Senator Hanway was his opposite, being of no more color than a monk and
of manners as precisely soft as a lady's. He never raised his voice,
never lost his temper; he strove for an accurate gentility--to give the
lie to noble foes at home--and far from owning any ferocities of fist,
retorted to a heated person who charged him with flat falsehood by a
mere shrug of the shoulders and a simple:

"I refuse to discuss it, sir!"

And all with a high air that left his opponent gasping and helpless and
floundering with the feeling that he had been somehow most severely and
completely, not to say most righteously, rebuked.

There you have vague charcoal sketches of Senator Hanway and John
Harley; you may note as wide a difference between the two as lies
between warclubs and poisons. And yet they fitted with each other like
the halves of a shell. Also they were masters of intrigue; only John
Harley intrigued like a Wolsey and Senator Hanway like a Richelieu.

John Harley played the business man, and was rough and plain and
blunt--a man of no genius and with loads of common sense. He made a
specialty of unpalatable truths and discarded sentiment. Indeed, he was
so good a business man that he got possession of a rotund interest in a
group of coal mines without the outlay of a dollar, and later became the
owner of sundry sheaves of railway stocks on the same surprising terms.

Not that the coal and the railway companies lost by John Harley. When it
was known that he possessed an interest in the mines, certain armor
plate mills and shipbuilding concerns, as well as nineteen steamboat
lines, came forward to buy the coal. As for the railway, whereas prior