Yet here was a simple rosewood desk with a bowl of mimosa on it, and
around the walls were a few simple landscapes from recent _salons_.

If Lars Larssen were a magic name to Sir Francis Letchmere, it was a
magic name also to many other men of affairs. From cabin-boy to
millionaire shipowner was his story in brief. But that does not tell one
quarter. The son of Scandinavian immigrants to the States,
factory-workers, he had run away to sea at the age of fourteen, with the
call of the ocean ringing in his ears from the Viking inheritance that
was his. But on this was superposed the fierce desire for success that
formed the psychical atmosphere of the new American environment. As a
boy in the smoke-blackened factory town, he had breathed in the longing
to make money--big money--to use men to his own ends, to be a master of
masters.

With precocious insight he quickly learnt that money is made not by
those who go out upon the waters, but by those who stay on land and send
them hither and thither. He soon gave up the seafaring life and entered
a shipbroker's office. He starved himself in order to save money to
speculate in shipping reinsurance. An uncanny insight had guided him to
rush in when shrewdly prudent business men held aloof.

He had emphatically "made good." Each fresh success had given him new
confidence in himself and his judgment and his powers. He would allow
nothing to stand in his path. Scruples were to him the burden of fools.

A fair-haired giant in build, with inscrutable eyes and mouth set grim
and straight--such was Lars Larssen.

Though Matheson was in no way a small man, yet he seemed somehow dwarfed