White Ashes. Sidney R. Kennedy
ex-officio, chairman of the board of directors, and except for some dynamos, cars, conductors, tracks, and other equipment, he is the trolley system."
"That sounds like Mr. Hurd," the girl acknowledged.
"Now I must ask you another leading question," the other continued.
"What do you know about fire insurance?"
"Well, I ought to know a little about it," replied Helen, "considering the fact that my uncle, Mr. Osgood, has one of the leading fire insurance agencies in Boston. Whenever there's a big fire he's always quoted as 'Silas Osgood, the veteran underwriter, said so and so.'"
"You will pardon me," said Mr. Wilkinson, "if my legal method of thought calls to your attention that 'ought to know' and 'do know' are not in all cases coincident. My original question was, 'What do you know about fire insurance?'"
"Not as much as I ought, I'm afraid," Helen confessed. "Uncle Silas belongs to the school which believes in locking his business in the safe when he leaves the office, and as he never mentions it, I know very little about it—though I don't at all care for your legal method of establishing my ignorance."
"A true gentleman ignores a lady's embarrassments. Fire insurance, to put it briefly, is indemnity against losses by fire. Companies do it. You pay them a little money called a premium—no connection with trading stamps—and when your house burns down they pay you a tremendous amount. It's a remarkable idea."
"It certainly sounds so, as you put it."
"The personal application is this: John M. Hurd owns a trolley system which ought to be insured for five or six million dollars if it was insured at all. But it isn't. And it is my life work to make him put on that insurance, and make him do it in a way that will count—for me, you understand."
"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, outré 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,