Storri commended the absence of stilts, this abandonment of the conventional.
"It is what I like!" cried he; "it is the compliment I shall most speak of when I am back with my Czar." Following dinner, Mrs.Hanway-Harley would have Storri to the library in engagingly familiar fashion.
Senator Hanway went always to his study after dinner, to receive visitors through that veranda door, and prune and train the vine of his Presidential hopes with confabs and new plans, into which he and those visitors--who were folk of power in their home States--unreservedly plunged.

Mr.Harley, who was not domestic and feared nothing so much as an evening at home, would give an excuse more or less feeble and go abroad into the town.

This left Mrs.Hanway-Harley, Dorothy, and Storri to themselves; and the maternal ally saw to it that the noble lover was granted a chance to press his suit.

That is to say, Mrs.Hanway-Harley gave Storri a chance so far as lay in her accommodating power; for she developed an inexhaustible roll of reasons for leaving the room, and in her kind sagacity never failed to stay away at least five minutes.

And a world and all of love may be made in five minutes, when both parties set their hearts and souls to the dulcet enterprise.
Storri was ardent, and Mrs.Hanway-Harley was discreet, and both displayed talents for intrigue and execution that, on other days, in other fields, might well have saved a state.