But, for all this lurking doubt, Courtnay's influence over her was
growing stronger and stronger. He was forever appealing to her pity by
telling her of the hard and lonely life he had lived since his father,
a poor gentleman of good family, had died in exile at Boulogne.
Really, his father, a stout but impecunious horse-dealer of the name of
Budgett, certainly in exile at Boulogne owing to a standing difference
with the bankruptcy laws of his country, was alive still. But Arthur
was very fond of himself, and once in the mood of self-pity, he could
invent pathetic anecdote after pathetic anecdote of his privations
which would have touched the heart of a hardened grandmother, much more
of a susceptible girl. She fell into the way of calling him "King
Arthur" to herself.
He devoted himself to winning her with an unrelaxing energy, for she
had forty thousand pounds of her own.
But he cared very little for her, and sometimes he found his
love-making hard work. She was not the type of girl whom he admired;
her delicacy irritated him; he preferred what the poet has called "an
armful of girl," buxom and hearty. Often, therefore, when she had gone
to bed, he would refresh himself by a vigorous flirtation with Madame
Seraphine de Belle-Ile, a brisk and vivacious young widow, who affected
always gowns of a peculiarly vivid and searching scarlet.
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