"That you blow up again. I would really like to see it just as you do, and that is much the best way—carry me along with you."
The underwriter looked momentarily away; then his eyes rested on her thoughtfully.
"All right. I'll do it," he said. "I'll make it so plain to you that you can't escape it. I'll hold you with my glittering eye till you cannot choose but hear," he quoted, with a smile.
"I do not choose but hear," Miss Maitland said.
Smith was silent for a long minute.
"The picturesque things are all very well in their way," he said. "Revolutions and railway building and all that. Let us take railway building for example—I was once in the construction department of a big railroad, myself. But every one can't get into that department, and even there, there is a good deal of routine and very little thrill. It's only once in a lifetime, practically, that a man gets his chance to build the suspension bridge that swings a mile above the chasm. With most railroad builders one day's work is pretty much like another's. Not much excitement, except at long intervals. To plan what you must do is interesting, of course, but the execution is generally a long grind."
"Yes," Helen assented; "I fancy that would be so."
"It is so. But even if it were not, the kind of obstacles that must be surmounted are very much the same, year in and year out. You ford quicksands; you evade granite hillsides; you fight walking delegates. What I mean is that the set of obstacles doesn't change much, and the environment of the railway constructor is always about the same. But that is not so with the underwriter. One moment he is in the construction camp of the road builder, and the next in the palace of the city banker; one moment he is in an Idaho sawmill, and the next in a New England college chapel; one moment he is in a Florida orange grove, and the next in a salmon cannery on the Oregon coast. Ten thousand businesses pass before his eyes, and he must be alert to the local conditions affecting every one. There is no fixed environment for the underwriter."
The girl interrupted him.
"That may be true. But there is no work of original construction about it, is there? Can you compare the vitality of your business with that of the men who create their own ideas? There is no routine about that. And after all, isn't that more vital than anything else can be?"