The setting of Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is split between two towns – Sawston, ‘within easy reach of London’ (21), and Monteriano, in Tuscany. The split means travel between the two is also important: Forster's first novel is, among other things, a travel-book satire. It opens at Charing Cross Station, London, where the Herritons of Sawston (Mrs Herriton, her son Philip and daughter Harriet, and a little girl called Irma Herriton) and others are bidding farewell to Irma's mother – a young widow called Lilia Herriton – and her companion, Miss Caroline Abbott. In Monteriano Lilia falls in love with Gino Carella, a dentist's son (shudders of disgust from Philip on learning this). The Herritons, and above all Lilia's domineering mother-in-law, Mrs Herriton, are appalled. Philip is sent to put a stop to things, but arrives too late: Lilia and Gino are already married. Lilia soon discovers that he has married her principally for money and that he has been unfaithful – this latter discovery destroying ‘such remnants of self-satisfaction as her life might yet possess’ (64). She dies giving birth to a baby son, who remains anonymous throughout the novel. All links between the Herritons and Carellas might have ended there, and Irma, the 9-year-old daughter by Lilia's earlier marriage, might never have known anything about it, but one day a postcard arrives: ‘View of the superb city of Monteriano – from your lital brother’ (78). Feeling that ‘the child came into the world through [her] negligence’ (82) in not chaperoning Lilia properly in the first place, Caroline Abbott resolves to see if she might adopt the child herself. This incites rivalry in Mrs Herriton, who agrees ‘that the baby must not be left entirely to that horrible man’ (85). Determined to outdo Miss Abbott, she sends Philip back to Monteriano, this time in the company of Harriet, under orders to buy the baby from Gino. Everything goes wrong. In Monteriano they find Miss Abbott already installed in the same hotel. Caroline and Philip are then each in turn seduced by Gino, disarmed by his manifest love of his son and announcement of remarrying for the baby's sake.