The great problem for Miss Stanbury arose when her beloved niece Dorothy fell in love with and agreed to marry young Brooke Burgess, nephew of Miss Stanbury's late lover. But young Brooke was to inherit the Burgess wealth that Miss Stanbury intended to return to the Burgesses. And if he should marry her niece, it would diminish her posthumous triumph in returning the wealth. So he must not marry her niece. Her niece must marry Mr. Gibson, a young clergyman of Exeter.

Happy endings are permitted in the subplots, and the young people have their way. That is, most of them do. Miss Stanbury comes around with a late night change of heart and grants her blessing to Dorothy's marrying Mr. Burgess. Mr. Gibson receives his just reward. He is claimed by two sisters of the parish, one of whom so terrifies him that he reneges on his engagement to her, escaping her long kitchen knife when a kinsman is summoned to take it away from her, and Mr. Gibson then takes the younger of the two lovely sisters.

There is yet another subplot involving the Rowleys and the Stanburys. Hugh Stanbury, best friend of the unfortunate and stubborn Louis Trevelyan and rejected beneficiary of his Aunt Stanbury, is in love with Nora Rowley, beautiful sister of the also unfortunate and also stubborn Emily Trevelyan. But Nora's parents have their hearts set on her accepting the proposal of one Mr. Glascock, soon to be Lord Peterborough on the death of his father. A handsome and pleasant young man, his proposal comes only after the beautiful Nora has lost her heart to radical young Hugh Stanbury, and Mr. Glascock is refused. We then have the opportunity to follow Mr. Glascock on his journey to Naples to see his dying father, in the course of which he happens to travel with, by great coincidence, Louis Trevelyan himself, and two young Spalding sisters from America. This gives the young Trevelyan, separated from his wife, an opportunity to describe another variety of wives, the American ones, who are "exigeant—and then they are so hard. They want the weakness that a woman ought to have."

We see a good bit more of the Spalding family in Florence, where Mr. Glascock decides that the elder sister Caroline is his favorite, and after a suitable diversion to other subplots, the reader learns that they have become engaged, Caroline having demonstrated her wit with her response to his question about American "institutions:"

"Everything is an institution. Having iced water to drink in every room of the house is an institution. Having hospitals in every town is an institution. Travelling altogether in one class of railway cars is an institution. Saying "sir", is an institution. Teaching all the children mathematics is an institution. Plenty of food is an institution. Getting drunk is an institution in a great many towns. Lecturing is an institution. There are plenty of them, and some are very good—but you wouldn't like it."

Mr. Trollope must have had some unpleasant experiences with one or more American women who served as his model for Caroline Spalding's friend Wallachia Petrie, "the Republican Browning," a "poetess" and a feminist and an outspoken opponent of "European" ways. Inveighing against the "courtiers" of "Europe," Miss Petrie vows that "the courtier shall be cut down together with the withered grasses and thrown into the oven, and there shall be an end of them."

We may hope that the future Lord Peterborough will not be obliged to listen to such speeches at Monkhams, his ancestral home.

But all is not diversion with subplots. The main business at hand is the progressive madness of Louis Trevelyan, who has his young son snatched by his private detective Bozzle (a well-meaning agent who eventually allows his wife to convince him that his own suspicion is correct, and that Trevelyan is mad) and carries him off to Italy. There he becomes progressively weaker, failing to eat, and Emily comes to rescue her son and provide hospice care for her husband. Was he mad? The author answers that he was "neither mad nor sane—not mad, so that all power over his own actions need be taken from him; nor sane, so that he must be held to be accountable for his words and thoughts."

The case of Louis Trevelyan is a tough one. The author, noted for his realistic portrayal of the world, makes a convincing case. And one must remember that Trollope was, after all, a story teller; and the story of a man who went mad because his wife would not accept his authority—because she would not recognize his position as master of his house, where his word was law—was a story worth telling. The subplots and the comedy and the realism are all background, but the strange story is the event in the foreground. The story may have taken its author further than he had intended to go. His own comment on the novel in his autobiography has been often quoted and is worth reviewing:

I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more completely short of my own intention than in this story. It was my purpose to create sympathy for the unfortunate man who, while endeavouring to do his duty to all around him, should be led constantly astray by his unwillingness to submit his own judgment to the opinion of others. The man is made to be unfortunate enough, and the evil which he does is apparent. So far I did not fail, but the sympathy has not been created yet. I look upon the story as being nearly altogether bad. It is in part redeemed by certain scenes in the house and vicinity of an old maid in Exeter. But a novel which in its main parts is bad cannot, in truth, be redeemed by the vitality of subordinate characters.