White Ashes | Page 8

been deeply disturbed if there had been
a ground swell or a cross sea going around Point Judith, but I wouldn't
have been threatened with approaching senile decay en route."
Smith was from New York. The elderly Bostonian who shared his
section had thought so from the first. He had guessed it when Smith
took out for the second time his watch and replaced it with a snap; he
had felt his belief strengthened when his fellow traveler raised the sash
and looked impatiently up the idle track; and he had dismissed all doubt
when Smith, conversing with the apathetic brakeman, crisply indicated
his desire to return from a study of still life to the moving picture show
for which he had paid admission. The elderly Bostonian had observed
many New Yorkers, but it had never ceased to be a source of surprise to
him why they all should be so incessantly restless with an electric
anxiety to be getting somewhere else. To his own thinking one place
was very much the same as another,--with the exception of
Boston,--and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned.
If people were waiting for one, and one didn't appear, they merely
waited a little longer--that was all. If eternity was really eternity, there
was exactly as much time coming as had passed. In any event no
well-regulated New England mind would permit itself to become
disturbed over so small a matter.
Smith, guessing perhaps something of this from his companion's placid
face, felt a momentary embarrassment at his own impatience.

"I've an engagement at ten o'clock," he remarked, somewhat
apologetically, to his conservative neighbor. "Do you suppose this train
is going to let me keep it?"
The gentleman addressed cautiously expressed the opinion that if no
further malign influences were felt, and the train were presently to start,
the remainder of the journey would occupy comparatively little time.
And so in due course it came to pass as the elderly Bostonian had
predicted, clearly proving--if Smith had been open to accept proof--that
the Oriental method of reasoning is the most comfortable, whatever
may be said of its efficiency. He had left home at eleven on the night
before, and he arrived at the offices of Silas Osgood and Company, 175
Kilby Street, at exactly half an hour before eleven in the morning.
The exercise of walking up from the South Station, although the walk
was a short one, had wholly dispelled the irritation of the delay, so that
his smile was as genuine as ever when Mr. Silas Osgood held out his
courtly hand in welcome It would have been a very bitter mood that
could have withstood the Bostonian's greeting.
"We were looking for you a little earlier in the morning," he said, when
the first greetings were over. "You come so seldom nowadays that we
feel you ought to come as early as possible."
Smith laughed.
"If you'd said that to me when I had been waiting two hours somewhere
just the other side of North, East, West, or South Newton, I would have
probably snarled like a dyspeptic terrier. Now, seeing you, sir, I can
blandly reply that I came via Springfield and that the train was a trifle
late."
"Exceedingly courteous, I am sure, for one not a native," agreed the
other, smiling. "I am advised that the train has been known to be
delayed."
"Well, I'm here now, anyway," Smith rejoined, "and very glad to be. It

must be six weeks since I saw the good old gilded dome on the hill, and
six weeks seems a long time--or would, if they didn't keep me pretty
busy at the other end."
The two men were by this time in Mr. Osgood's private office, and the
closing door shut out the click of typewriters and the other sounds of
the larger room outside. As Mr. Osgood seated himself a trifle stiffly in
his wide desk chair, Smith looked at him affectionately. The reflection
came into his mind that the old gentleman was just a little older than
when they had last met, and the thought gave a pang.
Silas Osgood was nearing his seventieth year. A long life of kindly and
gentle thinking, of clean and correct living, had left him at this age as
clear-eyed and direct of gaze as a child, but the veins showed blue in
the rather frail hands, and the face was seamed with tiny wrinkles. Mr.
Osgood had been in business in the fire insurance world of Boston for
almost half a century. He was as well known as the very pavement of
Kilby Street, that great local artery of insurance life, and the pulse of
that life beat in him as strongly as his own.
To be an insurance man--and by