Miss Marjoribanks

Lucilla Marjoribanks

Lucilla arrives in Carlingford armed with novels, popular philosophy, and a genius for social strategy, determined to become the indispensable center of the town's drawing rooms. Her masterstroke is the duet: she sacrifices her own solo applause to pair herself with a contralto, converting rivalry into a spectacle that serves her larger design. What makes her irresistible is that she is entirely sincere about her schemes and entirely self-aware about her sincerity, which is either the highest form of virtue or the most elegant form of ambition.

Miss Marjoribanks

When Lucilla loses her mother at fifteen, she resolves on the train home to become the sunshine of her father's life, a resolution drawn as much from literature as from grief. That early scene establishes the pattern of her whole career: she grasps a situation at a glance, sketches a noble picture of herself in it, and then executes the picture with a competence that shames the original sentiment. The name 'Miss Marjoribanks' is what the town calls her, but it is also what she has made of herself — a public office held by a private will.

Dr. Marjoribanks

The Doctor is too occupied with his patients to waste feeling on sentiment, which makes him the ideal parent for a daughter who wants a free hand. He indulges Lucilla's schemes not from weakness but from a kind of amused detachment, and his occasional dry observations suggest he sees more of her game than he lets on. His presence gives Lucilla both the household she manages and the license to manage it, and his professional standing is the foundation on which her social authority rests.

Tom Marjoribanks

Tom arrives from India by the nine o'clock train just as the kitchen has been put to rights, hungry, apologetic, and utterly incapable of adapting to circumstance. His blunders are so reliable that Lucilla treats them as a fixed feature of the landscape, sending conciliatory messages downstairs while Nancy mutters about cold pie. He matters because he is the one person in the novel who cannot be managed, and his presence tests whether Lucilla's system can absorb the genuinely unabsorbable.

Mr. Cavendish

Mr. Cavendish is exactly what Lucilla needs: a man who can flirt, who is under efficient discipline, and who is capable of carrying out a grand conception. For a virtuous interval he behaves with perfect decorum, and Mrs. Chiley begins a quiet canvass for the future M.P. But his weakness for Barbara's contralto reasserts itself, and his backsliding becomes the first real test of whether Lucilla's social order can survive the return of the repressed. He is less a villain than a force of nature — the Cavendish predisposition, as the narrator might say, doing what Cavendishes do.

Barbara Lake

Barbara is two years older than Lucilla, dark and glowing, with straight black eyebrows and a shyness that looks like scared defiance. She has never forgiven her mother for dying at the moment when she was on the threshold of Grange Lane, and she carries that injury into every room. When Lucilla offers her a place in the great duet scheme, Barbara accepts like a young soldier of fortune, ready to swallow mysteries in exchange for a chance at glory — but her ambition and her voice make her a rival as much as an ally.