Lavinia Duke and Lawyer Flense’s relationship of trust

Lavinia Duke and Lawyer Flense’s relationship of trust is a business alliance that Lavinia understands as personal loyalty, until Flense turns his authority over Duke and Breitsprecher into an opportunity for fraud. Her confidence in him is explicit and consequential: she entrusts him with a power of attorney while she is abroad, only to learn that he has left the country with company money and secretly disposed of corporate property. The betrayal leaves the company depleted and Lavinia struggling to reconcile her father’s faith in gentlemanly dealing with the lesson that trust without safeguards can be exploited.

A Trusted Adviser in the Company

Flense occupies a practical role in Lavinia’s business life well before his flight. At the end of a tiring day, he offers to drive Annag Duncan home because it is on his way, one of the small courtesies later recalled as part of his attention to her. His work also extends to major corporate decisions: he and Mr. Pye travel to Detroit to meet Dieter Breitsprecher’s business manager, Maurice Mossbean, and discuss how the Breitsprecher enterprise might be folded into Duke Logging and Lumber. The proposed name, Duke and Breitsprecher, would be settled alongside many other details in Board meetings. Flense is thus not a marginal legal functionary but a participant in the consolidation of the companies.

That role makes Lavinia’s later delegation of authority intelligible. Before she and Dieter leave on their New Zealand journey, she speaks separately with Flense and Axel Cowes. She tells Flense that she regards him not only as her adviser and executor in financial affairs but as a friend, and says that she has complete confidence in him. Because she and Dieter will be away, she gives him power of attorney to handle business matters, instructing him to consult Cowes if doubts or questions arise. She frames the arrangement as an extension of personal trust into corporate authority.

Flense answers with reassurance, telling her that matters will be handled as she herself would act. He takes her right hand and pledges his word. The scene gives the promise a physical and intimate form, but the later revelations expose the absence of a corresponding institutional check: the assurance rests on character and confidence, not on an effective limit to his power.

Delegated Power and Flight

The breach becomes known through Cowes, who arrives to tell Lavinia and Dieter that Flense has absconded. He explains that Flense has left both the city and the country for parts unknown, perhaps Texas, and taken a substantial portion of Duke and Breitsprecher’s funds. Cowes adds that Annag went with him. The news arrives as a rupture in the household’s ordinary morning: Dieter has just come in for his coffee mug before heading to the potting shed, and immediately urges that they go to Lavinia because she will take the news hard.

The fraud is later examined by four special accountants during a period when the logging company is already in severe difficulty. After the Depression brought a collapse in construction and falling lumber prices, the business had only begun to recover when Flense disappeared with Annag and the embezzled money. The accountants explain that Flense had extraordinary powers to acquire and sell properties on the company’s behalf. No contract confined him to acquisitions, and although he was an employee rather than a partner or stockholder, nothing in the arrangement barred wrongdoing except moral responsibility.

The accountants identify the material reach of the betrayal: Flense made secret sales of company woodlands, lumber barges, and warehouse contents. The damage therefore goes beyond the cash he carried away. The authority Lavinia had trusted him to exercise for the company had enabled him to dispose of assets that supported its operations, leaving Duke and Breitsprecher with a skeleton staff and a lean future.

Trust Reconsidered

Lavinia’s response is sharpened by the personal meaning she had given their arrangement. She insists that she believed Flense loyal to her as well as to the company, never doubted him, and counted him as a friend. Their business had proceeded by a gentleman’s agreement, in keeping with her father’s practice, which she says had never resulted in fraud. The accountants’ findings overturn not only her judgment of Flense but the inherited business ethic that had made that judgment seem safe.

She initially describes the loss as the taking of her ancestral heritage, recalling the Maine and Michigan lumber bonanza from which her fortune came and the scarcity of comparable rich woodlands in the present. The account clarifies that this is an emotional overstatement: Flense did not touch her personal property or her Chicago land holdings, then worth millions. What he rifled were the company’s assets. That distinction does not make the breach abstract; it shows how closely Lavinia’s identity and inheritance are bound to the enterprise whose resources he has damaged.

Her anger also turns toward Annag, whom she says she trusted and had employed when she had nothing. Dieter recalls the attention Flense had shown Annag: praise for her cookies, small bouquets, smiles, and rides home after long meetings. He suggests that Lavinia and he had taken Annag for granted, while Flense’s attentiveness offered her a different kind of recognition; he allows that Flense may himself have felt affection for her. Lavinia rejects the idea that affection explains the flight and wishes she could relive the years with both of them kept on a chain. The intimacy of the recollection makes the betrayal feel like a violation of ordinary courtesies as well as a corporate crime.

Consequences and the Limits of Confidence

The accountants’ inquiry places the scandal within the company’s weakened condition. Miss Heinrich remembers Lavinia calling in the four investigators, while the aged Mr. Pye is brought out of retirement to explain past actions. The accountants suspect that Pye may have helped set the scheme in motion and made himself comfortable, although the evidence does not establish that suspicion as fact. Their account instead makes clear how the company’s arrangements left room for wrongdoing: Flense’s authority was broad, his employment status did not provide a meaningful safeguard, and the system depended on moral responsibility.

The accountants recommend Adam Smith and warn that one’s word counts for nothing in business with Chicago lawyers, invoking the maxim that man is a wolf to man. Their severe judgment contrasts with Lavinia’s faith in personal loyalty and her father’s precedent. Yet she does not abandon the company or its future. She resolves to hire Pinkerton’s to search for the fugitives and bring them to prison, then accepts Dieter’s argument that forests in the northwest may offer renewed opportunities and that the firm can still pursue conservation policies. Her response is to seek accountability and continue, but the experience has exposed the cost of confusing a trusted individual’s promise with a structure capable of restraining him.