lar marriage proposal is stated at
once in the opening words of the tale:

"Young Oliver Pickersgill was in love with Peter Lannithorne's
daughter. Peter Lannithorne was serving a six-year term in the
penitentiary for embezzlement."

The young hero is depicted as a high-minded youth of unquestionable
and prosperous social {244} position in his community. His beloved is
a loyal daughter who is convinced that her father's crime was due
solely to a momentary and benevolent weakness, and to a mind confused
by care for the needs and too importunate requirements of his own
family. Not unjustly attributing the father's final downfall to the
impatience, to the agonising discontent, and to the worldly ambition
of her own mother, the daughter with spirit replies to the lover's
proposal by saying plainly: "I will never marry any one who doesn't
respect my father as I do." The lovers somewhat easily come to terms,
at least apparently, as to this sole present ground for disagreement.
The youth, not without inward difficulty, is ready to accept the
daughter's version of her father's misadventure. In any case, love
makes him indifferent to merely worldly scruples, and he has no fear
of his own power to face his community as the loving husband of a
convict's daughter; though there is, indeed, no doubt as to the
father's actual guilt, and although Lannithorne is known to have
admitted the justice of his sentence.

But to love, and to be magnanimously hopeful--this is not the same as
to convince other people that such a marriage is prudent, or is
likely, as the pragmatists would say, to have "expedient workings."
Young Oliver has to persuade Ruth's mother on the one hand, his own
father on the other, that such a marriage is reasonable. Both prove to
be hard to convince. To the ordinary scruples of worldly {245}
prudence which young lovers generally have to answer, they easily add
seemingly unanswerable objections. The mother--the convict's wife--now
a brilliantly clear-witted but hopelessly narrow-minded invalid--a
broken woman of the world--pragmatically enlightened, in a way, by the
bitter experience of sorrow, but not in the least brought thereby to
any deeper insight, faces the lover as an intruder upon her daughter's
peace and her own desolation. She has known, she says, what the
bitterness of an unhappy marriage can be and is. If she herself has
had her share of blame for her husband's downfall, that only the more
shows her suc