The heiress in whose pursuit Evan is carried off to Portugal to learn the management of his mouth, how to dress his shoulders and to direct his eyes, is Miss Rose Jocelyn, one of Mr. Meredith’s brave and loyal girls, with a sweet spice of naturalness in her virtues and in her defects, if she can honestly be said to possess any. In her train we find Evan returning to England, clad like a wandering don in sombrero and cloak. Rose’s expressed dislike of tradespeople gives him a hankering to announce himself as such, which honest intention the countess resolves to thwart, and is herself thwarted by Providence in the shape of a brother tailor, who comes aboard the _Jocasta_ to announce the great Mel’s death, and both ruins and saves the situation by mention of a shop and a uniform. Evan’s experiences on the road and in the shop are drawn in Mr. Meredith’s best style, and we are introduced to one of his oddities, Tom Cogglesby, and also to the suffering countess in low society. On his way up to London Evan is engaged in an ugly fight in an inn, where he comports himself as the only gentleman, and those born to the title as cads--not an uncommon exchange of _rôles_. He meets Rose, and instead of London he, with his guide and protectress, the incomparable countess, turns to Beckley Court, the home of Rose’s parents. Here the countess has a field worthy her great talents. To keep her footing firm, to guide Evan through the briars of a false position, and help him to win Rose, whom he honestly loves--this is no small undertaking with such combined forces against her. Lady Jocelyn calls her ‘a female euphuist, euphuism in woman being the popular ideal of a duchess.’ The pronounced comedian in a book where all the characters pertain more or less to comedy, is Mr. John Raikes. The tricks that are played on this young man by fortune and by men are innumerable, and there is perhaps a flavour of Dickens about him in the prolonged burlesque he plays. His burlesque lovers’ quarrels and the countess’s intrigues fill the middle of the book, until Evan breaks his neck in a breakneck leap.