tention nor desire to meet any one halfway.

Now Mr. Wintermuth had always held that a man too anxious to change his
affiliations was no proper man for the Guardian, and this indifference
of Mr. Gunterson pleased him. It further developed that Mr. Gunterson
had at last, in the Elsass-Lothringen, found almost what he had always
been seeking; his company gave him an entirely free hand,--a highly
desirable thing for an underwriting manager,--and he did not know
whether he should ever care about looking for anything else. At the
psychological moment he nonchalantly displayed to Mr. Wintermuth's
interested gaze his twenty-two per cent loss ratio for the
Elsass-Lothringen, but in the next breath, recalling a few recent
preliminary tremors unpleasantly suggestive of other catastrophes
through which he had passed, and not to overlook a link in his
entangling chain, he stated that after all, though, he was an American,
and intimated that as such he sometimes felt he would a little rather
devote himself to the interests of an American underwriting
institution. Only occasionally did he have this feeling--still, it was
there, and he must needs admit it.

Such was the man to whom Mr. Wintermuth had come, and to whom he
ultimately extended an invitation to present himself for the
consideration of the Guardian's directorate. And Mr. Gunterson,
uneasily suspecting that the structure of the German institution might
at any moment collapse at some quite unexpected point, and calculating
that he might secure the managerial berth for his equally inefficient
brother-in-law, and thus keep the salary in the family, cautiously
accepted the invitation. So this was the man who, a few days later,
faced the full board, who with affable confidence in his own abilities
won over even the somewhat skeptical Whitehill, and who was, on the
ninth day of December, 1912, elected Vice-President and underwriting
manager of the Guardian Fire Insurance Company of New York.

He guaranteed to free himself from his Teutonic engagements and
alliances in time to join the Guardian by the first of January. Suave
and profound, with his grave glance suggesting unutterable depth, he
bowed himself out of the presence of Mr. Wintermuth and the other
directors. And the ruminative elevator carried to the street level the
best satisfied man in New York.

At once the appointment was made public, and newspapers and individuals
alike refrained from expressing what the