The lady produced another key, with which the man belonging to the lift unlocked the door of the brass cage which guarded it.
"You must find strangers very dishonest, madam," said the Senator courteously as we stepped inside, "to render such a precaution necessary." But before we arrived at the third floor we were convinced that it was unnecessary.

It was not an elevator that the most burglarious would have cared to take away.
So many Americans surrounded the breakfast table next morning that we might almost have imagined ourselves in Chicago.

A small, young priest with furtive brown eyes cowered at one of the side tables, and at another a broad-shouldered, unsmiling lady, dressed in black, with brows and a slight moustache to match, dispensed food to a sallow and shrinking object of preternaturally serious aspect who seemed to be her husband, and a little boy who kept an anxious eye on them both.

They were French, too, but all the people who sat up and down the long middle table belonged to the United States of America.

They were there in groups and in families representing different localities and different social positions--as momma said, you had only to look at their shoulder seams; and each group or family received the advances of the next with the polite tolerance, head a little on one side, which characterises us when we don't know each other's business standing or church membership; but the tide of conversation which ebbed and flowed had a flavour which made the table a geographical unit.