Madeline’s relationship with her father signals that she feels loyal to her family in the same way that Nicholas feels loyalty to his. Madeline maintains that loyalty in the face of her father’s growing debt and the abandonment of her mother’s friends, who want Madeline to abandon her father. Madeline remains dedicated to her father, even though it would be in her material self-interest to leave him on his own. With that in mind, the novel again contends that loyalty to one’s family is one of the highest virtues and that that kind of loyalty is a sign of selflessness, the opposite of greed and selfishness.