A Laodicean: A Story of To-Day

George Somerset is a young architect in love with the old world he's being paid to destroy, sketching crumbling Gothic churches while modernity rushes in around him. Then he meets Paula Power, heiress to a fortified castle and all the weight of tradition it carries. She's beautiful, wealthy, and utterly incapable of choosing anything with her whole heart. Hardy builds their romance around the question that haunts the late nineteenth century: when everything old is dying and everything new is uncertain, how does anyone commit to anything at all? A rival appears, secrets surface, and the castle itself burns to the ground. Yet Paula remains what she always was: a Laodicean, lukewarm, holding back to the very end. This is Hardy at his most unsettling, less interested in whether love conquers than in asking what it means to love with conditions, to live in between, to refuse the heat of true conviction. It is a novel about the specific ache of half-hearted people in an age demanding total allegiance.