Lord Mountfalcon, a 'potent nobleman,' lingers on the South-western Island long after the season has emptied it of fashionable company. His friends grumble, but he is in love—with Richard Feverel's young wife, Lucy. Meredith renders the peer's passion with comic detachment: Mountfalcon is 'as a man with mighty tidings, and no language,' a 'great human hulk writhing under the unutterable torments of a mastery he cannot contend with.' The narrator's irony undercuts the romance, yet the situation is serious. Lucy, 'inexperienced little wife,' sees no harm in his visits, having been commended to his care by Richard himself. The stage is set for a crisis that the catalog subjects—'Fathers and sons,' 'Domestic fiction'—only partially anticipate.

A Husband's Desecration

Richard's own ordeal is internal and corrosive. The excerpts show him haunted by a sense of desecration: 'one whose body has been made a temple to him, and it is desecrated.' His education, we are told, 'has thus wrought him to think' in such stark moral terms. He cannot blame Lucy, only his own 'baseness.' Yet the bliss that beckons—presumably a reunion with her—is refused. He burns his father's letters unread, fearing 'words from without might tempt him and quite extinguish the spark of honourable feeling that tortured him.' The narrative voice shifts into a kind of free indirect lament: 'Ah, happy English home! sweet wife! what mad miserable Wisp of the Fancy led him away from you, high in his conceit?' This is not the domestic fiction of the catalog's promise; it is a psychological battlefield where the enemy is oneself.

The Titaness and the Hero

Enter Lady Judith, a woman who 'as far as her sex would permit, was also of the Titans in their battle against the absolute Gods.' She has married a lord 'incapable in all save his acres' and now takes up Richard, who 'feeling infinitely vile, somehow held to her more feverishly.' Meredith's prose grows arch: 'How the dark unfathomed wealth within us gleams to a woman's eye! We are at compound interest immediately.' The irony is palpable. Lady Judith 'understood' Richard—but the understanding is a kind of possession. Austin Wentworth finds them 'among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland: Titans, male and female, who had not displaced Jove, and were now adrift, prone on floods of sentiment.' The mock-heroic frame undercuts any simple reading of romance or redemption. Richard watches 'young men of his own age trooping to their work. Not cloud-work theirs! Work solid, unambitious, fruitful!' The contrast is devastating.

The Limits of the Catalog

The Project Gutenberg catalog lists this volume under 'Fathers and sons -- Fiction' and 'Domestic fiction.' Yet the excerpts barely touch on the father-son dynamic: Sir Austin's letter is mentioned only to be burned. The domestic sphere—the 'happy English home'—is invoked as a lost ideal, not a present reality. Instead, the narrative dwells on adulterous temptation (Mountfalcon's for Lucy, Richard's entanglement with Lady Judith) and on Richard's psychological fragmentation. The word 'ordeal' in the title proves apt, but the ordeal is less about filial obedience than about masculine honor and sexual guilt. Readers expecting a domestic drama of family reconciliation will find instead a study in shame and evasion, rendered in Meredith's characteristically ironic, metaphor-laden prose. The catalog subjects, while not false, are incomplete guides to the volume's actual preoccupations.

This volume rewards attention to Meredith's narrative voice—its shifts from mock-heroic to lyrical lament, its sudden direct addresses to the reader, its willingness to let characters wallow in self-awareness. The excerpts offer no resolution; they end in mid-scene. Readers should watch for how the novel handles the gap between what characters think they are doing and what the narrator implies. The ordeal is not over, and the catalog's tidy categories may need revision as the story proceeds.