Such lovers' stories occur all the time. Family relationships still matter, and they still require cultivation. But as the inner thinking of each of the lovers was revealed in great detail throughout the story, I found myself protesting that these weren't real people like any the author had known. They were characters set up in a plot, and the turns of the story were just that: turns for the sake of the story, not turns that a real person would make. Trollope summarizes the story of the progressively colder nature of their engagement with this retrospective view: "Each was too proud to make the first concession to the other, and therefore no concession was made by either." No one can read this sentence and wonder what the book is about. But the reader may feel that it's all a fable. This is where the story starts, and the details are just filled in. Perhaps the author's style accounted for my reaction: Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway might have presented the same story in a more convincing fashion, leaving out all the details of the thinking and giving us only a few scraps of dialogue to explain the action. In this instance, I failed to overcome being accustomed to the fast pace of "the way we live now," and I could not immerse myself in the more leisurely pace of the nineteenth century world. As I followed their thoughts through each turn of the story, I became so impatient with the stubbornness of George Herbert and Caroline Waddington that I lost my sympathy for them. It's hard to be a good fan when your team is losing. Little bright spots appear throughout the book. The dialogue between Caroline, as Lady Harcourt, and her husband strikes a note of detachment reminiscent of the dialogue in Noel Coward's _Private Lives_. One can almost hear Carol Lawrence saying Lady Harcourt's lines in response to her husband's question: "I hope you are happy, Caroline?" said Sir Henry, as he gently squeezed the hand that was so gently laid upon his arm. "Happy! Oh yes--I am happy. I don't believe, you know, in a great deal of very ecstatic happiness. I never did." Trollope shamelessly introduces some welcome comic relief in the form of a deaf lady and her ear trumpet when Miss Todd, an outspoken woman who travels in society, takes her young charge Adela Gauntlet on a social call to one of the grand dames of Littlebath (obviously a pseudonym for Bath). Miss Todd proposes that they take turns of five minutes each in talking to her and then leave after three turns. Miss Todd is a slightly older Miss Dunstable from _Dr. Thorne_. Having enough money to speak her mind, she does so with relish, as in her defense of playing cards in a conversation with a clergyman of Littlebath: