lf?'

'I am on my way to Lady Arpington.'

'You cannot be thinking how serious it is.'

'I rather value the opinion of a hard-headed woman of the world.'

'Why not listen to me?'

'You have your points, ma'am.'

'She's a torch.'

'She serves my purpose.'

Livia shrugged sadly. 'I suppose it serves your purpose to be
unintelligible to me.'

He rendered himself intelligible immediately by saying, 'Before I go--a
thousand?'

'Oh, my dear Russett!' she sighed.

'State the amount.'

She seemed to be casting unwieldly figures and he helped her with, 'Mr.
Isaacs?'

'Not less than three, I fear.'

'Has he been pressing?'

'You are always good to us, Russett.'

'You are always considerate for the honour of the family, ma'am. Order
for the money with you here to-morrow. And I thank you for your advice.
Do me the favour to follow mine.

'Commands should be the word.'

'Phrase it as you please.'

'You know I hate responsibility.'

'The chorus in classical dramas had generally that sentiment, but the
singing was the sweeter for it.'

'Whom do you not win when you condescend to the mood, you dear boy?'

He restrained a bitter reply, touching the kind of persons he had won:
a girl from the mountains, a philosophical tramp of the roads, troops of
the bought.

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 b