Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey--and so finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. She is increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation--a situation contrasted with that of her friend Lady Glencora, forced by "sagacious heads" to marry the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser in order to prevent her true love from wasting her vast fortune.
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