And yet in the next four pages Trollope gives us as vivid a picture of the performance of whirling dervishes as we are likely to find.
But the lowly place of women in society was an obvious part of the landscape, and the travelers' observations were only window dressing; the business of the novel has to do primarily with the relationship between George Herbert and Caroline Waddington, and secondarily, between Arthur Wilkinson and Adela Gauntlet. George Herbert is a proud young man, and Miss Waddington is a proud young woman. David Skilton's pen-and-ink drawing opposite page 110 in the Folio Society edition of 1993 tells it all: With the walled city of Jerusalem represented in the background, George sits on the barren ground looking away, unhappily, to his right. Miss Waddington, parasol over her head to protect her from the sun, stands looking away in the opposite direction. He has just told her of his newly formed resolution to become a clergyman, and she has poured cold water on his enthusiasm, reminding him that he is eligible for a noble position that would be preferable to a country parsonage.
When he protests that a vicar's career can be noble, she replies, "I judge by what I see. They are generally fond of eating, very cautious about their money, untidy in their own houses, and apt to go to sleep after dinner."
These two young people, both with strong personalities, are clearly in love with each other. He gives up his idea of being a clergyman; he decides to study law. He proposes, and she accepts. He presses for an early wedding date; she demurs, saying that they must wait until he has been called to the bar, which will take two or three years. She is afraid that a small income would fray their love for each other. Neither will compromise. The engagement is broken, and she marries his friend, a rising star in the legal and political world.
Behind all this is the possible legacy of his rich uncle. George, however, refuses to humor his uncle for the sake of becoming his heir.
Such lovers' stories occur all the time. Family relationships still matter, and they still require cultivation. But as the inner thinking of each of the lovers was revealed in great detail throughout the story, I found myself protesting that these weren't real people like any the author had known. They were characters set up in a plot, and the turns of the story were just that: turns for the sake of the story, not turns that a real person would make.
Trollope summarizes the story of the progressively colder nature of their engagement with this retrospective view: "Each was too proud to make the first concession to the other, and therefore no concession was made by either."
No one can read this sentence and wonder what the book is about. But the reader may feel that it's all a fable. This is where the story starts, and the details are just filled in.
Perhaps the author's style accounted for my reaction: Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway might have presented the same story in a more convincing fashion, leaving out all the details of the thinking and giving us only a few scraps of dialogue to explain the action. In this instance, I failed to overcome being accustomed to the fast pace of "the way we live now," and I could not immerse myself in the more leisurely pace of the nineteenth century world. As I followed their thoughts through each turn of the story, I became so impatient with the stubbornness of George Herbert and Caroline Waddington that I lost my sympathy for them. It's hard to be a good fan when your team is losing.
Little bright spots appear throughout the book. The dialogue between Caroline, as Lady Harcourt, and her husband strikes a note of detachment reminiscent of the dialogue in Noel Coward's Private Lives. One can almost hear Carol Lawrence saying Lady Harcourt's lines in response to her husband's question: