“Oh, call it a business,” returned Murray, “but think of it as a profession. It’s the way you regard it yourself that counts, and you can’t go far astray in that if you stop to think what is required of a good insurance man. Sterling integrity, for one thing, and tact and judgment. A man who brings in a good ten-thousand-dollar risk is more valuable than the man who brings in one hundred thousand dollars that is turned down by the physicians or at the home office. And the first requisite for advancement is absolute trustworthiness. There are temptations, even for a solicitor—commission rebates to the insured that are contrary to the ethics of the business—and there are greater temptations higher up. You will learn, as in no other line, that a man wants what he can’t get, even if he didn’t want it when he could get it, and he will pay a high price for what he wants. Collusion in a local office might give it to him, in spite of all precautions taken; such collusion might be worth ten thousand dollars to a man who had no record of refusal by other companies against him, and ten thousand dollars could be split up very nicely between the local agent and the company’s physician. So integrity, unswerving integrity, is rated exceptionally high, and the least suspicion of trickery or underhand dealing may keep a capable man on the lowest rung of the ladder for all time, even if it doesn’t put him out of the business entirely. You are paid to protect your company, so far as lies in your power, and to get business by all honorable means; if you resort to dishonorable means, even in your company’s interests, there is always the suspicion that you will use the same methods against its interests whenever that may be to your personal advantage.”
Owen Ross pondered this deeply on his way home. It gave a new dignity to his occupation. He had taken up insurance because it happened to be the only available opening at a time when he was out of employment. He had been a clerk for a big corporation that had recently combined two branch offices, thus materially reducing its office force, and Ross had been one of those to suffer. His father, a prosperous merchant, had expressed himself, when consulted, in this way:
“I will give you a place here whenever that is necessary to enable you to live, but I prefer that you should complete your preliminary business training under some one else. No boy can consider himself a success until he has proved his independence, and no boy can be sure he has proved that until he has made a secure place for himself outside the family circle.”
So Ross, being wise enough to see the reason and justice of this, endeavored to show his independence by securing a position with Murray. And, although fairly successful from the start, he was only just beginning to take a real interest in his work. Murray liked him and encouraged him: there was, he thought, the making of a good and successful man in him, and he frequently went to considerable trouble to explain the theory and practice of insurance. Then, too, he knew that Ross had married just before he lost his other position, and that he was living in a modest little flat on his own earnings, in spite of the fact that he had a father who would be much more ready to assist him financially than he was to take him into his own office at that particular time. In fact, the elder Ross was quite willing that his son and his son’s wife should live with him, holding only that the family influence should not extend to his first business connections, but Owen deemed the flat a necessary evidence of his independence.
“I’ll get that sanctimonious optimist to-morrow,” he mused as he walked along. “He can’t answer those arguments that Murray gave me. He is content because the Lord will provide, but why may not I be the human instrument through which the Lord makes provision? That sounds presumptuous, but why not? Hasn’t He provided for others in just this way? Hasn’t many a man, convinced against his will, protected the future of those he loved barely in time?” He laughed quietly at a thought that occurred to him. “If this man should be insured to-morrow and die the next day,” he went on, “he would think the Lord had provided, but if he has to pay the premiums for twenty years, he’ll think it all very human. I’m beginning to understand him.”
He was still smiling at this quaint conceit when he entered his flat and was informed by his wife that Mrs. Becker had been there to see him. Mrs. Becker was a woman who did washing and occasional cleaning for them.
“To see me!” he exclaimed. “Why, her dealings are all with you.”
“It has something to do with insurance,” his wife explained. “She knows you’re in that business, of course, and she is in deep distress. She was crying when she was here this afternoon, but I couldn’t understand what the trouble was. She said she’d come back this evening.”
Ross puzzled over this a good deal during dinner, and even tried to get some additional information by questioning his wife closely. Exactly what did the woman say? Her words might be “all Greek” to his wife and still be intelligible to him, if only she could repeat them.
“But I can’t,” she insisted. “I was so sorry for her and so helpless that I really didn’t hear it all, anyway. I only know that it had something to do with an application or a premium or a policy, and her husband is very sick and she needs money.”