At this point we find Glencora's and Alice's personalities summarized as Glencora congratulates her friend on her fourth engagement: "I know that it is quite a misery to you that you should be made a happy woman at last. I understand it all, my dear, and my heart bleeds for you."
As for subplot number one: Simon Raven properly omitted it from his television presentation. It is a third variation on the theme of a woman torn between a dashing scoundrel and a boring steady gentleman. In this one, as it turns out, Aunt Greenow selects the impecunious Captain Bellfield, and we leave her beginning to get him housebroken.
Trollope's great achievement in this novel is the creation of Glencora and Plantagenet. They have not become household words in our time, but they had enough in them for elaboration of their stories in another medium, and they carried a series of six political novels in which they played sometimes major and sometimes quite minor roles. Political figures in England have cited these novels as the best fictional presentation of parliamentary process, and wives of great men have cited Lady Glencora as the model of all that a political wife should be and do.
It is Glencora's sense of fun and play that makes her an endearing figure to her friends, and also to the reader. At Baden she takes Alice with her to the casino to play "one little Napoleon," with which she wins a little pile and finally loses it. Plantagenet finds her, scolds her, and takes her away. Alice feels wrongly scowled upon by Mr. Palliser and follows them to their room, where Glencora affects laughter. "Here's a piece of work about a little accident."
Plantagenet fails to see the humor and admonishes her for sitting at a common gambling table amid heaps of gold. "You wrong me," Glencora replies. "There was only one heap, and that did not remain long. Did it, Alice?"
Alice, with her own agenda of being wronged, takes her candle and takes her leave. This was the set of family and friends that Simon Raven brought us on BBC. Glencora, pert and pretty, sometimes strayed, and she sometimes strayed further than to the tables of Baden; but she was a lot more fun than Alice. She was more fun than any of them.
And the inevitable question: Was the television series more fun than the book? And the required qualifying query: What did you do first—see it on television or read the book? In my case, the television series came first, and yes, the portrayal on television was more fun. But it was so much fun that the text is required reading.