It seemed to Miss Maitland that this Smith was a very unusual person. And his enthusiasms were strangely contagious. Fire insurance, New York, and now baseball, things in none of which had she ever felt more than a flicker of interest, suddenly, seen through his eyes, assumed a reality, a vital quality she had never dreamed they could possess. Was it all the difference in point of view?
"It isn't because baseball in my opinion does more real good than all the socialistic documents put out by high-browed agitators will ever do," Smith was continuing, "that I go to it. Not at all. I go to it because I like it, and because I like to yell."
"Do you yell?" asked Miss Maitland of Boston.
"You do—that is, I do," said Smith, tersely. "At all events, when things go our way."
"And don't you think I would be likely to—yell?"
"Well, hardly, at first," the underwriter answered. "After a while, probably. If you'd like to go and see, though, whether you'd yell or not, I should like awfully to take you."
Thinking the matter over afterward, Helen was at a loss to discover why she had so readily accepted this somewhat unusual invitation. To see this young man at an office on a matter of business was all very well; it was one thing to meet him casually on the street and walk with him a few blocks up the Avenue—but it was decidedly another to promise she would accompany him to a professional baseball game. Baseball, of all things! Yet she had accepted, and on the whole she could not seem to be quite sorry that she had. But it would never do to tell Aunt Mary. Yet Miss Wardrop must of course be told. Helen was twenty-five years of age and her own mistress, but Boston in the blood dies hard.
It was moribund, however, on the afternoon that Smith called to escort her northward to the field where those idols of Gotham, the Giants, were indulging in a death grapple with their rivals from Chicago in the closing series of the year, with the National League pennant hanging on its result. Her companion had, to be sure, called formally and in due order upon Miss Wardrop and her niece on an evening of the intervening period, so that Helen felt her sharp New England sense of the proprieties lulled to a state of pleasing and comfortable coma.
The elevated train which took them to the grounds was jammed to the very doors with cheerfully suffering humanity, and Miss Maitland, most of whose previous experience with crowds had been with those decorous gatherings in the subway beneath the Common, regarded the struggling multitude with covert dismay.
"If you should find the elbows of the populace unduly insinuated into you, don't worry," her companion advised. "It will merely be part of your general education. Getting back to the soil is nowhere beside the democratic experience you are about to enjoy," he added.