Trollope is a chatty author. Had he been as reticent as twentieth century practitioners of minimalist fiction, we might not have had spelled out for our curiosity a definition of a gentleman, a recurrent source of fascination for Trollope. Miss Marrable is the author's agent who ponders the matter, concluding that money does not entitle a millionaire to be considered a gentleman. Attorneys don't make the cut by virtue of their profession. A son of a gentleman, however, could maintain his rank by earning his living as a clergyman, a barrister, a soldier, or a sailor. Physicians were not absolutely excluded from the ranks of the gentlemen, but a physician could never participate in the privileges accorded to the Law and the Church. There might be some doubt about the engineering profession, but any man who allowed himself to touch trade or commerce automatically excluded himself. Such men might be ever so respectable, "but brewers, bankers and merchants were not gentlemen, and the world, according to Miss Marrable's theory, was going astray, because people were forgetting their landmarks." And it goes without mentioning that for Walter Marrable, the option of going to work to make money is never considered. His only recourse is to return to the army. Obvious generalizations as to class have gone out of style. But Victorian England was a land of class and caste, as shown in this allusion to a hired hand in the mill: "His companion in the mill did not come near them, knowing, as the poor do know on such occasions, there was something going on which would lead them to prefer that he should be absent." There's also a murder mystery. It occupies several chapters, but at the end it is dismissed with only the limited knowledge of the details told by Carry Brattle and her brother Sam, both witnesses at the trial. The story of the Mary Magdalene, though innovative, is, after all, sentimental; the love story, perhaps considered essential to sell the book to the public, is tedious; the murder mystery is perfunctory; but I wouldn't miss the story of the Methodist chapel. A TERMINAL AFFECTION SIR HARRY HOTSPUR OF HUMBLETHWAITE The beleaguered father of the twenty-first century might at first look with some longing to the mores of the nineteenth century and to _Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite_, in a time and place when a father's word was law, and a faithful daughter would not marry without her father's consent. It was not so simple, though, and that's what the book is about. The plot anticipates that of Henry James's _Washington Square_, written about ten years later about a family in New York.