One has to understand these givens in order to follow the implications of the story. The wedding of Caroline Waddington to Sir Henry Harcourt created a significant problem for the central lovers of the story, Miss Waddington and George Bertram. As the enormity of her mistake became apparent to her, Caroline (now Lady Harcourt) realized that there was no good way out. These days, she would do as a senior friend of mine, a professed atheist, said he would do if, to his surprise, he should find himself standing at the Pearly Gates after his death. "I would say, 'Gentlemen, it appears that I have made a horrible mistake.'" And then she would get a divorce and marry her true love with no questions asked. But her options were few and unattractive: She could flee abroad, as Lady Laura Standish did with her father, to escape her crazed husband, in Trollope's _Phineas Finn_. She could (if the husband would permit it) live openly with her lover, as did George Eliot. But just as Hollywood movies follow an apparently tacit code of audience acceptability, so Trollope was unwilling to send his central figures to Europe to live together, as Glencora Palliser had contemplated doing with her lover Burgo Fitzgerald in _Can You Forgive Her?_ (Glencora couldn't bring herself to do this, and she learned to love her husband Plantagenet Palliser, after a certain acceptable fashion.) Lady Harcourt's husband could die of illness or injury, or someone could murder him, or he could commit suicide. Trollope was not scrupulous about revealing the outcome in advance. The reader is warned, and suicide is chosen. (This was also the means of exit and retribution for Ferdinand Lopez in _The Prime Minister_ and of Augustus Melmotte in _The Way We Live Now_.) Trollope did not consider himself a feminist; he professed a conservative view of society. But he was a realist who described the world as he found it. And his findings speak for themselves. The constraints placed upon women turn up again and again, in almost every novel he wrote. Some of the action takes place in the Middle East, and this glimpse of the experience of touring there a century and a half ago provides a virtual visit to Jerusalem as it was then: a walled city with no suburbs, appearing as "a fortress of cards built craftily on a table," where one enters and suddenly realizes "that you are beyond the region of passports." And the description of the environs provides an uncensored and not necessarily tactful view of "all the absurdity" of the "dark unfurnished gloomy cave in which the Syrian Christians worship, so dark that the eye cannot at first discover its only ornament--a small ill-made figure of the crucified Redeemer." The author would probably be the object of a fatwah today for his description of the Moslem washerwomen as "ape-like" and the Jewish washerwomen as "glorious specimens of feminine creation."