You make an excellent point. I'm not really giving full credit to Trollope for the originality of the new characters. That family group could have come from Henry James.

There is something I want to say about how they, and to a lesser extent Arabin, fit with the other materials of the novel, but I'm not sure how to frame it. It's as though they had got into the wrong novel, but not very wrong -- the novel next-door to the one they ought to have been in.

Have you read the rest of the series? Do you recommend it?

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