dian and let the others
go. This, however, in nearly every case was out of the question, and
eventually all these agencies went with their fellows. During the
first month of the new year almost one hundred agents, some of them
among the most satisfactory and profitable of the Guardian's plant, had
been compelled to resign. The income from these agencies reached to
the neighborhood of one hundred thousand dollars annually, and Mr.
Wintermuth began to take decided notice of his strategic position.

Of course, whenever an agency was lost, there was the possibility of
replacing the company in some non-Conference office; but this was not
so easy a matter. The non-Conference agents were principally lower
grade, cut-rate concerns, and not of the standard either professionally
or financially to which the Guardian was accustomed. The company's
field men, continually confronted by the discouraging task of finding
in a town a satisfactory agent, when none existed save in Conference
offices, became disheartened. Their letters to the home office
indicated their demoralization and Mr. Gunterson could not think how to
direct their campaigns for them.

At this juncture the hand on the reins needed to be both delicate and
firm, and the hand of Mr. Gunterson, while it may have had its moments
of inflexibility, was never delicate. And it was firm with less and
less frequency as the days went by. Never any too well convinced, at
the bottom of his heart, of the soundness of any course he elected to
pursue, the apparent necessity of sitting helplessly in his office and
watching his agency plant disintegrate before his eyes robbed him of
much of the assurance that had always been one of his predominant
factors. Outwardly his manner remained as impressive as ever, but it
was retained with an ever increasing difficulty.

In this dark hour his only sustaining reflection was that this rule,
which was working such havoc among the Guardian's smaller agencies, did
not apply to the larger cities whence came a large proportion of the
company's premium income. Boston, of course, with a local rule even
more radical than that of the field generally, had gone the way of the
small towns; but in New York separation was out of the question since
most of the important companies maintained their own local departments,
dispensing with agents altogether; in Philadelphia the local
underwriters had never been able to agree among themselves on any
dras