He thought the less of it, since Mr.Harley had given him some glint of the measureless millions of Mr.Gwynn, and he deduced from this stiff turning towards Richard, this brittle deference, nothing save a theory that Mr.Gwynn, by virtue of his tremendous riches, had grown too great to do his own listening and thinking.

It was as plain, as it was proper, that he should hire them done, precisely as he hired a groom for his horses or a valet to superintend his clothes.

Senator Hanway, himself, was at bottom impressed by nothing so much as money, and was quite prepared to believe that one of the world's wealthiest men--for such he understood to be the case of Mr.Gwynn--would prove in word and deed and thought a being wholly different from everyone about him.
Wherefore, his heaped millions accounted in Mr.Gwynn for what otherwise might have been considered by Senator Hanway as queernesses.
To add to this, Mr.Gwynn was of a certain select circle of English exclusives; Senator Hanway had learned that much from his sister, Mrs.
Hanway-Harley.

It was to be expected then that he would have someone about him to furnish brains for his deliberations, and to make up his mind as a laundress makes up shirts.

Senator Hanway, knowing these things of Mr.Gwynn, was in no wise surprised that he possessed in his service one who was hearer, talker, and decider, just as ancient kings kept folk about whose business was to make witty retorts for them and conduct sparkling conversations in their stead, they themselves being too royal for anything so much beneath that level of exalted inanity, which as all men know is the only proper mark of princely minds.
Something of this raced hit or miss through Senator Hanway's thoughts, as Mr.Gwynn presented Richard and then relapsed--hinge by hinge as though his joints were rusty with much aristocratic unbending--into a chair.
Richard gave him no space to dwell upon the phenomenon.