Little Billee is a very nice young man who has been kept too close to his mother's apron-strings for his own good--a girlish, hysterical kind of boy, who should be given spoon- victuals and put to bed early. Of course he wants to marry Trilby, for he is of that age when the swish of a petticoat makes us seasick. She is perfectly willing to become his mistress--although she had "repented" of her sins and been "forgiven" but a few days before. She has sense enough--despite Du Maurier's portraits of her--to know that she is unworthy to become a gentleman's wife, to be mated with a he-virgin like Little Billee. But she is overpersuaded-- as usual--and consents. Then the young calf's mother comes on the scene and asks her to spare her little pansy blossom--not to blight his life with the frost of her follies. And of course she consents again. She's the great consenter--always in the hands of friends, like an American politician. "The difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading" prevents a mesalliance. Trilby skips the trala and Little Billee--who has no chance to secure a reconsideration cries himself sick, but recovers,--comes up smiling like a cotton- patch after a spring shower. He is taken to England, but fails to find that "absence makes the heart grow fonder." He gets wedded to his art quite prettily, and even thinks of turning Mormon and taking the vicar's daughter for a second bride, but slips up on an atheistical orange peel, something has gone wrong with his head. Where his bump of amativeness should stick out like a walnut there is a discouraging depression which alarms him greatly, and worries the reader not a little. But finally he sees Trilby again, and, the wheel in his head, which has stuck fast for five years, begins to whizz around like the internal economy of an alarm clock--or a sky terrier with a clothespin on his tail.