So much for the inheritance issue. There are complicated boy-girl issues also. Ralph the heir becomes the ward of Sir Thomas Underwood, a distinguished but now idle barrister. Sir Thomas has two daughters--Patience, the elder, plain and intelligent; and Clarissa, a beauty. He also has an orphan niece, nineteen years old and "the most lovely young woman he had ever seen," Mary Bonner. So as it starts out: Gregory the parson, brother of Ralph the heir, is in love with Clarissa; Clarissa is in love with Ralph the heir; Ralph the heir kisses Clarissa and tells her he loves her, but when he realizes he needs money he is persuaded by his tailor Mr. Neefit to propose to his daughter Polly. When Mary arrives on the scene he vows to propose to her; Mary keeps her own counsel, but Ralph "not the heir" falls seriously in love with her. Patience may have had some preference of her own but not the looks to express or pursue it. This tangle of alliances and preferences is a bit like a murder mystery: can the reader guess who will wind up with whom? And in truth, the novel basically stands on its plot. Trollope is sufficiently realistic to show that Ralph never really reforms. One of the most interesting women is Polly Neefit, who is urged by her father the breeches-maker to accept Ralph the heir, after Ralph is persuaded by him to propose. She refuses him twice, first because she doesn't think he loves her, and then, after being somewhat mollified on that score, because he doesn't respect her father and although she could have any one of twenty young men, she has only one father. Her first refusal is a classic Trollopian dialogue. He swears he can love her, but after a lengthy recitation of probabilities, she concludes: "I ain't come to breaking my heart for you yet, Mr. Newton." Trollope handles the boy-girl scenes very well. But his forte is politics. He had run for a seat in Parliament once himself, and he had become sufficiently disillusioned to paint the political scene in some raw ways. Here we find Sir Thomas Underwood, who has retired from professional and public life to write the definitive biography of Sir Francis Bacon (but never actually takes pen to paper), deciding to try to re-enter Parliament via the rotten borough of Percycross, on the Conservative ticket. It so happens that one of the other contestants for one of the two Percycross seats is Ontario Moggs, a young radical rebel who preaches the virtues of labor unions and strikes, and who is also an ardent suitor for the hand of Polly Neefit. We follow Ontario to the Cheshire Cheese, the public house where he delivers impassioned orations; and we follow Sir Thomas in his reluctant efforts to canvass the electorate. Sir Thomas and his running mate, the incumbent Conservative candidate, win the election, but there is a petition--a demand for a recount and an investigation into possible improprieties in the election.