There are two heroines who equally command our sympathy,--Lady Castlewood the wife of Harry's kinsman, and her daughter Beatrix.

Thackeray himself declared the man to be a prig, and he was not altogether wrong.

Beatrix, with whom throughout the whole book he is in love, knew him well.

"Shall I be frank with you, Harry," she says, when she is engaged to another suitor, "and say that if you had not been down on your knees and so humble, you might have fared better with me?
A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry, and not by sighs and rueful faces.

All the time you are worshipping and singing hymns to me, I know very well I am no goddess." And again: "As for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at your feet and cry, O caro, caro! O bravo! whilst you read your Shakespeares and Miltons and stuff." He was a prig, and the girl he loved knew him, and being quite of another way of thinking herself, would have nothing to say to him in the way of love.