In a late eighteenth century setting, between fashionable London and backward Virginia, two twin brothers from the nobility spend their formative period trying to flee a domineering dowager mother in different ways, the older a saturnine, melancholy character, the younger an easy going type. Both, in their own way, succeed; but both reach old age feeling themselves equally swindled. The usual Thackeray touch of good humoured aristocratic melancholy aimed at bourgeois philisteism.