It was his office, however, which, to his mind, perfectly set him off. It was the setting for the jewel which was himself, and it was a perfect setting. The office knew it. It oozed self-importance. It realized its responsibilities in being the daily container for Abner Fownes. It was an overbearing office, a patronizing office. It was quite the most bumptious place of business imaginable; and when Abner was in place behind his flat-topped mahogany desk the room took on an air of complacency which would be maddening to an irritated proletariat. It was an impossible office for a lumberman. It might have been the office of a grand duke. Gibeon poked fun at the office, but boasted to strangers about it. It had on its walls two pictures in shadow boxes which were believed to be old masters rifled from some European gallery. What the pictures thought about themselves is not known, but they put the best possible face on the matter and pretended they had not been painted in a studio in the loft of a furniture store in Boston. Their frames were expensive. The walls were paneled with some wood of a golden tone which Abner was reputed to have imported for the purpose from South America. The sole furniture was that occupied by Abner Fownes--his desk and chair. There was no resting place for visitors--they remained standing when admitted to the presence. If Abner Fownes, for some purpose of his own, with Machiavellian intelligence, had set out to create for himself a personality which could be described only by the word fatuous, he could not have done better. Every detail seemed to have been planned for the purpose of impressing the world with the fact that he was a man with illusions of grandeur, motivated by obstinate folly, blind to his silliness; perfectly contented in the belief that he was a human being who quite overshadowed his contemporaries. If he had possessed a strong, determined, rapacious, keen mind, determined upon surreptitious depredations upon finance and morals, he could not have chosen better. If he wished to set up a dummy Abner which would assert itself so loudly and foolishly as to render the real, mole-digging Abner invisible to the human eye, he could not have wrought more skillfully. He was a perfect thing; his life was a perfect thing.... Many men, possessing real, malevolent power, erect up clothes-horses to function in their names. It was quite unthinkable that such a man should set _himself_ up as his own stalking horse.