Subordinate to character, plot, and central idea, yet scarcely less effective in producing the total effect of the novel, are its setting, its style, and its author's point of view. Already Meredith's point of view has been defined as that of the writer of comedy. In the dinner scene at Richmond, for example, you are conscious of the author smiling apart upon callow Richard and Ripton caught in the snares of the demi-monde. It is Thackeray over again, letting us see the self-deception of Pendennis in his admiration of the Fotheringay. Sometimes, in this novel, Meredith apostrophizes his people, emitting lyrical exclamations of admiration or disgust at their conduct. More often, he remains aloof, though none the less present in spirit. Rarely does he here conform to Brownell's statement, more applicable to his later fictions, that: "He is not merely detached, he is obliterated. All he shows us of himself is his talent; his standpoint is to be divined." That which especially reveals the author's standpoint is what Professor Saintsbury, in referring to this novel, has termed its "style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of strange ironic persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression." The persiflage appears, above all, in the speeches of the saturnine Adrian. As for the epigrams, their number is justified in part by supposing them to come from Sir Austin's collection entitled "The Pilgrim's Scrip." They abound, however, in the speech of others and in the narrative proper. Typical spicings of style are the following: "To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half traversed the world is youth's foolishness"; "It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account"; "If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate Providence to another"; "The ways of women, which are involution, and their practices, which are opposition, are generally best hit upon by guesswork and a bold word"; "The God of this world is in the machine, not out of it"; "Sentimentalism is a happy pastime and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a damning one to them who have anything to forfeit"; "The task of reclaiming a bad man is extremely seductive to good women. Dear to their tender hearts as old china is a bad man they are mending." Even illiterate Mrs. Berry talks in epigram, now on checked matrimony, which she holds to be as injurious as checked perspiration, and now on the wickedness of old people, which, she affirms, is the excuse for the wildness of young ones. "I think it's always the plan in a 'dielemmer,'" she says, "to pray God and walk forward." To Lucy, the bride, she gives this advice: "When the parlour fire gets low, put coals on the kitchen fire.... Don't neglect your cookery. Kissing don't last; cookery do."