This is the formidable woman who paid for the education of Hugh Stanbury, Louis Trevelyan's best friend, and then cut him off from all support because he abandoned the study of law to write for the "penny press." She then wrote to Hugh's mother asking her to send her younger daughter Dorothy to live with her. "I shall expect her to be regular at meals, to be constant in going to church, and not to read modern novels." The great problem for Miss Stanbury arose when her beloved niece Dorothy fell in love with and agreed to marry young Brooke Burgess, nephew of Miss Stanbury's late lover. But young Brooke was to inherit the Burgess wealth that Miss Stanbury intended to return to the Burgesses. And if he should marry her niece, it would diminish her posthumous triumph in returning the wealth. So he must not marry her niece. Her niece must marry Mr. Gibson, a young clergyman of Exeter. Happy endings are permitted in the subplots, and the young people have their way. That is, most of them do. Miss Stanbury comes around with a late night change of heart and grants her blessing to Dorothy's marrying Mr. Burgess. Mr. Gibson receives his just reward. He is claimed by two sisters of the parish, one of whom so terrifies him that he reneges on his engagement to her, escaping her long kitchen knife when a kinsman is summoned to take it away from her, and Mr. Gibson then takes the younger of the two lovely sisters. There is yet another subplot involving the Rowleys and the Stanburys. Hugh Stanbury, best friend of the unfortunate and stubborn Louis Trevelyan and rejected beneficiary of his Aunt Stanbury, is in love with Nora Rowley, beautiful sister of the also unfortunate and also stubborn Emily Trevelyan. But Nora's parents have their hearts set on her accepting the proposal of one Mr. Glascock, soon to be Lord Peterborough on the death of his father. A handsome and pleasant young man, his proposal comes only after the beautiful Nora has lost her heart to radical young Hugh Stanbury, and Mr. Glascock is refused. We then have the opportunity to follow Mr. Glascock on his journey to Naples to see his dying father, in the course of which he happens to travel with, by great coincidence, Louis Trevelyan himself, and two young Spalding sisters from America. This gives the young Trevelyan, separated from his wife, an opportunity to describe another variety of wives, the American ones, who are "exigeant--and then they are so hard. They want the weakness that a woman ought to have." We see a good bit more of the Spalding family in Florence, where Mr. Glascock decides that the elder sister Caroline is his favorite, and after a suitable diversion to other subplots, the reader learns that they have become engaged, Caroline having demonstrated her wit with her response to his question about American "institutions:"