Miss Marchant

Miss Marchant — Eve — is the sister Vansittart chooses against all worldly advice, a girl 'simple and straightforward, never affecting to be rich when she was poor.' Her betrothal to a man of three or four thousand a year is the scandal of his family: his sister Maud sighs over 'four sisters and an impossible father,' and his mother broods on the bad strain that must surely show. The early-middle arc turns on whether Eve's own worth can survive the weight of her relations, and on the quiet, ominous cough that Benson hears with Peggy's fate in mind.