On all such occasions interviews are bad. The teller of this story ventures to take the opportunity of recommending parents in such cases always to refuse interviews, not only between the young lady and the lover who is to be excluded, but also between themselves and the lover. The vacillating tone--even when the resolve to suppress vacillation has been most determined--is perceived and understood. Not always a dispassionate instructor, the compassionate narrator at one point has tender words for the doomed maiden: "Then he knelt down and prayed . . . that he might be as a brand saved from the burning. . . . Alas, dearest, no; not so could it be done! Not at thy instance, though thy prayers be as pure as the songs of angels." The story is built with several materials familiar to Trollope readers: the faithful young woman who can never love another, whatever becomes of the love of her life; the father concerned with the integrity of his estate in generations to come; and the young man who never intends to work and would readily marry for money. Whereas, however, in other novels it all comes out all right (_Ayala's Angel_, for instance, is a comedy from first to last in which numerous young girls succeed in following their hearts without having to pine away) in this story the chips fall where they may, so the ending is a bit of a downer. By all accounts Trollope considered himself rather a conservative citizen. But whether consciously or not, he holds up a number of Victorian conventions to the test of _reductio ad absurdum_ and shows their absurdity to a later generation, whatever his contemporary readers may have thought. No feminist, he showed the disadvantaged state of women in novel after novel. And although Father may often know best, his stubborn attempt to prove it might include the risk of disastrous consequences, as shown in _Sir Harry Hotspur_. THE HEIR AND THE BASTARD RALPH THE HEIR There are two Ralph Newtons in Anthony Trollope's _Ralph the Heir_. One is nephew to the Squire of Newton Priory and is his heir. The other is his illegitimate son. So: why should the title not be _Ralph the Bastard_? First: this is a Victorian novel; such a title would have been unacceptable to Victorian society. Second: even though the squire's son shows himself to be more worthy than his cousin, the central figure in the story really is Ralph the heir. Trollope merely says that heroes of pure virtue and villains of unalloyed vice are rare. This is what it is about: There was a complicated inheritance issue--not contested, just complicated. I had to draw a little diagram to get it straight, and I then had to refer to it time after time: