"Not at all. Why, do you know that baseball is the most American thing in America? And it's about the only wholly American thing, as we like to think of America. There is only one other place besides the ball ground where the spirit of genuine democracy shows itself, and that is in politics. There you will find the high and low together--the judge putting off his ermine and getting down from the bench elbow to elbow with Tom Radigan, the East Side barkeep, when the Patrick J. O'Dowd Association of the Eighty-eighth Assembly District gives its annual outing or its ball. But that's not true democracy because it's very largely selfish--inspired by the desire of votes. Now baseball--that's different. Inspired by no desire but to see a good game--and for the home team to win. Nowhere else in the world can you see democracy in its fine flower--at its best. There you can see them all--judges and dock rats, brokers and bricklayers, cotillion leaders and truck drivers, historians and elevator starters, lawyers and the men they keep out of jail, college boys, grocers, retired capitalists, and the lady friends of the whole collection. You'll find them all there. Oh, you ought to go to a game yourself. Then you'd understand." 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.