The Inverted Pyramid by Bertrand W. Sinclair

On an afternoon a week later Rod sat in the library nursing a book, a cigarette, and some curiously mixed reflections. A week-end party had come and gone, leaving Laska, her maid, and a friend at Hawk's Nest. Whereupon Phil had taken the _Haida_ and departed for a point up the coast. The old restful quiet had succeeded that forty-eight hours of good-natured glamor, the laughter and drinking and dancing, in which Rod, morose and broody, seemed to detect an irritatingly hectic note. He was glad they were gone, glad to see the _Kowloon_ clear of Mermaid Bay. Grove was getting beefier, more assertive, more arrogant. He was so cocksure, so frankly contemptuous of things and persons outside his own sphere.

Yet by all accounts Grove was becoming a reckonable power in the affairs of B. C. There was a dash and sweep about his operations that moved men to admiration. He had been tremendously successful in all he undertook, far more so than Rod had believed possible. The Norquay Trust Company was a three-ring circus and Grove was the ringmaster. Lesser men and concerns leaped and curvetted when he cracked his whip. He was fond of cracking the whip, Rod cynically observed.