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.

"Busines