ce. "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?