"—he paused—"there might be a general fire in that part of Boston."

"A conflagration, you mean? Nonsense! Boston is safe as a church."

"Probably safer than St. Stephen's, out in Cambridge, that burned to the ground last week," returned his visitor, with a smile.

"To be sure," said Mr. Hurd, hastily. "But there'll never be a big, sweeping fire in Boston."

"Why not? There was one once."

"Forty years ago. That's no criterion. Things are very different now. This is a modern city we're talking about—half the buildings down town are fireproof or nearly so. Modern cities don't burn the way older ones did."

"Baltimore did, as you may recall; also San Francisco. And they were modern—as modern as Boston. There are people—not Bostonians, of course—who would consider them more so."

"Come now, do you mean to tell me any one honestly believes there is any danger of another really big fire here?" rejoined Mr. Hurd, almost contemptuously; but under the surface Charlie believed that his attitude of contempt was more or less assumed. He believed he had made a distinct impression, and it was therefore almost with a gambler's instinct that he brought forth his trump card.

"I tell you, sir," he said, with all the impressiveness he could command, "that the best technical engineers—not alarmists, but men who are careful students of such things—agree that the danger here is as great as in any of the big cities of the United States. The conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity."

Mr. Hurd regarded him with amazement.

"Would you mind repeating that?" he asked at length.

"Certainly not, since I know it to be true. I say that the conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity."

The traction magnate walked slowly to the window, and looked out. On the sunny pavements below him people were going back and forth on their various concerns. Around the corner came the familiar delivery wagon of a well-known dealer in wholesale groceries. Somehow the sight of these common things restored to Mr. Hurd his ordinary tranquillity of mind, which he now saw had been disturbed by the astonishing utterances of his plausible young relation. He smiled rather grimly when he thought of how near he had come to being impressed by what Charlie had said. Of course, there could be nothing in it; certainly not, from such a source. It was the old John M. Hurd who turned again to face his visitor, who with but one card left to play awaited breathlessly but with outward nonchalance the effect of his cherished speech.

"Well, I've enjoyed talking this over with you, Charlie," the older man said with candor. "There's something in what you say, too. Perhaps our insurance fund isn't as large as it ought to be. But I couldn't consider carrying insurance for the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company. And why are you so interested in this, all of a sudden, anyway?"

"Partly philanthropic and partly mercenary," said his nephew, easily. "Philanthropic, because I would like to do something of real benefit to the most distinguished member of my family—who least needs my assistance; mercenary, because I need the money. I rather expect you to let me have charge of the placing of this insurance, sir."

"Well, Charlie, I don't mind saying that you've made a better impression than any of these other insurance men that occasionally get into my office, and if I were going to take out insurance on the traction properties, I believe I'd let you make your commission on it. But I'm not. And now I must ask you to excuse me."

"Oh, I've not quite finished," returned Wilkinson. As he was in for it now, he would see it through. "I think you're making a mistake, sir; and there are still one or two aspects of the matter which you have not considered."

"And what may they be?" inquired his uncle. "Please remember I'm a busy man."

His visitor reflected briefly. He did not know whether to play his last card slowly and carefully or to slam it face upward with enough force to make the table rattle. He decided on the latter method; after all, to succeed with John M. Hurd one did well to make him blink.

"There is such an institution as the Stock Exchange," he said blandly.

Mr. Hurd looked at him.

"Massachusetts Traction has been considered a very substantial security," Wilkinson went on, "so safe that its market value fluctuates very little, and so well regarded that the banks generally accept its stock as collateral at very nearly its market value. They accept it as a matter of course because they know its dividends are fully earned and paid regularly, and they have confidence in your management and don't go into the details. Your company has no bonded indebtedness; the bonds were all converted into stock years ago; if it was bonded, the bondholders would compel you to insure, whether you wished to or not. Perhaps the banks have forgotten that you are not forced to carry insurance, and are taking it for granted that you are exercising ordinary prudence along this line and insuring just the same. Suppose—only suppose—the intelligence should become diffused among certain gentlemen of State Street that you are likely to lose three quarters of a million dollars by fire if your new Pemberton Street car barn should go and the power house adjoining it be seriously damaged, and to meet such a loss you had an insurance fund of thirty thousand dollars. Do you suppose your stock would be quite so popular as collateral as it is now?"

He paused for a reply, but none came.

"Of course none of the directors of the company ever borrow money on that stock. . . . Need I say more, sir?"

It was evident that there was no need. If there were any of the directors who did not borrow money on the stock, Mr. Hurd could not think of them offhand. Once more he walked to the window, and this time he looked long and thoughtfully out over the level roofs.

"Your point is not badly taken. And in one thing you are probably right—State Street, if left to itself, would never raise the question," he said, half to himself. But Wilkinson's reply was ready and obvious.

"There are so many thoughtless people," he said softly. "One never can tell when such news might leak out."

His uncle surveyed him sternly. But Charlie's cryptic gaze met his uncle's, undisturbed.

"Some one might tell," he gently observed, and said no more.

It was some time before Mr. Hurd raised a thoughtful yet somewhat amused face to that of his caller.

"I'll consider the matter," he said tersely.

"I thank you, sir," replied Charles, with graceful humility, which he dared assume since his case seemed won. And a moment later South Framingham's one time pride watched his exit through the grille gate into the descending elevator.

As Wilkinson started blithely across the Common, he caught sight of a familiar figure advancing along one of the diagonal paths. He quickened his already jocund step to meet Miss Maitland at the intersection of their ways.

"Whither away so briskly this hungry noon?" he inquired with enthusiasm. "If it were not for the fact that I am in search of some one to ask me to luncheon, I would ask you to come and lunch with me."

"Then if I were really quite hungry, which I am after an hour in this autumn air, I should decline your gallant invitation with regret, and say that I am on my way to lunch with Uncle Silas at the Club."

Charlie was on the point of telling her his news—but changed his intent. After all, his were incubator chickens at best, and perhaps it would be wiser to postpone a public enumeration of them. So he merely replied, "I trust you will have a pleasant luncheon."

"The same to you, and many of them—consecutively," replied the girl, with a laugh.

"Now, that's what I call a friendly speech," rejoined her escort, and the two went their separate ways.

At the club whose billiard players have the almost unique privilege between masse shots of regarding at close range the tombstones of an aristocratic cemetery, Helen and her uncle were comfortably lingering over their demi-tasses before Mr. Osgood's guest gave speech to the thoughts within her.

"You are a dear to give me this luncheon," she began.

The old gentleman bowed a courtly head.

"I have been envied, I think, by all my more youthful fellow members here," he said. "And that is very pleasant, even when one might be supposed to have passed the age of vanity."

"Thank you, Uncle Silas. No one of your fellow members could have said a nicer thing than that." She fingered her coffee cup. "But I had a reason for inviting myself—practically—to lunch with you. I want to ask your advice."

"I'm afraid I should be inclined in advance to let you do exactly as you liked, my child," said the other, with a smile. "But what is it? I hope it's not trouble of any sort."

"No—it's not trouble, exactly," his niece responded. "It's more like—well, like dissatisfaction. I am awfully tired of being a perfectly useless person, with no definite end and aim. You don't suppose it's because I see every day the girls coming down to work, on the Massachusetts Avenue cars, do you? I went a little while ago to my doctor's because I thought perhaps there was something the matter with me, and he suggested a change of air, but I think he mixed up the cause with the effect. Perhaps I do need a change, but it's a change of interests and a change of what I see and hear and talk about."

"Commonly termed a vacation," said Mr. Osgood.

"Yes, a vacation—that's it. Not a vacation from doing anything, because I've done nothing, but a vacation from the atmosphere I've been living in."

"You mean the artistic atmosphere?" her uncle asked. "You are a little tired of—"

"I'm more than a little—I'm horribly tired of imitations and poses and make-believes. I want to see things and people who really live, who don't exist by the light of crimson-shaded globes and spend their days dreaming about impressions and arrangements and tones and shadows."

Helen wound up this diminutive tirade with quite a little flourish, and Mr. Osgood looked thoughtfully across the table at her.

"Why don't you run down to New York?" he suggested. "I'm sure your Aunt Mary Wardrop would be delighted to have you come for a visit."

"Yes. I thought of that. I should like to go there, and I had almost decided to. But can't you suggest something for me to do? Aunt Mary's principal occupation is abusing the nouveaux riches, and one merely has to agree with her, which is not at all difficult. If I had anything to do here, I'd rather stay than go. Of course New York is quite a change from Boston—there can be no doubt about that. But—don't you see what I mean, Uncle Silas?"

"I think I do—somewhat, my dear. You are a little restless, and you think that because the things you do are small they are less real. That is not so—small things can be made very interesting if one does them with enthusiasm. Take my own business, for example. It is possibly just a 'business' to you, like any other, but that is because you have not seen it from the inside. To me it is absolutely vital. I don't know of another business so interesting."

"Really!" the girl answered. "I thought it was just getting people to buy insurance policies, very much as you would have gotten them to buy sugar if you had been in the grocery business. If it's so interesting, why couldn't I come down to your office and learn about it? I'm sure I could be of some use—I'm quite quick at figures."

"I fear you'd be disappointed," said Mr. Osgood. "I'm afraid I must admit that adding up columns of figures is very much the same in one business as in another. And as I said, to find the real interest you should see a business from the inside. My office is not the inside—it's only part way in. The real inside, the center of the web, is the home office of some big company. I'm only a local agent, you understand; you would only see one phase of the business in my office. But if you went to New York, I could arrange that you might visit the home office of one of the New York companies, if you would like."

"I think I would," said Miss Maitland.

"Then I will give you a letter to Mr. James Wintermuth, one of my oldest and closest friends and the head of the Guardian Fire Insurance Company of New York. And some morning, if you find time hanging heavy on your hands, you can go down to William Street. And if you don't arrive before ten o'clock, I think Mr. Wintermuth will be pleased to show you something real—and something which has not a purple shadow in its possession."

"Then you really think it would be a good thing for me to go to New York?" his niece asked.

"Decidedly. I'd write your aunt to-day, if I were you. Now that she has your portrait, she would probably like a chance to compare it with the original."

"On the contrary, she may think, that having so recent a copy, the original would be superfluous."

"I fancy I'd risk it," her uncle returned, with a smile, as they rose from the table.

And so it was arranged. Helen's mother entered her expected protest, and was promptly overruled. Trunks were packed and letters were written; among them one by Silas Osgood to James Wintermuth. And at length, as September was drawing to a close, Miss Maitland boarded the Knickerbocker Limited one day, and the town of her nativity was speedily left behind her.

On the very afternoon of her departure the office of the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company was the scene of an unusual, and, to most of the participants, a disquieting conference. The shimmering face of the big, dark, mahogany table reflected many a perplexed expression, and its substantial supports found their impeccable varnish menaced by a number of restless and uneasy boots. The directors of the company, assembled for their monthly meeting, found that, instead of the customary conventionality of procedure, a thing strangely impertinent and unexpected demanded their surprised attention.

Ordinarily these meetings were simple in the extreme, being merely ratifications of what the President had done and approvals of what he said he purposed to do. To the somewhat bored group of representative financial figureheads around the table Mr. Hurd would read a sheet of figures telling how many million miles the company had carried one passenger during the previous month—such reports are always reduced to absurdities—and would inform them of such plans as he chose to intrust to their confidence, and would then suggest the declaration of the usual dividend. To this the directors would unanimously assent. Then they punctiliously received each man his golden eagle, and a motion to adjourn closed the ceremony.

To-day had come an astonishing innovation in procedure. Instead of suavely instructing them what they should vote to do, Mr. Hurd was behaving in a most oddly uncharacteristic fashion. He was asking their advice. This amounted to a bouleversement supreme of the usual order of things, and it was no wonder that there was disquietude among his hearers.

"It has been represented to me," he had tersely said, "that if a large fire should involve our Pemberton Street barn and power house, notwithstanding the presumably fireproof construction of those buildings, we should quite likely incur a much larger loss than we would find it convenient to pay at a time when additional financing might be somewhat embarrassing. I am therefore laying before you gentlemen the question of doing what we have never previously done, and carrying fire insurance on our properties. I prefer not to advise you, and suggest an open discussion of the matter."

Mr. Hurd sat down; his directors surveyed one another and the situation with concern. Could the old man be losing his grip, or was this merely a transient eccentricity? In the debate which followed the President took no part; only once, in answer to a question by Mr. Jonas Green, much the most penurious man at the table, as to what had brought the question up at the present time, Mr. Green being an enthusiastic exponent of the doctrine of laissez faire when any additional expenditure was proposed, Mr. Hurd made reply:—

"It is represented to me that if it became public knowledge that we carry no insurance, banking and financial institutions generally may come to feel that our conservatism is open to criticism and that they are rating our stock somewhat too highly as collateral. It is intimated that some of us might conceivably be annoyed by requests to substitute in part other collateral or somewhat reduce loans secured by Massachusetts Traction stock."

"But so far as the banks are concerned, we're in exactly the same position we've always been. How is the fact we don't insure going to become public knowledge now any more than in the past?" persisted Mr. Green.

"It is suggested that news spreads—if not of its own volatility, at least with only the most trifling assistance. And that, I take it," concluded Mr. Hurd, "will be supplied."

Mr. Green's face grew almost purple.

"Why!" he exclaimed, "that's—that's pretty close to blackmail!"

The President's lips half concealed the merest trace of a smile.

"Possibly," he assented. "But I am inclined to think it is business."

The controversy continued. And Mr. Hurd, listening, found himself more and more moved to austere amusement by the effect of Charlie's suave proposal. When he had placed the matter before the directorate, it was because he himself had not made up his mind on the question of its desirability. He had slowly come to feel that his personal prejudice against carrying insurance should not be made forcibly to apply to the policy of a corporation, in which many others were interested, and he felt that he would prefer to shift the responsibility on this point to the gentlemen who presumably were paid for deciding just such things. And as he listened, he found growing upon him the hope that Charlie's plan would be adopted. This hope, unexpressed, was so utterly out of keeping with what he had supposed to be his convictions that he strangled it without a qualm. It was, he supposed, dead, when he sat up at the further request of Mr. Jonas Green to answer a few additional queries.

"Tell me," said Mr. Green, "do you honestly believe there's a particle of danger of a big fire in this city? Pooh!" He dismissed the subject almost contemptuously.

Some odd chord of recollection stirred in Mr. Hurd. Almost unconsciously he responded:—

"The best technical engineers—not alarmists, but men who are careful students of such things—agree that the conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity."

The sounding syllables passed from his lips with a faint, far echo which he found vaguely but unidentifiably familiar. But into the group around the long table the utterance fell with cryptic, crucial solemnity. Only Mr. Green, stubbornly contentious to the last, and thinking anxiously of both horns of the dilemma at once, found voice or will to reply.

"You don't say so!" he said feebly.

"I do," Mr. Hurd coolly rejoined. "And now, gentlemen, the motion is in order: Shall the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company insure its properties against loss by fire?"

And when the motion was put, there was no dissenting voice.

Of this somewhat unprecedented meeting the close at least was normal. But Mr. Jonas Green grasped his ten dollar gold piece more firmly than ever as he passed through the doorway.



CHAPTER VIII

One of the most inexplicable things in human nature is, commonly, the stuff out of which other people carve their fetiches. A philosopher is a man who can understand the incomprehensible selections by other men of the objects of their adoration. But philosophers are uncommon.

To Helen Maitland, leaving Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street and straying northwestward into the early autumn splendor of the Park, it seemed as though for the first time she could understand the viewpoint of those unidentified myriads to whom New York is a fetich; and as she walked on beneath the trees soon to lay aside their valedictory robes, she appreciated most fully those to whom Central Park is a fetich within a fetich, a guarded flame within the inmost chamber of the shrine.

Partly the spell was that of Autumn, that grave, melodious season; and as Helen went forward, her mind lingered on the "tragic splendor" at whose "mute signal, leaf by golden leaf, crumbles the gorgeous year."

In the past she had never been inordinately fond of New York. In common with most of her fellow Bostonians, she had found it too big, too noisy, too garish, and too unfriendly. To her it was iron and stone and dust and the tumult of a harsh and heartless unceasing struggle. But now, under the alchemic hand of Autumn, she found herself thrilling to the town as never before had she thought possible. Only two days had elapsed since her departure from Boston, but it seemed to her now that she was a participant in some slow-moving pageant, not a hostile critic in the audience, but a minor actor in an unfamiliar yet strangely familiar play. Even the hurrying throng of people who confronted her, when at length she sought again the street on her way homeward, seemed less hostile and alien, less inimical to her and her mood than ever before. As she went southward on the street car—for her careful New Englandism forbade her taking a taxicab in sunny weather—she found herself reflecting with a smile that Boston in her recollection was an astonishing distance away. She also detected with surprise a very slight irritation at the intense preoccupation of the thronging thousands in their own concerns and their utter carelessness of her and hers.

As a matter of fact she had no concerns of her own, or at least none whose vitality would gain attention. And suddenly her friendly sense of being a part of this flowing life dissolved sourly into mockery. She was in it and not of it—again the hostile critic. And then it occurred to her that perhaps momentarily she was a little lonely. And her utter impotence in this huge careless city heightened this feeling. She could make no headway against the current of this life. The remarkable persistent vitality of the thing around her made her feel totally unimportant and quite helpless. The feeling was far from pleasant, but it was salutary, and stimulus for the first remedy at hand, and the natural depression of impotence did not overcome the exhilaration of curiosity.

When she reached Washington Square again, she said something of this to Miss Wardrop, who nodded comprehendingly.

"Every one feels that way for a time," she said; "it's like sitting out a cotillion by one's self. What you need is something or somebody to pull you into the whirl."

"I suppose that is so," agreed the girl,—"but where am I to find it—or him? I don't know anybody who is in. Of course I have Uncle Silas's letter to Mr. Wintermuth, but I didn't really know whether I'd have the courage to use it or not."

"Who may Mr. Wintermuth be?" demanded her aunt.

"A friend of Uncle Silas, and the President of the Guardian Fire Insurance Company."

"Fire Insurance? A fire insurance company? Wait one moment. Jenks. . . . Jenks! Bring me that envelope from the mantelpiece. . . . No," she added, "my policy is not in the Guardian. I thought perhaps it might be."

"What is the matter?" inquired her niece. "Have you had a fire?"

"Yes, I have," returned her aunt, "or rather Jenks has. He burned off the lamp shade from my reading lamp. And Jane Vanderdecken says because he did it out of sheer clumsiness I cannot ask the company to pay for it."

Helen remembered the shade in question, which had been in the eyes of all save its owner a horror upon horrors, a mausoleum preserving, apparently for all time, the ghastly glories of a dead era of alleged ornamentation. So it was with dubious sympathy that she said:—

"I don't know whether Jane Vanderdecken is right or not."

"You can go and find out. Mr. What's-his-name can tell you, even if it isn't his company that will have to pay."

And in this way it came about that Helen found herself, not many days later, descending from the Elevated Station at Cortlandt Street, and turning her steps eastward toward William Street. It was half-past ten when she found herself before a portal on which were the words: The Guardian Fire Insurance Company of the City of New York.

Intrusting herself to the deliberate conveyance of the elevator, she arrived eventually at the top floor, and to a clerk near the door she expressed her desire to see Mr. James Wintermuth. One of the principal assets of this employee was his readiness to assume an expression, when any one inquired for the President, suggestive that in his opinion such a desire could scarcely be expected by the visitor to be gratified, and he was also supposed to decide by inquiry or intuition whether he should so far intrude on Mr. Wintermuth's privacy as to present the stranger's name. He had come to be uncommonly adept at this, but the spectacle of this dark-eyed young woman was quite beyond the gamut of his routine experience. In a sort of charmed coma he surveyed the visitor, and found himself starting to inform the President of her arrival without a preliminary inquisition even to the extent of inquiring the nature of her business with that gentleman. Accordingly, after the briefest of intervals she found herself ushered into the office of an elderly gentleman who rose courteously to welcome her.

"Miss Maitland, I think. You are the niece of Silas Osgood of Boston?" he inquired. "Mr. Osgood wrote that I might expect to see you here."

The girl handed him the letter.

"Here are my credentials," she said, with a smile. "I am also an envoy extraordinary from my aunt, Miss Wardrop, on a diplomatic mission connected with the burning of a long-cherished but doubtfully valuable lamp shade!"

"Won't you sit down, please? You will pardon me if I read your uncle's letter?" Mr. Wintermuth responded.

Helen assented, and the other leisurely read the few lines the letter contained. In the interim the visitor glanced about the room to apprehend the setting of the scene into which she was now come. Presently her host spoke.

"I gather from what your uncle says that you have come not to call on an old friend of his, but to look at maps and daily reports and surveys, and find out what a fire insurance company is really like. And although I am quite old enough to be your father, I would really much rather you had come to see me," he remarked pleasantly.

"If I had known you before, I undoubtedly would have done so," the girl smilingly returned.

"Times have changed since I was a youngster," Mr. Wintermuth went on. "I presume all elderly people say so, and I am afraid we are apt to make it at once a refrain and a lament, but nevertheless it is true. Forty years ago young ladies did not feel any interest in business such as fire insurance, or if they did they kept it to themselves. But," he added, "I am the gainer in this work of time, to-day at least, for it brings me the pleasure of a call from you."

"I'm afraid my interest is rather sudden and hasn't any very deep foundation," his visitor admitted. "I haven't felt it very long. Uncle Silas has been a fire insurance man ever since I can remember, but I never knew what he was actually doing, and I never tried to learn. But now I really would like to find out, and that is what brings me to you. I have lived in a kind of unreal atmosphere, and I'm trying now to learn about something absolutely practical. I hope it won't bore you too awfully to have things shown to some one who will undoubtedly have to ask the meaning of everything she sees."

"Not in the least," the old gentleman assured her. "I shall give you an instructor who likes to explain things." He pressed a button under his desk. "Ask Mr. Smith to come here," he said to the boy who responded.

"Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir, but Mr. O'Connor is going to Baltimore and he says he'd like to see you a minute before he goes."

"Ask him to come in. Miss Maitland, let me present Mr. O'Connor, our Vice-President. Miss Maitland is the niece of Mr. Silas Osgood, and she has come to look over our offices."

"Very pleased to meet you," said O'Connor. "Sorry I haven't time to help show you around, myself. I see now that I was wrong when I decided to go to Baltimore to-day. I felt a little doubtful right along, and now I'm sure I should have stayed here."

Helen thought that he spoke a trifle too glibly, but she made a civil reply, and turned to the window while O'Connor received some final advice from his chief. When the door closed behind him she turned once more, and as she did so she became aware of a young man who stood in the doorway looking expectantly at Mr. Wintermuth.

"Ah, you are here, Richard," said the President. "Miss Maitland, this is Mr. Smith. Miss Maitland is Mr. Silas Osgood's niece, and she wants to know how the Guardian runs its business. Do you think you can show her?"

"I think I can," replied the younger man, pleasantly. Then, turning to the girl, he said, "I shall at least be very glad indeed to try."

Mr. Wintermuth then went on to tell what Smith should show the visitor, and while he was doing this the two younger people looked at one another, Helen swiftly and Smith with a steadier glance. To him she seemed a girl of unusual charm, but whether this could have been guessed from his manner was problematic.

Helen, with discreet but none the less comprehensive scrutiny, saw before her a man of thirty-three or four years, erect of figure, with a clean-shaven face and gray eyes. One thing she noticed about him was a certain odd immobility of carriage, which was not in any way to be mistaken for lassitude or lethargy; on the contrary, it reminded her of a coiled spring. He was somewhat above the middle height, and he had rather lean hands, and he wore no jewelry except an unobtrusive scarf pin—thus far had Helen's assessment proceeded when a question from Mr. Wintermuth recalled her.

"Would you like to start now to look us over?"

"If it is quite convenient to you," replied the girl, a shade stiffly. This impassive young man, who seemed quite different from any one she had met in her Boston set, was a little out of her calculations. She knew it was unreasonable to expect Mr. Wintermuth himself to act as cicerone, but just the same she was not entirely certain that she did not resent being so definitely turned over to this youthfully unexpected substitute. Probably Mr. Otto Bartels would have been initially more acceptable to her.

"Show Miss Maitland everything—begin at the beginning, and don't leave anything out," said the President, and dismissed them both with a fatherly wave of the hand as he pressed the button that summoned his stenographer.

Smith looked keenly at the girl as they walked slowly out into the office; he was wondering what her object might be in this pilgrimage. His mind flitted briefly over the ideas of muck-raking reporters and inquisitive lady novelists; yet surely this self-possessed but quiet young lady suggested nothing of either class, and besides, a niece of Silas Osgood's could scarcely deserve suspicion. At the same time, detecting in her manner what impressed him as a slightly Bostonian attitude of mental hauteur, Smith remained wary.

"This is the Eastern Department," he said, stopping before the first long map desk that stretched along the whole side of the room. Helen assented politely to this information, and the young man led the way through the other departments. Through the lower floors they went, Smith sketching briefly the function of each department as they passed it.

"Here is the City Department," he said, as they reached the ground floor; and for a little while they stood and watched Cuyler in his traffic with the brokers. He was engaged in a spirited argument with a very small and somewhat soiled person who insistently thrust upon Mr. Cuyler what that gentleman had obviously no intention of accepting. Risk after risk was declined, and the turns and ripostes were fast and furious.

Finally the soiled placer presented a binder which called for five thousand dollars to cover Jacob Warbalowsky on his stock of artificial flowers and feathers while contained on the fourth loft of a six-story factory building which Mr. Cuyler knew to be of cheap and light construction, dirty and hazardous throughout, and each floor but one of which was tenanted by a concern whose name indicated that its pyromorality, so to speak, was to say the least questionable. Mr. Cuyler quite distinctly recalled, scanning the names of the tenants in the card cabinet which gave the occupation and tariff rate of each, that a few years before, the concern on the third floor, having manufactured a stock of raincoats which it found impossible to sell, had been strongly suspected of disposing of its goods to the fire insurance companies instead of to the retail trade by the simple expedient of the double gas jet. This popular device was as follows. The proprietor, who was detained at his office after his employees had gone home, would, when he himself departed, leave two gas jets turned on, one at each end of the factory, one burning (as usual) and the other unlit. Long enough afterward so as to establish an alibi and remove all suspicion from himself, the escaping gas would meet the flame, and there would be an explosion and a fire which usually resulted in the desired destruction of the useless but fully insured merchandise. The cause of the fire could almost always be traced to a leaky gas jet, for which, of course, the assured was not responsible.

Mr. Cuyler, regarding the names of the tenants, noticed that the top floor was occupied by a maker of automobile accessories, named Pendleton. He turned cheerfully back to the placer.

"Phil, I'd like to help you out," he said, "but I can't write anything in that building. I know it's hard to get. Why, my brother-in-law's factory is on the top floor, and only last Sunday, when I saw him up at the house, he asked me if I wasn't going to loosen up and put the Guardian on for a small line. His broker can't get anywhere near enough to cover him. And I had to tell him nay, nay. You couldn't really expect me to do something for you, Phil, that I couldn't do for one of my own family."

The soiled placer removed a cigarette butt from his mouth, and threw it on the floor with a gesture of extreme impatience.

"Your brother-in-law like hell!" he remarked, quite disregarding the presence of Miss Maitland in the background. "What kind of a fairy story are you trying to put across on me? I suppose you're claiming that Pendleton, the automobile man, is your brother-in-law. Well, he moved out about a month ago. The card hasn't been changed yet, but the firm in there now is a bunch of Kikes that make boys' pants—Lipper, Loeb, and Kahn. I saw their sign when I went up to get this order from Warbalowsky. Which of them did your sister marry?"

Mr. Cuyler was momentarily discomfited, but his presence of mind almost immediately returned.

"All three," he said calmly to his excited adversary. "All three. You just saw the sign, you say. You didn't meet any of them personally, did you? Well, you couldn't have."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked the astonished placer, pausing in the act of lighting a fresh cigarette.

"Why, Phil," said Mr. Cuyler, kindly, "my sister married a man named Reginald Whitney. His name isn't his fault. And he is a manufacturer of boys' pants. Now, Phil, you understand local conditions as well as nearly any one I know, and I ask you: What chance of success would a boys' pants manufacturer named Reginald Whitney have? Absolutely none. He therefore operates under the name of Lipper, Loeb, and Kahn, and I don't mind saying he is doing very well, but I hope he won't stay long in that building, for some of that bunch of crooks under him—I don't mean Warbalowsky, you understand—will probably touch off the place some night and leave him with a total loss and only forty per cent insurance to value."

While this controversy was going on, Smith, watching his companion shrewdly, saw the light of real interest for the first time dawn in her eye. And when Cuyler finished, she laughed outright, and the two returned to the elevator the better for one shared amusement.

"I suppose Mr. Cuyler was—embroidering the truth a little?" queried Helen, comprehendingly.

"He never had a sister in his life!" nodded her escort, cheerfully.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Smith," Helen said as they regained the top floor, "that I don't really understand the first principles of fire insurance well enough to appreciate what you have shown me. It's a humiliating admission, but I must make it. I don't believe you began near enough the bottom—with the elementary, one-syllable things."

The underwriter surveyed her thoughtfully but with covert approval. Wary though he was, like all idealists, regarding the things near to his soul, it now for the first time struck him that he wished very much that Miss Maitland should understand what meant so much to him. And he felt that he could make her understand; hitherto it had not seemed so.

"I wonder if I could really show you," he answered, half to himself, and there was something in his tone that made the girl reply, "I wish you would try."

"Let's start all over, then," said Smith, buoyantly. "We'll begin right here. Now, this is a map desk in which the maps are kept and on top of which they are laid out when in use. The map desk is really the home of underwriting, just as the stage is of the drama. And just as there are stage conventions, certain things which are taken for granted, such as the idea that a character on the stage cannot escape over the footlights into the audience—that there is an imaginary blank wall between the audience and the players—so we have our conventions and symbols in the maps." He called for Boston One, which the map clerk laid instantly open at his elbow. It was a large volume bound in gray canvas, perhaps two by three feet in dimensions, and weighing several pounds. Smith turned to a page which showed some of the blocks surrounding the Common, and Miss Maitland bent close to look. "All these little colored objects represent buildings, red for brick and yellow for frame; and they are drawn on a scale of fifty feet to the inch. We get so accustomed to them that automatically we grow to visualize the buildings themselves from these diagrams. See, there is the State House on top of the hill; there's Beacon Street; there's—"

"Beacon Street! Where is number forty-five? I want to see what that looks like."

"What number did you say?" inquired Smith.

"Forty-five."

"There it is."

"Why, so it is! What is that queer little wiggle sticking out of the front?"

"It looks like a bay window in the front room of the second floor. Is there one in that house?"

"Yes. . . . Have you got Deerfield Street in this map?"

Smith found the place.

"Number?" he asked again.

"Here it is," the girl said amusedly. "That is where I live. Now let me see how much visualizing you can do on that. Let me see how nearly right you can get it. And why is it brown instead of red?"

"With pleasure," said the underwriter, with a smile. "In the first place, it is brown because it is of steel and concrete fireproof construction. It is an eight-story and basement apartment building with a tile roof and a short mansard of tile in front only. There are two sections, cut off from one another except for a metal-clad door in the basement. The elevator is at the right as you enter; the stairway runs around it. There are two light courts, one front and one rear, both with stairway fire escapes. Which is your apartment?"

"West front, on the fourth floor."

"You have probably seven rooms, with four windows along the street side and four on the court. Well," he finished, laughing, "is that sufficiently visualized?"

"You have told me nearly everything except where we have our piano," Helen returned. "I don't suppose your diagram would show that?"

"Well, no. That wouldn't interest us as a rule, and besides, people move pianos so often. We don't try to keep them all located."

Smiling together, and better friends than they had yet been, the two turned from the map of Boston.

"Here," said Smith, "are the other maps of the Eastern Department, from Maine to Maryland, Rhode Island to Ohio. Also Canada—Halifax, Quebec, Montreal. Over at the other end of the room are the Southern cities, Atlanta, New Orleans, St. Augustine—with some of the old Spanish houses still standing. Do you know it strikes me there is something Homeric, something epic, about a map desk. You can turn to any building in any city on the continent, at a moment's notice. I can show you the Old South Church, or Fraunce's Tavern in New York where Washington bade his generals good-by, or Montcalm's headquarters at Quebec before Wolfe scaled the heights. Or you can see the Peace Conference Hotel outside Portsmouth, or the Congressional Library in Washington, or the new Chinatown in San Francisco, or the great shops of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Altoona, or even the site of the arena at Reno, Nevada, where Mr. Johnson separated Mr. Jeffries from the heavy-weight title of the world."

So engrossed was Smith that he did not notice the almost imperceptible withdrawal of his auditor. Among her Boston friends there was no one who spoke of prize fights; even Charles Wilkinson, whose conversational reservations were certainly few, ignored the prize ring. Smith went unconsciously on, but for his hearer, for the time at least, the spell was snapped. Still, she listened. He told her more of what the maps showed—how they indicated the location and size of the water mains in the streets, of the hydrants, the fire department houses, even the fire alarm boxes—everything, in short, which the fire underwriter desired to contemplate when passing on a risk submitted for the company's approval. By this time they had reached the other end of the big room and were close to O'Connor's office.

"I really must have taken you on a walk of several miles," said Smith, contritely; "and if you are going to let me continue this monologue, I may at least let you sit down. Suppose we go in here; Mr. O'Connor has just left town, and we may as well use his office."

Again Miss Maitland hesitated, although not sufficiently to attract her companion's notice. She was not accustomed to interviews in private offices with strange young men. But she entered, and Smith behind her, and the glass door closed on them both, shutting out the sound of the clicking typewriters. Helen seated herself with her back to the window.

"Go on," she said. "I want to hear everything."

Smith went on.

Briefly but clearly he sketched the foundations of insurance. How, in more primitive times, when a man's house burned, his neighbors used to provide him with materials and come to help him rebuild; but this proved onerous, and instead a communal fund for the purpose of assisting fire sufferers was established. The modern insurance company had gradually come to assume the management of this fund and eventually to undertake the function of insuring against fire. But the people were still the arbiters of the fire cost, and the companies merely barometrically reflected the condition of the community as to fires. When fires are numerous and costly, the price of insurance must advance. Insurance is a tax which the companies collect in premiums from the many and pay out in losses to the few. But the idea remains the same.

"That is interesting," said the girl. "Now will you think me very stupid if I ask you to explain what all the terms mean as you go along? You spoke a moment ago of underwriting: I don't know what underwriting is. I thought big loans and stock issues and things of that sort were underwritten. Is this the same?"

"So they are, but this is another matter. Fire underwriting is a thing all to itself—sui generis. Similarly, a fire underwriter is a person like no other—at all events he likes to persuade himself that he is. And frequently he succeeds."

Smith smiled at his own reflection.

"A fire underwriter, to be a real one," he went on, "should be a chemist, financier, mechanic, lawyer, engineer, and diplomat, and a dash of a clairvoyant, too. He should know everybody's business, including his own. Consider what he is expected to know: there is no class of industry which can dispense with insurance."

"Except the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company," interposed Helen, quickly.

"That is true up to the present time," Smith assented; "but their wisdom in having done so is not sufficiently proved, and Mr. Charles Wilkinson, whom I met in your uncle's office, is in hopes of being able to change their ideas on that subject. But I have my doubts if he will succeed, from what is said of Mr. Hurd."

"I think Mr. Wilkinson spoke of having met you," the girl said carelessly; which was positive disingenuousness, for she remembered very well indeed. And here she sat, talking to the man whose suggestion, as Charles quoted it, had roused her interest in the business. Helen was not sufficiently Oriental to find anything predestined in this meeting, but it nevertheless seemed a little odd. Abruptly she spoke, to rid her of her own thoughts.

"Mr. Hurd believes in carrying his own risk—isn't that the expression?"

"Absolutely. No life-long fire insurance man could have phrased it more correctly."

"I'm afraid it was mere plagiarism. I think Mr. Wilkinson used it."

"Credit withdrawn," said Smith. "What were we talking about? Oh, yes—about underwriters. Now, the fire underwriter has to pass upon the danger of every risk whose insurance is offered to his company. The company, of course, makes its underwriting or trade profit—or hopes to do so—by receiving more money in payment of premiums than it has to disburse, after deducting expenses, in losses. It must therefore accept its business as scientifically as possible. It must know how much money to risk—that is, how large a policy to write—on every class of risk in the world. When a line on a foundry and machine shop comes in, let us say, from Silas Osgood and Company, the underwriter is supposed to know how much premium, or rate, the risk should pay, and how many dollars the company can safely hold."

"But I thought you said Uncle Silas sent you the risk. Doesn't he also determine the amount the company takes?"

"The amount for which the policy is issued; but he is merely the agent. He exercises his best judgment, but the home office underwriter is the court of last resort. Generally speaking, the agent secures the business and offers it to the company for its acceptance. If, when it comes, the underwriter feels that the rate of premium is not commensurate with the hazard, he writes the agent, 'Rate too low: please cancel.' And there is where his diplomacy comes in. The agent, who must now get back the policy from the assured, must not be offended, or his more desirable business will be placed in some rival and more liberal company. If, on the other hand, the rate of premium seems adequate, but the amount at risk is too great, the underwriter reinsures or cedes a part of his line to another company, paying it a proportionate part of the premium, and holds only what he thinks safe. And here is where his judgment is needed. The company has what it calls its idea of line—which means that it doesn't want to lose more than a certain amount, say five thousand dollars, in any ordinary fire. . . . I'm not boring you?"

"Oh, no," said Helen. "I'm following it all."

"Well, then, what the underwriter is supposed to do is to decide, from the kind of risk he is asked to insure, how much the Company can write, and still not be liable for a greater loss than five thousand dollars in any ordinary fire."

"How can he do it?"

"By knowing his business. When he passes on a foundry, for example, he ought to know, first, the fire record of foundries in general; second, what rate of premium they ought in general to pay; and third, what the dangers, or, as we call them, hazards, are. By looking at the map he must be able to tell where the fire is most likely to start—where, in other words, fires usually do start in foundries. Probably it will be the cupola charging platform or the core ovens. Then he can closely tell from the construction of that particular foundry, considering also the protection, extinguishing appliances, public water pressure, nearness of the fire department, and fifty other considerations, how much of the whole plant would burn—probably. If only half, then he feels safe in writing ten thousand dollars on the risk, since only half of it is likely to be destroyed by one fire."

"I don't see how you can tell."

"Well, most companies have quite elaborate line sheets to assist their underwriters in determining how much to hold on various classes of risks, but between you and me, you can't tell surely. But you do the best you can, and the ablest underwriter is the man who tells the closest. A really good underwriter should know the hazards of all the ordinary risks in the world, and be able to tell you offhand what is the danger point in a brewery, a playing-card factory, a paper mill, a public school, a shovel works, a Catholic church, a chemical laboratory—every sort and kind of risk. Of course he has surveys, made by inspectors, to help him, showing details the map fails to show, such as the location of your piano, and where the hazards lie and how they are cared for. But inspectors are fallible, and he must know—everything."

"You make my head whirl," Helen said. "To know everything! It sounds colossal. Do you know everything?"

Smith laughed.

"No," he replied. "Decidedly not. I'm afraid I know only a very small proportion of what I ought. But the big men of the business do. There is one man who I verily believe is perfectly familiar with every kind of risk in the United States. If there is a chemical process he doesn't know or can't find out about, I'll eat the thing myself. He knows every explosive mixture, every fulminate, every sort or manner of dust, paste, or grease which burns or explodes of itself."

"But that one man must be a genius! What does the average man do? Doesn't he need some one to help him in all this? It sounds like such a terrific undertaking to keep track of so many things. Doesn't it make your own head swim at times?"

"Well," said Smith, "of course there are a thousand and one things in the nature of aids to the underwriter—things whose proper action he doesn't directly control, although he has to keep a father's eye on them to see that they don't run amuck."

"Such as what?" asked the girl.

"The inspectors I spoke of, for one thing; the map makers who make the pretty brown buildings in Deerfield Street; the rate makers who go around applying schedules to buildings, and from the various hazards of construction, occupancy, and exposure fixing the rate which the schedule brings out; the stamping bureaus that check the rates as the agents send through the business. And then there are the field men, called special agents, who travel from agency to agency, appointing and discontinuing agents, straightening out difficulties, adjusting losses, and making themselves generally useful. All these the underwriter has to help him, as well as information such as building inspections by cities, police regulations, fire alarm systems, municipal rules and vagaries of all sorts—oh, a category of things as long as one's arm, which of course an underwriter doesn't actually himself supervise, but whose accuracy he must be able to estimate—and often repair if they get out of order and cease to run smoothly."

"But—" said the girl, slowly.

"But what?" Smith asked.

"But isn't it awfully technical, this business? I had an idea that fire insurance was done principally by clerks writing endlessly in large books. That's what they always seem to be doing in Mr. Osgood's office. And now you tell me it's like this. This is absolutely different from what I thought it was, and it seems incredibly difficult, but—"

"Well, but what?" demanded her companion.

"Well, then—it seems to me a little dry. Or perhaps not exactly that, but a little too scientific, too technical. Not so vivid, so vital—"

She stopped short at the expression of Smith's face.



CHAPTER IX

"Not vital!" he exclaimed, getting out of his chair and facing her. "Not vital! Really, Miss Maitland, what can you call vital? Fire insurance is as vital as anything in the world of business to-day—or in any world that I know anything about." He paused, and some of the indignation went out of his eyes. "I beg your pardon," he said more gently. "I had thought I was making you understand."

"You were—you were," Helen hastened to assure him; but he shook his head.

"Not if you think, after all, that fire insurance isn't vital."

"I'm afraid I chose my word badly. What I meant, perhaps, was that it wasn't picturesque. It isn't that, is it—as the word is generally understood?"

"You mean it isn't building bridges over boiling chasms three thousand feet below in the Andes river bottoms; it isn't leading ragged armies of half-baked South American natives against a mud stockade; it isn't shooting African animals and dining on quinine and hippopotamus liver. No, there's none of the soldier of fortune business about it. But vital! My heavens! what do you call vital?"

"I don't know," said the girl, humbly. She was somewhat abashed before this flare her words had so suddenly lighted. And she felt honestly contrite, for she saw she had hurt an ideal that was very close and real to the man before her.

At the sound of her reply Smith came to himself.

"I really beg your pardon—again," he said, with a little tremor in his voice. "I didn't appreciate what I was doing, or I wouldn't have blown up with a report like a nitroglycerine storehouse. Will you excuse me?"

Helen looked squarely at him.

"Yes—I will," she said, "on one condition."

"And what is that?"

"That you blow up again. I would really like to see it just as you do, and that is much the best way—carry me along with you."

The underwriter looked momentarily away; then his eyes rested on her thoughtfully.

"All right. I'll do it," he said. "I'll make it so plain to you that you can't escape it. I'll hold you with my glittering eye till you cannot choose but hear," he quoted, with a smile.

"I do not choose but hear," Miss Maitland said.

Smith was silent for a long minute.

"The picturesque things are all very well in their way," he said. "Revolutions and railway building and all that. Let us take railway building for example—I was once in the construction department of a big railroad, myself. But every one can't get into that department, and even there, there is a good deal of routine and very little thrill. It's only once in a lifetime, practically, that a man gets his chance to build the suspension bridge that swings a mile above the chasm. With most railroad builders one day's work is pretty much like another's. Not much excitement, except at long intervals. To plan what you must do is interesting, of course, but the execution is generally a long grind."

"Yes," Helen assented; "I fancy that would be so."

"It is so. But even if it were not, the kind of obstacles that must be surmounted are very much the same, year in and year out. You ford quicksands; you evade granite hillsides; you fight walking delegates. What I mean is that the set of obstacles doesn't change much, and the environment of the railway constructor is always about the same. But that is not so with the underwriter. One moment he is in the construction camp of the road builder, and the next in the palace of the city banker; one moment he is in an Idaho sawmill, and the next in a New England college chapel; one moment he is in a Florida orange grove, and the next in a salmon cannery on the Oregon coast. Ten thousand businesses pass before his eyes, and he must be alert to the local conditions affecting every one. There is no fixed environment for the underwriter."

The girl interrupted him.

"That may be true. But there is no work of original construction about it, is there? Can you compare the vitality of your business with that of the men who create their own ideas? There is no routine about that. And after all, isn't that more vital than anything else can be?"

"Yes," said Smith, "I presume it is. Certainly it is for the genius; probably even for any man of high and true talent, a man able to lose himself in his own creation. Undoubtedly that is the only real elixir of life, the only ineffable exaltation. But isn't that carrying your argument out too far? We can scarcely set a standard for creative geniuses—there are too few of them. You spoke of the men who create their own ideas. How many of them are there? There are thousands of near-authors, near-musicians, near-artists, near-poets, who are painfully remote from the genuine article. Do you understand what I mean?"

"Oh, yes. And that is so. I myself have at least seen that."

"Of course it is so. And do you suppose these second-rate creators get the real thrill? Not they. In their hearts they know they are frauds, impostors, dilettantes at best. There is no vitality to their grip on things, and they know it. They deal with the spurious and fustian from cradle to grave. Why, I myself know innumerable people that spend their lives in trying to persuade themselves into thinking they are doing something worth while!"

Mentally the girl winced; the words went home so close to Pelgram, who had been in her own mind. It was this very feeling of protest, for which Smith now found voice, that had sickened her of Pelgram.

"Such people get little out of life," the underwriter went on, "probably first because they are constantly uneasy in the knowledge that they are charlatans, and second because they do not have anything real, anything alive, to face. They deal in half-tones, in nuances—"

Nuances! Was the man clairvoyant? He had suggested that an underwriter ought to be. Helen felt that this channel had been pursued far enough.

"No one defends dilettanteism as such," she said.

"One can, though, easily enough, if one wishes," Smith promptly responded. "After all, to do things for the love of doing them is the right way. But they must be the right things, and to get the full taste out of anything one must have faced real dragons to attain it. There is no lack of dragons in the insurance business. You're fighting them all the time. If it isn't against time to keep your premiums up, it's against fate to keep your losses down. And of course all your days you're fighting on not one but a thousand battle lines to keep your rivals from getting your business away from you. Now your little artist, your semi-creator, hasn't anything like that. So long as he lives he hasn't any real facts to face."

"No; I suppose not," said the girl, slowly.

"The same trouble, or very nearly the same, exists for your soldier of fortune. To be sure, he faces facts—there can be no doubt about that—but they are facts he deliberately seeks, and not the actual obstacles that the world rolls up before him. He gets color and excitement all right, but the quality of the self-constructed excitement isn't quite so fine; in fact, after a while it begins to pall on one. Then, too, a man wearies of doing things that serve no useful end and that get nowhere; he begins to feel awkward and superfluous in the whole scheme of things. And these soldiers of fortune don't really do anything, they merely put on the canvas a few bold strokes that attract ephemeral attention but which their successors promptly paint out, and they leave the world precisely where it was before they entered it or carried on their living."

"But isn't that much the same with you, too? Fire insurance doesn't get anywhere, does it? Of course it's more useful to provide people with fire insurance than with South American revolutions, but after all it isn't indispensable. The world could move, couldn't it," she said diffidently, "without fire insurance? At least it did so for a good many centuries."

"The modern world couldn't," Smith said promptly. "Insurance is one of the things that the world, having had, could not do without. You do not perhaps realize the trend of the world to-day. It is no longer military; it is along commercial lines. Napoleon and Wellington to-day would be capitalists, either bankers or merchants or manufacturers, and their battles would be fought with money, not men. The world is ruled by commerce and trade—and where would trade be without fire insurance? Nowhere. The foundation of modern trade is credit. Without credit, no trade—or either petty trade limited to cash transactions or trade carried on by great millionaires or trusts who are above the fear of fire—although it is doubtful if there are any such. But for ordinary people, take credit away and trade is at an end."

"How is that? I don't understand," the girl said.

"Business to-day is transacted mainly on borrowed money. Jones, who keeps a corner grocery store, hasn't enough money to buy groceries because his customers don't pay him until the end of the month. So he goes to White and Company, who are wholesale grocers, and buys his stock on credit. But do you suppose White and Company would let him have those groceries if it were not for insurance? Certainly not; that's their only protection. If Jones's store burned with that stock before it was sold, and there was no insurance, who would lose? Not Jones—White and Company could force him into bankruptcy, but that wouldn't collect their bill. As I said, trade would be impossible, except cash trade and that in the grip of interests so vast that the ordinary run of fire losses wouldn't count."

"I never thought of that before," the girl remarked.

"Would the cotton grower ship his cotton north to the New England mills or to Liverpool if he couldn't insure it in transportation? No; he wouldn't dare take the risk. His cotton would remain on his plantation until some venturesome buyer came, paid him cash, and carried it away with him. We should go back to the commercial dark ages."

"You have crushed me, Mr. Smith," Helen said with a smile. "I will admit that insurance is indispensable."

"I was in hopes that you would admit it, not because you were crushed, but because you saw."

"I think I'm beginning to see," she answered.

The underwriter regarded her a little doubtfully; then a whimsical smile crossed his lips, making him singularly youthful and—Helen noted—singularly attractive. By a sudden change of thought he turned toward the window.

"A seaport city is a wonderful thing," he said. "Here come the keels of the world, bringing the tribute of the seven seas. It is a fine place to work, Miss Maitland, this down town New York within sight of the water and the water front. Even if you seldom get time to look at it, you have the feeling that it is there. There is never a minute, summer or winter, night or day, when those keels are not bringing argosies home to these old docks. Merely to walk along the shore front is as though one were in touch with all the world."

"I've seen some of it in Boston," said the girl; "but Boston is not the port it used to be."

"There are places in the world, they say—Port Said is one of them and the Cafe de la Paix in Paris is another—where all things and all people come soon or late. Those places must be the most interesting in the world."

"You have never been abroad?" the girl asked.

"No; I never had time. I have to get my world travel, world strangeness, world movement, as I can. And I get it pretty well, here in this office."

"Here! What do you mean?"

"We photograph it all, day by day."

"Oh," said Helen, "you mean you get it all from the maps you showed me?"

"Partly that. That is, the maps are part of it. They make the stage, the setting where the insurance drama is played. But the characters come on the stage through the medium of plain sheets of printed paper known as daily reports. The daily report is the link that unites this office to the throbbing life of a thousand cities around us."

"And what is a daily report? Certainly the name of it doesn't sound romantic."

"No, it doesn't. And yet the daily report is as vital a document as there is in the world."

"In what way? I never heard of it before."

"You never asked Mr. Osgood. He has sent us many thousand. As you know, the company receives its business from agents, scattered all through the country, at most of the important and a large number of unimportant points. In New England alone this company has nearly two hundred agents, each one writing policies when people apply for insurance."

"Does Uncle Silas write policies? I thought the companies themselves did that."

"No. Mr. Osgood has a young man in his office—his name is Reed—who does nothing else. And every time a policy is written by Mr. Reed and signed by Mr. Osgood or Mr. Cole and delivered to the assured, this peculiar document, the daily report, is made up and sent in to this office. It is really a complete description of the policy which has just been written."

"But there must be thousands!"

"Of course. One for every policy every agent issues. We get more than two hundred a day in this office."

"That's why Uncle Silas said I ought to go to a home office to see things properly. That's what he meant—it's the center of everything. I begin to understand."

Smith, glancing at her, perceived that there was no question of her interest now.

"Here they come, the daily reports," he continued, "and we open them—dailies from Chicago, San Antonio, Butte, Lenox, Jersey City, Tampa, Bangor. Dailies in English, a few in Spanish, quite a number in French, for a few of our Canadian agents speak nothing else. This current of dailies flowing through this office, never ceasing day in and day out, year after year, is like the current of the blood tending back to the heart, like the response of the nerves to the pulse-beat, reporting at the brain, bringing news of the body's health, even down to the fingers' ends. And we sit here, like a spider in a web, drawing all the world."

"What do they tell you?" asked the girl, absorbedly.

"Everything;—or nearly all. Is a trust in the making? We know of it here, when we see the ownership of scattered factories change to a common head. Is prohibition gaining ground in the South? We can tell by the shut-down endorsements on brewery and distillery policies and by the increasing losses on saloons whose owners can make no further profit. Is there a corner in wheat or coffee or cotton? We follow the moves in the struggle by the ebb and flow of insurance in the big warehouses and elevators and compresses. Is the automobile market overstocked? Our rising loss ratio gives the reply. Are hard times coming? We can tell it when the merchants begin to cut down their insurance, which means their stocks as well, buying what they need from day to day. Is the panic over? We learn it by a rush of new dailies, buildings in course of construction, new and costly machinery introduced in factories, increased insurance all along the line."

"It sounds almost uncanny," said Helen, slowly. "Can you really learn all these things in this way?"

"Not all, of course, or at least not always, by any means, for the Guardian is only one of many companies, and only a small part, a fraction of one per cent, of the country's business comes to us. But we learn a great deal; much of it along rather surprising lines. I learned yesterday, for example, that the scandal which has been suspected to exist between the fair but probably frail Mazie Dupont and her manager is undoubtedly a matter of fact."

"How could you find that out?" Helen was amazed to find herself asking. The actress was a celebrity, to be sure, yet Miss Maitland, in her own self-analysis, should hardly have evinced curiosity regarding the details of her private life.

"Ownership of pretty country house up the Hudson transferred from his name to hers. Endorsement on our policy," replied Smith. "Of course that's not proof, but its pretty good presumptive evidence. We get similar cases every day. Here's a millionaire gets caught the wrong side of the stock market and needs money. We know it because his hundred thousand dollar Franz Hals goes to the art dealer's to be sold, or some big mercantile building that he owns is mortgaged to the Universal Savings Bank. Endorsement for our daily report. So they go."

"Well, I shall be afraid to have our furniture insured ever again after this," said the girl, with a laugh.

"Insure it with the Guardian, and I myself will see that your family skeletons are kept safely out of sight in the closets where they belong."

"That's very nice of you."

"I'm afraid, though, that your insurance wouldn't be very interesting, as regards sensation," the underwriter went on. "But there are lots of people the investigation of whose insurance affairs is in the field of a first-class detective agency. There are people, as you may or may not know, who make their living by having fires. These fires are fraudulent, of course, but fraud is very hard to prove. We can never secure a witness, for no one applies a match to his shop while any one is looking on; and with only circumstantial evidence and an individual pitted against a rich corporation, the jury generally gives the firebug the benefit of the doubt. Most of these people put in a claim for goods supposed to have been totally burned but which in reality they never possessed or which have been secretly removed just before the fire. Usually they have a fraudulent set of books, too, to back up their claim; and we have to keep a close watch all the time for birds of that feather."

"But how can you?"

"Oh, we have a pretty complete fire record compiled from loss experiences sent by every company to the publisher. All companies subscribe to this record. If a man has several suspicious-looking fires, nobody will insure him. If he gets such a bad fire reputation in one town that he can't get insurance there, he moves somewhere else, but the record keeps track of him, and finally he has to turn honest—or change his name."

"Do many of them do that?"

"Not so many as you'd think. You see, it's not so easy to disguise one's personality. The La Mode Cloak and Suit Company may turn out to be our old friend Lazarus Epstein; but we have the service of the principal commercial agencies to aid us in becoming better acquainted with our policyholders. And any one who has no rating in these commercial agencies we investigate very thoroughly, making our local agent tell us all he knows of the man, and sending for a full detailed report by the commercial agency besides. Even then we occasionally get caught with a crook, but not often. The Guardian is very careful; if all other companies were equally so, there would be fewer firebugs in business."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, many companies rely wholly on their agents; they don't send for these special reports, and the result is that they get caught for a dishonest loss, and the crook who is smart enough to make the agent think he is straight gets away with it. Thus encouraging the impostors."

"But are not the commercial agency men fooled too?"

"Oh, yes, they're only human; but at least you have two sources of information to draw on—and three, if the man has a fire record. By the time we've finished we are apt to know a good deal about our policyholder, here at the home office, and sometimes we learn very strange things—sometimes humorous and sometimes quite the reverse."

He stopped, and Miss Maitland, seeing his pause, hesitated with the question she had been about to put.

"I wonder if you'd care to hear about a case that came to my notice yesterday," he said.

"I would very much," the girl replied.

"You know these commercial agency reports are by no means what I should term models of English prose style. They are usually about as dull and dry documents as any I know in the manner of their presentation of facts. Their authors have about as much need for imagination as the gentlemen who compile city directories and telephone books; beside them articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica are yellow journalism. All the same, they deal with facts, and facts can be more tragic than any romantic fiction ever produced. This case I speak of was simply the story of a harness maker who lived in Robbinsville, a small town up in the center of New York State. A little while ago our local agent wrote a policy on this man's stock, and because he had no rating showing his financial responsibility, the underwriter who passes on New York State business sent for a detailed report, which after some delay came to us yesterday."

Again he paused, and there was silence in the little office until he resumed.

"The rating said—and the manner of it showed that the reporter felt the poignancy of his words—that the harness maker was bankrupt. For nearly fifty years he had kept a harness shop in that same little town, and competition by a younger, more aggressive man had taken away a good many of his customers, his money had gone in ordinary living expenses, his assets had shrunk to almost nothing, and his liabilities had increased to fifteen hundred dollars, which to him might just as well have been a million, and now all he could do was to throw himself on the mercy of his creditors. Which he did."

"And what did they do?" said Helen, in a low voice.

"This is what the old man said—the commercial agency reporter gave it just as the old man said it: 'I have sold harness in this town since I was twenty years old. Now you say I am bankrupt. I want to do what is right. I don't want to cheat any man. I don't know where the money has gone. You gentlemen must do what is best. But I hope you can make some arrangement by which I can keep my business. I have had it so many, so many years. It probably won't be for much longer anyhow. But we don't want to go on the town—my wife and I. A man and his wife ought not to go on the town when he's worked honest all his life and is willing to work still.'"

Smith rose abruptly, and turned toward the window. "I've heard of 'Over the Hills to the Poorhouse' and similar things," the underwriter went on, after a moment, not looking at the girl, "but this somehow seemed different. Perhaps it was its unexpectedness, or finding it in such a way. Do you know," he said, "I felt as though I'd like to write a check for fifteen hundred dollars and send it to that old harness maker up in Robbinsville, just to give him one more chance."

He turned at the touch of a light hand on his arm.

"I'd like to go halves with you," said a voice which Helen's Boston acquaintances would hardly have recognized as hers.

"It's a go," said Smith. "I can't afford it; but five or six hundred dollars in actual cash would probably straighten things out pretty well, and if the creditors don't grant the extension to give the old fellow enough to carry him the rest of the way—by Jove, we'll finance the harness business, you and I!"

"You can count on me for my half. Shake hands on the bargain!" cried Helen, in the exhilaration following emotion sustained, and Smith gravely took her hand in his own. For a moment they stood side by side looking out on the East River which O'Connor's office overlooked, and for a space neither spoke. Then Helen returned somewhat sedately to her seat, and demurely spoke to Smith's back:—

"Well, my present interest in the fire insurance business is all that its most ardent champion could wish."

The underwriter turned back to her.

"I'm awfully glad if I haven't bored you," he said. "I've been holding forth like a vendor at a county fair. But I didn't mean to do it."

"You know you haven't bored me," she replied. "But I must be going now. I thank you very much for the trouble you have taken with my education. I hope it will not turn out to be altogether barren."

"I hope it will not," returned Smith, politely.

She was about to turn to the door. The underwriter made no move.

"Shall I say good-by now?" she asked.

"Here better than elsewhere. Good-by."

And then, to her subsequent surprise, Helen found herself saying:—

"I am stopping with my aunt, Miss Wardrop, at thirteen Washington Square, North. If you and I are to go into the harness business together, I hope you will come—and bring your price lists and things, won't you?"

"Thank you. I will surely come," the underwriter answered simply.

It was not until she found herself once more mounting the steps of her aunt's house that Miss Maitland recollected the lamp shade.



CHAPTER X

There have been in half a century many and significant changes in Washington Square. Of the buildings that defied time fifty years ago, not many remain. On the East especially, where Waverley Place—once more picturesquely called Rag Carpet Lane—links the Square to Broadway, the traditional brick structures have all been replaced by modern loft-buildings, almost as sober but far less austere. Elsewhere around the Square the old-time residences only here and there survive, encroached upon more and more by the inroads of modernity. Only along Washington Square North, east and west of Fifth Avenue, has there been consistent and effective resistance to the tidal march of progress; and it was east of the Avenue and in the immediate shadow of the New that Miss Mary Wardrop had lived for more than three generations.

Now there remained only three of what must not long ago have been a considerable community—those that dwelt on Washington Square at the time when Central Park was being made or when Lincoln called for a quarter of a million volunteers and in prompt and patriotic answer the Northern regiments passed through cheering crowds down Broadway.