perceptibly three hours afterwards, yet the great earl paid no more
attention to her than if she had been a Saxon dairy-maid. These things,
combined with the fact that she unexpectedly found the ladies of the
Empress's court wearing pocket sleeves, shaped like overgrown
mandolins, and almost dragging on the rushes as they walked, whereas
her own were of the old-fashioned open cut, had filled her soul with
bitterness against the legitimate heir to King Henry's throne and had
made the one-sided barrier between herself and her husband--which she
could see so plainly, but which was quite invisible to him--finally and
utterly impassable. He not only bored her himself, but he had given her
over to be bored by others, and from that day no such thing as even the
mildest affection for him was to be thought of on her side.

It was no wonder that she listened with breathless interest to all Sir
Arnold told her, and watched with delight the changing expression of
his smooth face, contrasted at every point with the bold, grave
features of the Lord of Stoke, solemnly asleep beside her. And Curboil,
on his side, was not only flattered, as every man is when a beautiful
woman listens to him long and intently, but he saw also that her beauty
was of an unusual and very striking kind. Too straight, too cold, too
much like marble, yet with hair almost too golden and a mouth like a
small red wound; too much of every quality to be natural, and yet
without fault or flaw, and too vivid not to delight the tired taste of
the man of pleasure of that day, who had seen the world from London to
Rome and from Rome to the imperial court of Henry the Fifth.

And she, on her side, saw in him the type to which she would naturally
have been attracted had she been perfectly free to make her choice of a
husband. Contrasted with the man of action, of few words, of few
feelings and strong ones, she saw the many-sided man of the world,