The father, Dr. Vesey Stanhope, is summoned home from Italy by the new bishop. Dr. Stanhope, it turns out, had gone to Italy for his health; he had had a sore throat twelve years earlier and had never returned. He brings with him his wife, two daughters and a son. The card of the younger daughter is decorated with a coronet, and it reads "La Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni--Nata Stanhope." She is somewhat indifferent to her situation of having married a captain of no birth and no property, leaving her with a young daughter but no husband, and a knee injury that she attributed to ascending a ruin, leaving her to walk with "the grace of a hunchback." And so she has chosen to be carried everywhere she goes. Her brother Bertie, the son of a man without fortune, feels no obligation to earn his own bread. Madeline and Bertie prove to be rolling cannons on the decks of Barchester. The beautiful Madeline has separate and conspicuous _tête-á-têtes_ with the Bishop, Mr. Slope, Squire Thorne, and a newly arrived clergyman from Oxford, Francis Arabin. Bertie distinguishes himself at Mrs. Proudie's reception by remarking to the bishop that he once had thoughts of being a bishop himself. "That is, a parson--a parson first, you know, and a bishop afterwards. If I had once begun, I'd have stuck to it. But on the whole, I like the Church of Rome the best." But one comes closest to feeling some sympathy for Mr. Slope--whom the author confesses that he himself does not like--when Signora Neroni uses an audience for the purpose of humiliating him. (This is after Mr. Slope has proposed unsuccessfully to Signora Neroni and to Eleanor Bold, and at a time when he has had his friend Tom Towers of _The Jupiter_ write in its pages that Mr. Slope would be the best candidate to replace the lately deceased Dean of the Chapter--a position that is to be offered to Mr. Harding and eventually accepted by Mr. Arabin.) Her morning _levée_ includes Mr. Thorne; Mr. Arabin ("It may seem strange that he should thus come dangling about Madame Neroni because he was in love with Mrs. Bold; but was nevertheless the fact"); Mr. Slope; and a couple of other young men about the city. Bertie and Charlotte are spectators as she follows one thrust at Mr. Slope with another, saying that everybody knows that he is to be the new dean, passing over old men like her father and Archdeacon. She then taunts him with having been refused by Mrs. Bold, singing It's gude to be off with the old love--Mr. Slope, Before you are on with the new. 'Ha, ha, ha!' Mr. Slope's sins were such as to merit little mercy from the court of public and private opinion. And perhaps his punishment did fit his crime. But his punishment was severe.