"What do they tell you?" asked the girl, absorbedly.
"Everything;—or nearly all. Is a trust in the making? We know of it here, when we see the ownership of scattered factories change to a common head. Is prohibition gaining ground in the South? We can tell by the shut-down endorsements on brewery and distillery policies and by the increasing losses on saloons whose owners can make no further profit. Is there a corner in wheat or coffee or cotton? We follow the moves in the struggle by the ebb and flow of insurance in the big warehouses and elevators and compresses. Is the automobile market overstocked? Our rising loss ratio gives the reply. Are hard times coming? We can tell it when the merchants begin to cut down their insurance, which means their stocks as well, buying what they need from day to day. Is the panic over? We learn it by a rush of new dailies, buildings in course of construction, new and costly machinery introduced in factories, increased insurance all along the line."
"It sounds almost uncanny," said Helen, slowly. "Can you really learn all these things in this way?"
"Not all, of course, or at least not always, by any means, for the Guardian is only one of many companies, and only a small part, a fraction of one per cent, of the country's business comes to us. But we learn a great deal; much of it along rather surprising lines. I learned yesterday, for example, that the scandal which has been suspected to exist between the fair but probably frail Mazie Dupont and her manager is undoubtedly a matter of fact."
"How could you find that out?" Helen was amazed to find herself asking. The actress was a celebrity, to be sure, yet Miss Maitland, in her own self-analysis, should hardly have evinced curiosity regarding the details of her private life.
"Ownership of pretty country house up the Hudson transferred from his name to hers. Endorsement on our policy," replied Smith. "Of course that's not proof, but its pretty good presumptive evidence. We get similar cases every day. Here's a millionaire gets caught the wrong side of the stock market and needs money. We know it because his hundred thousand dollar Franz Hals goes to the art dealer's to be sold, or some big mercantile building that he owns is mortgaged to the Universal Savings Bank. Endorsement for our daily report. So they go."
"Well, I shall be afraid to have our furniture insured ever again after this," said the girl, with a laugh.
"Insure it with the Guardian, and I myself will see that your family skeletons are kept safely out of sight in the closets where they belong."
"That's very nice of you."
"I'm afraid, though, that your insurance wouldn't be very interesting, as regards sensation," the underwriter went on. "But there are lots of people the investigation of whose insurance affairs is in the field of a first-class detective agency. There are people, as you may or may not know, who make their living by having fires. These fires are fraudulent, of course, but fraud is very hard to prove. We can never secure a witness, for no one applies a match to his shop while any one is looking on; and with only circumstantial evidence and an individual pitted against a rich corporation, the jury generally gives the firebug the benefit of the doubt. Most of these people put in a claim for goods supposed to have been totally burned but which in reality they never possessed or which have been secretly removed just before the fire. Usually they have a fraudulent set of books, too, to back up their claim; and we have to keep a close watch all the time for birds of that feather."