In the cramped, money-haunted household of Miser Farebrother, Phoebe Farebrother finds herself at the center of a ruthless game. Her birthday tea party is a battlefield where Jeremiah Pamflett, a man of glittering ambition and carefully concealed greed, maneuvers for position. He wants Phoebe not for her warmth or her wit, but for what her connection to the miser might secure him. Around them swirls the tension of a household where every kindness has a price, every smile a calculation. Fred Cornwall offers another path, though whether his intentions are any purer remains dangerously unclear. Farjeon, writing in 1888, dissects the Victorian obsession with wealth and marriage as social currency with sharp, unsentimental precision. This is a novel about the brutal arithmetic of love in an age when a woman's dowry could determine her worth more than her character. Volume II continues the slow revelation of each character's true nature, as ambitions collide and the household's secrets slowly surface.
