There still
remained to him the power of spending some five or six hundred a
year, and upon this practice had taught him to live with a very
considerable amount of self-indulgence. He dined out a great deal,
and was known everywhere as Mr. Maule of Maule Abbey.
He was a slight, bright-eyed, grey-haired, good-looking man,
who had once been very handsome. He had married, let us say for
love;--probably very much by chance. He had ill-used his wife, and
had continued a long-continued liaison with a complaisant friend.
This had lasted some twenty years of his life, and had been to him an
intolerable burden. He had come to see the necessity of employing his
good looks, his conversational powers, and his excellent manners on
a second marriage which might be lucrative; but the complaisant lady
had stood in his way. Perhaps there had been a little cowardice on
his part; but at any rate he had hitherto failed. The season for such
a mode of relief was not, however, as yet clean gone with him, and
he was still on the look out.
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