The Battle of Basinghall Street by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Mr. Sidney Littleburn, whose wistful persistence had won for him the salutation of Sandbrook and his companion at Marridge's restaurant, was a man of no particular personality. His father had been a City clerk before him and his mother the daughter of a small tradesman. He had a flair for figures, a passionate desire to get on in the world, and a personal love of money which was almost a vice. During the earlier days, after the establishment of Woolito, Limited, he had devoted the whole of his gifts towards the improvement of the finances of the company, and in these efforts he had been remarkably successful. He had won rapid and well-deserved advancement. At the present moment he was the respected tenant of a suite of apartments on the ninth floor of a block of handsome flats in Kensington. He had a plain wife, whom he had married for her moderate dowry, no children, a motor car which he had bought at a great bargain, and the pleasant consciousness that he was not spending half his income. In appearance, he was like thousands of others who pass their days upon the anthill. He was inclined to be short; of pallid complexion; he wore a straggling brown moustache and gold-rimmed spectacles. Away from his work, he had an abstracted air, as though he were perpetually adding up columns of figures. In his private office, when he had changed his coat, when his ledgers were at hand, his bankbook immediately available, the discount rates of the day at his elbow and surrounded by his myrmidons, he presented altogether a different appearance. He was a man who was master of his work and he loved it. In his study, warming his slippered feet at the fire, unfolding his evening paper and sipping a tardy cup of tea, he was a very ordinary individual indeed.

"A young person to see you, sir," the maidservant announced, late on the afternoon of a certain fateful day.