Isabel Hurd sat bolt upright on the stiff and blackly austere divan, and surveyed her friend with mingled surprise and concern.

"My dear Helen," she protested, "to my certain knowledge you have seen your cousin only twice this summer, and surely it would not hurt you to go to her reception."

"I disagree with you," replied Miss Maitland. "If there is any equity in social obligations, it would decidedly hurt me."

"Why, what do you mean?"

"Well, just because I take the trouble to watch a certain person select her wall paper, is that any valid reason why I should shed upon that person the effulgence of my eyes? Not that I am a sufferer from effulgent eyes and need the services of an oculist—I'm only quoting—but it seems to me awfully one-sided. I hate Cousin Henrietta's receptions—dull, poky affairs—where Mrs. Parkinson weeps into her teacup and the Misses Pyncheon are apt—most apt—to recite a little Browning. I detest receptions, anyway, and if I have to go to any more of them I shall scream. If you suggest my going to any, Isabel, I shall scream at you!"

Miss Hurd smiled a superior smile.

"Why, my dear child," she said, "you know perfectly well that I don't care an atom whether you go to your Cousin Henrietta's or not. But I never knew you were so down on receptions. I hope you haven't forgotten that next month you promised to receive with mother and me at ours."

Helen wavered a moment, then obstinately continued.

"Yes, I have. I've forgotten it absolutely. If I ever said it, I must have been suffering from febrile lesions,—if there are any such things,—and I hereby wave the promise aside with the magnificent gesture of a satrap ordering somebody to execution."

Isabel no longer smiled; her answer was a little acid and very distinct.

"Of course, if you don't want to help mother and me, no one will compel you to, my dear. Do precisely as you like; do not think of us in any way—we can easily get some one else."

Miss Maitland looked quickly up, and saw that there was a suspicious brightness in her friend's eyes, whereby she understood that Isabel felt actually hurt by her diatribe against the social dragon and his works—at least when his works were interwoven with Isabel's own concerns. And because Helen was tender-hearted under all her social armor, and because she and Isabel were fonder of one another than one would have thought possible, considering the diversities between them, she was smitten with swift compunction and hastily withdrew so much of her protest as touched her friend.

"You are a silly person, but a dear," she said contritely; "and I didn't really mean what I said about receptions—at least, about yours. But I meant every word about Cousin Henrietta."

A slight shadow of doubt lingered in Isabel's eyes, and Helen, seeing it, crossed quickly over to the divan and kissed her lightly on the cheek. The olive branch was accepted and peace restored.

"All the same," Miss Maitland presently went on, "there are times, I confess, when I get so tired of some of the things I do that I feel as though I couldn't possibly do them again."

Isabel nodded understandingly.

"Is there anything in particular that you are so tired of?" she insinuatingly asked.

"Yes, Miss Portia, there is. And furthermore you know as well as I do what that something is."

"I would hesitate to mention it," said Miss Hurd, with a smile.

"Well, I wouldn't. On the contrary I freely and unqualifiedly announce that I am excessively tired of a thousand things, most of which begin with P. I am tired of portraits and portrait painters; I am tired of posing and of poseurs; I am tired of palettes and paint; I am tired of—" she stopped, breaking off a little suddenly.

"Well, complete it. You are tired of Pelgram, I suppose," said Isabel, composedly.

"Pelgram, then. Yes, I am," the other girl admitted.

Her friend raised her eyebrows, and glanced at her somewhat curiously.

"You don't have to marry him, you know," she remarked in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Of course I don't," Helen replied quickly. "But I have to sit to him four times a week until that unspeakable portrait is finished. And it's my belief that it never will be finished. He won't even let me look at it now. It's my opinion that he's doing like Penelope, and destroying every night what he has accomplished during the day. I would never have promised to have it done if I had suspected what I was in for. And if it were for any one else but old Aunt Mary Wardrop, I'd back out now."

Isabel regarded her sympathetically. A portrait was bad enough without the added embarrassment of an amatory artist.

"Is he really as difficult as that?" she asked.

"Even more difficult. He's more difficult than anything conceivable—except analytical trig," she added reflectively.

"Don't mix art, psychology, and mathematics, or you will certainly get into trouble," said her friend. "And really, if I were you, I would try to forget that I had been 'higher' educated. It's enough to give one the creeps to hear a perfectly normal girl talk of analytical trig—whatever that may be—if there is such a thing."

Helen laughed.

"I'm not actually sure, myself, that there is. For, as I remember it now, it deals almost exclusively with imaginary or worse than imaginary quantities. I remember distinctly that i with the acute accent meant the square root of minus one—and stood for 'imaginary' on the face of it. That was right at the start, and the farther you went the farther from reality you found yourself. But I don't remember anything of the subject—only the name—I wouldn't dream of being so Bostonian as that."

"Well, it's almost as bad merely to refer to it," said Miss Hurd.
"Especially when you know that I never could pass beginner's algebra."

The two girls laughed together. It was perfectly true that Isabel, who was keen almost to the point of brilliance in the application of mathematics to such practical matters as finance and real life, had never academically been anything but a hopeless dunce, while Helen, who had penetrated so far into the upper occult that the mind shuddered to follow, was notoriously incapable of making her personal accounts balance within fifty per cent. It was an understood situation that always amused them both.

They had been friends all their lives, these two, or so nearly all their lives that the residue was hardly worth consideration. As each was now nearing the middle twenties, it must have been almost a full generation since they had been presented to one another. It was at the respective ages of six and five that little Miss Maitland and little Miss Hurd had been discreetly conveyed to the decorous Back Bay Kindergarten which was known to all Bostonians of a certain class as the "Child's Cultural Institute" of Miss Dorcas Kingsbury. It was there they met, under the watchful eye and the eagle espionage of Miss Dorcas. That good lady was not distinguished for her social graces, but her introduction of these two small maids was an instant success. It has subsequently been established, by hesper light so to speak, that the bond which first united the two was their chastened and wide-eyed mutual marveling at six long black cockscrew curls which marked—for only by a figure of speech could they have been said to adorn—the lateral aspects of Miss Dorcas's chignon. Forth they jutted, these remarkable structures, from cul-de-lampes above the lady's ears, and thence they descended, three toward the right shoulder, three toward the left. But their most astonishing quality was their buoyancy, their resiliency, which made them vital and active things, and not mere soulless parts of an ordered design.

At all events the two little newcomers, cowering somewhat under the glittering gaze of their preceptress, drew for protection close to one another, small hand found small hand, and a friendship was cemented which the swirling years had proved unable to break.

Their later experiences at this fountain of learning served only to draw them closer still. Many a time, in later years, would they smile together, remembering incidents that had happened in the square old red brick house with the green blinds, and the orderly terrible courtyard with the straight narrow seats set bolt upright against a speechless wall, and the little green pump that only grown-up persons were permitted to touch; remembering, too, the long low-backed benches in the schoolroom, row after row to the end of the low-ceiled room, and the tiny gray blackboard, and the painful corner behind the stove where recalcitrant pupils were stood, awaiting the approach of tardy contrition or increased mental attainments; remembering, above all, the grave, kind face of the teacher herself, Miss Dorcas Kingsbury—of the Kingsburys—reduced in her middle age to conducting a "cultural institute," but as undeviating and inflexible in her idea of duty as was the very line of her uncompromising brow. Not bad training for small girls, that of Miss Dorcas; Helen and Isabel would not have changed it, in their memories at least, for the fairest lane of learning in the world.

Time went on and gradually carried them beyond the pale of Miss Dorcas's influence and over the horizon beyond the sight of her curious curls. But the school-girl lovers had become friends—which was of much more consequence. They stayed together as they grew, although in intellectual concerns Helen soon left Isabel behind. A year the elder, she was also the more dominant, and had always taken the lead in their mutual affairs. Isabel, who had a will of her own, did not always follow; but there was never any struggle for precedence, and Helen's unselfishness prevented her from ever assuming an unpleasant autocracy.

It would have been difficult, at any rate, to associate anything unpleasant with Miss Maitland. She was tall, well over the middle height, and her hair was of that uncompromising blackness that made one think of things Amazonian—or would have done so had not her deep violet eyes softened the effect in a peculiarly attractive manner. 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. There are Bostonian persons of the female kind who could with readiness be conceived as turning into men without any sea-change or especially startling biological transmutation. But Isabel was not one of them. Small and dainty, she was of the gold-and-white, essentially feminine type. She lived alone with her parents in the solid old-fashioned house on the north side of the Common, almost under the shadow of the State House dome. It made very little difference to Isabel where she lived, and since her father would never consider moving to any other locality nor rebuilding the rather patriarchal homestead which he had occupied for twenty-five years, it was just as well that the daughter was so complaisant. She, moreover, was the only person who looked upon John M. Hurd with a clear understanding of his habits of thought. She could herself accomplish things with him, when her way did not conflict too directly with his own, but she gained her points first by concentrating her attack on the matters really of import to her, and second by taking her way whenever she saw an avenue open, notifying her somewhat surprised parent afterward that she had done so.

"Father once told me a story," Isabel had said, "of a man who went to a railroad president about a culvert he wanted to build under the railroad track, and the president told him that he should have built his culvert first and asked permission afterwards. And I invariably say now, if father protests against any of my performances, that he never should have told me that story. And he usually gives a kind of growl which I have always interpreted to mean that all is well."

Isabel had a little money of her own, but she never used the income. Instead, she put it in the bank and lived on her allowance. She was not John M. Hurd's daughter for nothing. Her mother, a stiff, lean, gray woman with a tremendous capacity for being both busy and uncomfortable and making every one around her share the latter feeling, had little or nothing to do with Isabel or her friends. She was the typical Puritan, the salt of a somewhat dour earth, and how Isabel ever came into her household would be difficult to say. The mother had much undemonstrative affection for her daughter, but no understanding and less sympathy. She could never accustom herself to the girl's habit of facing every problem when it had to be faced but not before; she herself was used to spying trouble afar off, rushing forth with a sort of fanatical desperation, and falling upon its breast. John M. Hurd had selected her for her sterling and saving qualities, and he had always found her all he could have wished. From her daughter's viewpoint she left much to be desired, at least in the capacity of a confidante, and this prerogative had long since been assumed by Miss Maitland.

That young lady, more reserved than Isabel, usually preferred to receive rather than to bestow confidences. Only in unusual cases, such as the one now under contemplation, was Helen moved to such downright speech. But in this instance she acknowledged the presence of an irritation alien to her customary serenity, and unconsciously she hit on conversation as a soothing influence. Thus it chanced that the talk was still on Pelgram when the doorbell rang and the butler announced that Mr. Wilkinson was calling.

"I believe I could write a manual of artistic courtship," concluded Miss Maitland, "with a glossary embracing every shade of every color of an artist's mood. Charlie Wilkinson was absurd, of course, the other day, with his 'nuances,' but he was amazingly near the truth at the same time, for all that. Isabel, I'm sick and tired of nuances—I confess it freely."

"Well," said her friend, soothingly, "here is Charlie now. He ought to be a fine antidote, for Heaven knows he hasn't a nuance in his entire anatomy."

Mr. Wilkinson entered.

"My dear Isabel," he said reproachfully, as he shook hands, "I couldn't help hearing most of what you were just saying about me, and I assure you that I feel deeply flattered, but at the same time a little hurt. I dislike to be denied the possession of anything, even an abstract quality, whether I want it or have any use for it or not. Miss Maitland, I bid you an exceedingly good day, and venture to express the hope that you will concede that latent in my anatomy I may have a liberal share of that something—the name of which I failed to catch—although I may perhaps have up to now given no evidence of its possession."

"You would do much better, Charlie," said his hostess, with a laugh, "if you announced with all the emphasis at your command that you had none of this particular quality concealed about your person. Whatever it was, Helen just said that she never wanted to see or hear of such a thing again."

"Miss Maitland," said the visitor with due solemnity, "I assure you that whatever else I may be, I am as free from the taint of this unmentionable attribute as a babe unborn. Isabel, you will bear me out in this?"

"I feel sure of it," Helen replied smilingly. "In fact, I should have exonerated you even without inside information of any sort. Really, I'm awfully glad you've come. Here we are, two lone dull girls, hungry to be amused. Be as chivalrous as you can in our distressing state."

"You two lone girls lonely!" retorted Mr. Wilkinson. "Ridiculous! That is certainly a fine ground on which to seek sympathy from me! I forget who it is has the proverb, 'Never pity a woman weeping or a cat in the dark.' And I am reminded of it when I look at you two. You and my fair cousin, when you have one another to talk to, are just about as much in need of sympathy as a tiger is of tea . . . Speaking of tea—" he turned to Isabel with bland inquiry in his face, after a hasty glance about the room to make sure that no ulterior preparations had been made. "I am anxious," he explained, "to see what progress has been made since last I inculcated my theories as to edibles—and detrimentals."

Isabel rose with a sigh.

"I see that I shall have to go and superintend the matter personally," she said, "for the customs of years are too strong to be utterly overcome all at once. I can only dimly conjecture Peter's dismay if he were asked to pass the Hamburger steak to Mr. Wilkinson, yet that is the shadowy future awaiting him."

With a laugh she vanished through the doorway, and the visitor seated himself solemnly across from Miss Maitland, whom he then proceeded to regard with a gloomy eye.

"It is a fearful strain on one's comic spirit to have it suddenly cooled," he said. "It makes it liable to crack, and then when you beat on it you get nothing but a dull stodgy sound. I feel that there are times when my ebullience, my wealth of genteel diablerie, my flow of jeux d'esprit astonish even myself, but those times are never the ones when my hostess says, in effect: 'Charlie, you can be such an awful idiot when you want to that I wish you'd be one now—go on, there's a dear!'—which was substantially what you said to me. I don't mind telling you that it's very upsetting."

"Oh, I'm awfully sorry," Miss Maitland replied. "I didn't mean to. I should be simply heart-broken if your spring of divertissement should ever run dry—especially if you held me in any way responsible. Charlie serious! Good heavens! And yet, on second thought, would it not have a certain piquant lure, gained from its utter strangeness, which would be simply overwhelming? Try it and see. No audience was ever more expectant."

Wilkinson's gloom melted in meditation.

"Do you know," he said thoughtfully, "that there has never been in your attitude toward me the regard and genuine respect—I may almost say the reverence—that I could wish to see there. If it were not such a perfectly horrible thing to say, I should say that you do not understand me. As it chances—though you would be surprised to learn it—there is at this moment a mighty problem working out, or trying to work out, its solution in my brain. You tell me to be serious, and since I want the advice of every one, including those whose advice is of problematic value, I will be. And who knows but when you see me engaged, or about to engage, in practical, cosmic matters, swinging them with a gigantic intellectual force, your veneration for me may develop with remarkable rapidity?"

"Who knows, indeed? Go ahead—you have my curiosity beautifully sharpened, at any rate, before a word is said."

Wilkinson cleared his throat and bent forward with an air of concentration, meant to indicate that he was marshaling his ideas. Then he said in a hushed and confidential tone: "What do you know of trolley systems?"

Miss Maitland looked at him in surprise.

"Goodness, Charlie!" she said; "I know there are such things—the term is perfectly familiar. I have always supposed that trolley cars were part of trolley systems, but I should hesitate to go very far beyond that statement."

The young man nodded gravely.

"You are right. Your information, so far as it extends, is absolutely correct, but it hardly goes far enough. Trolley cars belong to trolley companies which operate trolley systems. That's very well put, don't you think?"

"Very. Go on—I'm awfully interested."

"I'll put it a little more simply. The scientific attitude is too difficult to maintain. And besides, that was just about as far as I could go scientifically, anyway. I had much better deal with concrete facts—or with what I hope to convert into them. Don't you agree? Although I felt rather well in my academic habiliments."

"Much better," Miss Maitland promptly agreed. "And there would be the additional advantage that I would quite likely know what you were talking about, which would not be at all a certainty if you insisted on retaining your scientific manner."

"It's this way, then," said her companion. "It's this way. John M. Hurd, Isabel's father, my step-uncle, Mrs. Hurd's husband—John M. Hurd, in short, is the President of the most important trolley system in this vicinity, the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company. He is also, 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, as he turned to go. "More depends upon this than you pampered children of luxury can ever guess. Isabel, I congratulate you on the educational advance of your butler. Miss Maitland, I am your very devoted."

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