Mr. Inglesby.

Mr. Inglesby had a desk downstairs in the bank, in the little pompous room marked “President’s Office,” where at stated hours and times he presided grandly; just as he had a big bare office at the mills, where he was rather easy of access, willing to receive any one who might chance to catch him in.  But these rooms we were entering without permission were the sanctum sanctorum, the center of that wide web whose filaments embraced and ensnared the state.  It would be about as easy to stroll casually into the Vatican for an informal chat with the Holy Father, to walk unannounced into the presence of the Dalai Lama, or to drop in neighborly on the Tsar of all the Russias, as to penetrate unasked into these offices during the day.

We stepped upon the velvet square of carpet covering the floor of what must have once been a very handsome guest chamber and was now a very handsome private office.  One had to respect the simple and solid magnificence of the mahogany furnishings, the leather-covered chairs, the big purposeful desk.  Above the old-fashioned marble mantel hung a life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself.  The artist had done his sitter stern justice—­one might call the result retribution; and one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was.  There he sat, solid, successful, informed with a sort of brutal egotism that never gives quarter.  In despite of a malevolent determination to look pleasant, his smile was so much more of a threat than a promise that one could wish for his own sake he had scowled instead.  He is a throaty man, is Inglesby; and this, with an uncompromising squareness of forehead, a stiffness of hair, and a hard hint of white in the eyes, lent him a lowering likeness to an unpedigreed bull.

John Flint cast upon this charming likeness one brief and pregnant glance.

“Regular old Durham shorthorn, isn’t he?” he commented in a low voice.  “Wants to charge right out of his frame and trample.  Take a look at that nose, parson—­like a double-barreled shotgun, for all the world!  Beautiful brute, Inglesby.  Makes you think of that minotaur sideshow they used to put over on the Greeks.”

In view of Laurence and of Mary Virginia, I saw the resemblance.

Mr. Hunter’s office was less formal than Mr. Inglesby’s, and furnished with an exact and critical taste alien to Appleboro, where many a worthy citizen’s office trappings consist of an alpaca coat, a chair and a pine table, three or four fly-specked calendars and shabby ledgers, and a box of sawdust.  To these may sometimes be added a pot of paste with a dead cockroach in it, or a hound dog either scratching fleas or snapping at flies.