ABSTRACT

How is a bit of carpet redolent of a marriage proposal? Trollope’s Adolphus Crosbie finds it so in The Small House at Allington when he must witness his fiancée’s ruthless absorption as she bargains over the hymeneal carpets that are to furnish their marital home. 1 Watching her in a great London shop he knows he has himself become shop-soiled, having sold his good looks and reputation for an aristocratic bride. In Framley Parsonage Lucy Robarts’s mind keeps coming back to the carpets. Finally confessing that she has refused the marriage proposal of a “real live lord” (whom she dearly loves), she tells her sister-in-law,

“Well, it was not a dream. Here, standing here, on this very spot – on that flower of the carpet – he begged me a dozen times to be his wife. I wonder whether you and Mark would let me cut it out and keep it.”