"Now I must ask you another leading question," the other continued.
"What do you know about fire insurance?"
"Well, I ought to know a little about it," replied Helen, "considering the fact that my uncle, Mr. Osgood, has one of the leading fire insurance agencies in Boston. Whenever there's a big fire he's always quoted as 'Silas Osgood, the veteran underwriter, said so and so.'"
"You will pardon me," said Mr. Wilkinson, "if my legal method of thought calls to your attention that 'ought to know' and 'do know' are not in all cases coincident. My original question was, 'What do you know about fire insurance?'"
"Not as much as I ought, I'm afraid," Helen confessed. "Uncle Silas belongs to the school which believes in locking his business in the safe when he leaves the office, and as he never mentions it, I know very little about it—though I don't at all care for your legal method of establishing my ignorance."
"A true gentleman ignores a lady's embarrassments. Fire insurance, to put it briefly, is indemnity against losses by fire. Companies do it. You pay them a little money called a premium—no connection with trading stamps—and when your house burns down they pay you a tremendous amount. It's a remarkable idea."
"It certainly sounds so, as you put it."
"The personal application is this: John M. Hurd owns a trolley system which ought to be insured for five or six million dollars if it was insured at all. But it isn't. And it is my life work to make him put on that insurance, and make him do it in a way that will count—for me, you understand."
"But how do you expect to convince him?" asked the girl. "If he never has insured the system, the chances are that he doesn't believe in insurance, or that he doesn't think the system is likely to burn up, or that he has some other good reason for not insuring it."
"That's exactly why I'm asking your advice," her companion replied. "Probably you are correct in all three of your conjectures. What I want is some way to make him do something that he doesn't believe in and from which he never expects to get his money back and that he has some other perfectly proper argument for turning down—and make him do it, just the same. Eventually he's got to do it—it's a case of sheer necessity—for me."
"Why don't you ask Isabel? I think I hear her coming."