Sidney R. Kennedy

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I haven't done anything that any business man wouldn't have done. Some agents have decided that they'd rather represent the Salamander than the Guardian; in my opinion that's only the exercise of good judgment. If people prefer to give risks to us rather than you, they've a right to exercise the privilege of their choice. My feeling toward the Guardian is exactly what it has always been. If Mr. Wintermuth thinks he's been unfairly treated or that he has a grievance against me, let him come to me with it himself, and I will be glad to show him that he is wrong. ”

“ To his own thinking one place was very much the same as another,—with the exception of Boston,—and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned. If people were waiting for one, and one didn't appear, they merely waited a little longer—that was all. If eternity was really eternity, there was exactly as much time coming as had passed. In any event no well-regulated New England mind would permit itself to become disturbed over so small a matter.
Smith, guessing perhaps something of this from his companion's placid face, felt a momentary embarrassment at his own impatience. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was no wonder that poor Pelgram fluttered about so compelling a flame, and Isabel, as she looked at her friend, thought for the thousandth time that if she were a man—well, it was a little hard to say what she would do in that remote contingency, but she felt certain, at all events, that she would adore Helen.
As a matter of fact no young lady in all Boston seemed less likely to become a man in the next or any subsequent incarnation. ”

“ A great city is a wonderful place in a thousand ways, not the least of which is its magical influence upon human relationships. Perhaps its mere size, the multiplicity of its sights and sounds, its effect of isolating an individual in the midst of an almost impenetrable throng—perhaps these things are chiefly responsible. But it is certain that, in common with the desert and the sea, a city like London or Paris or New York carries in its very atmosphere a sense of almost devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. ”

“ The singers of world songs find voice to-day, just as they always have, and no lack of all the panoply of old-time chivalry and war can make a friendship slipping into love less than a beautiful and wondrous thing. It is perhaps in some ways to be regretted that the inspiring bombast of the elder days is no longer in vogue—the grandiloquent arrogance that led a man to tie a lady's ribband to his arm and proclaim on fear of sudden death her puissance of beauty throughout the world. ”

“ 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." ”

“ There has never been a fire of this magnitude that has not absolutely ruined many of the smaller companies. It takes either a very strong or a very conservative insurance company to weather a great conflagration. After each of our big city fires in this country many and many a company has found that after it paid its losses there would be nothing left to carry it to further existence—capital and surplus were both wiped out. And it must be said to their credit that most of them, at a time like this, pay every cent they owe, even if they have to go out of business directly afterwards. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Don't know your underwriting policy, hey? Well, they don't need to—they've got an underwriting policy of their own. Do you know what it is? It's to take a line on anything that's not actually on fire. They're the slop bucket of Boston, the standard lemon of Kilby Street; they've got a loss ratio of three thousand per cent, and they've burnt the hide off every company that's ever touched them. You make me tired. You're a fine, consistent bunch, you are—to pose as a conservative company in New York and write every skate in Boston through Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy! ”

“ It is natural enough for men who deal with the tiny, circling ball of a roulette wheel or with the turn of playing cards to deny any power higher than chance; but how of Napoleon, dicing for empires without end?—and how of Columbus, sailing indomitably westward into the wheel of the sun?—how of Shan Tung, surveying the rotting corpses of seven times seven cities of Chinamen slain by the Tartar sword?—and how of Boston, on this February morning, looking white-faced on its own ruin, a ruin which, furthermore, seemed scarcely begun? Whether Fate be Fate or not, Boston believed in it that day. ”

“ Many of its best agents look on me as the company; the Guardian is just a name, but the man they do business with is F. Mills O'Connor, and I'll guarantee that a lot of the best of them will keep on doing business with me, no matter with what concern I'm associated. Now the Guardian has as fine a class of big city business on its books as any company of its size in the field, and I'll bet that in the big cities, where you've lost your money, its business is not only better but larger than the Salamander's. In New York and Boston and Philadelphia you couldn't beat it to save your life. ”

“ The thing remains as secret, as recondite, as baffling as ever. Good Bostonians regard attempts to solve the problem as not only futile but impertinent—almost blasphemous—accepting it as a factor in the general inscrutability which veils the world, and are content to let it remain such.
From these reflections it is patent that this large patience, this Oriental calm, had not yet come to Mr. Richard Smith of New York, who felt a certain irritation somewhat modified by amusement as he sat looking out of the car window at an apathetic brakeman who languidly gazed down the shining rails. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Only a few miles to the eastward the roofs of Boston and the golden dome of the Capitol glittered in the morning sun, and there were the bright rails stretching clean and straight up to the very gates of the city. Railroading was a silly business anyway, thought Smith. An express train should be consistent, and not suddenly decide to become a landmark instead of a mobile and dynamic agent. He almost wished he had taken his ticket by the Fall River boat—as he probably would have done had he been a Bostonian. ”

“ Those persons now whose ears are close laid to the breathing of the world all believe in Fate. Not negatively, not foolishly, not in the manner which sets forth that what will be, will be, and any opposing effort is therefore futile; but in the way of the true philosopher, of the man who can look upon the ruin or the loss of all that he held dear, and realize that what is to him a tragedy must, in some light cruelly hidden from him, be conserving some higher, some more inscrutable end. ”

“ Helen felt inclined to defend her contemporaries, but as she looked at the old aristocrat before her and contrasted his manner with that of some of the men in her own set, she did not know quite what to say. Pelgram's poses seemed cheap and shallow, and Charlie Wilkinson's free-and-easy carriage might have its virtues, but it certainly was not marked by dignity, nor did it make particularly for respect.
"They have no reverence for age, none for the great things, the great days that some of us remember. ”

“ Supporting the weight of this roof, wide spans of steel branched, curving upward from the walls at east and west—and it was one of these walls whose integrity was now so bitterly beset.
A great fire makes its own fuel; it finds food where no food seems to be; stone walls crumble like sugar before it; it devours iron like dry wood, and plays wild pranks with steel. To its grisly power and its reckless humor the Station was now to bear witness. ”

“ If a grist-mill owner or a storekeeper has a busy corner of two Southern streets where passers-by congregate on market day, he gets the representation of a fire company or two, and from time to time sends in a risk to the head office, whose underwriters go nearly frantic in endeavoring to decipher the hidden truth in the dusty reports of these well-intentioned amateurs.
But it is not so in New England. In New England fire insurance reaches its proudest estate. It is a profession, and to its true votaries almost a religion. ”

“ 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. ”