“When taking a suitor to task for not demonstrating sufficient impatience to declare himself so as to scale the wall outside your bedchamber and enter your room through the window, which, you will recall, you did last night,” he said with conversational ease as if arriving to take tea in her sitting room, “it’s commonly accepted courtesy to have a window through which he may enter. In the absence of just such an aperture, I was forced to sneak into the house through the front door.”