Livia spelt at the problem he was. She put away the task of reading it.
He departed to see Lady Arpington, and thereby rivet his chains.

As Livia had said, she was a torch. Lady Endor, Lady Eldritch, Lady
Cowry, kindled at her. Again there were flights of the burning brands
over London. The very odd marriage; the no-marriage; the two-ends-of-
the-town marriage; and the maiden marriage a fruitful marriage; the
monstrous marriage of the countess productive in banishment, and the
unreadable earl accepting paternity; this Amazing Marriage was again the
riddle in the cracker for tattlers and gapers. It rattled upon the
world's native wantonness, the world's acquired decorum: society's
irrepressible original and its powerfully resisting second nature. All
the rogues of the fine sphere ran about with it, male and female; and
there was the narrative that suggestively skipped, and that which trod
the minuet measure, dropping a curtsey to ravenous curiosity; the apology
surrendering its defensible cause in supplications to benevolence; and
the benevolence damnatory in a too eloquent urgency; followed by the
devout objection to a breath of the subject, so blackening it as to call
forth the profanely circumstantial exposition. Smirks, blushes, dead
silences, and in the lower regions roars, hung round it.

But the lady, though absent, did not figure poorly at all. Granting
Whitechapel and the shillelagh affair, certain whispers of her good
looks, contested only to be the more violently asserted; and therewith
Rose Mackrell's tale of her being a 'young woman of birth,' having a
'romantic story to tell of herself and her parentage,' made her latest
performance the champagne event of it hitherto. Men sparkled when they
had it on their lips.

How, then, London asked, would the Earl of Fleetwood move his pieces in