Jacob was rigidly sincere; he had no touch of the snobbery which shows itself in sham admiration.

If he liked a thing he said so, and strongly; if he felt no liking where his guide-book directed him to be enthusiastic, he kept silence and cudgelled his brains.
Equally ingenuous was his wife, but with results that argued a shallower nature.

Mrs.Bradshaw had the heartiest and frankest contempt for all things foreign; in Italy she deemed herself among a people so inferior to the English that even to discuss the relative merits of the two nations would have been ludicrous.

Life "abroad" she could not take as a serious thing; it amused or disgusted her, as the case might be--never occasioned her a grave thought.

The proposal of this excursion, when first made to her, she received with mockery; when she saw that her husband meant something more than a joke, she took time to consider, and at length accepted the notion as a freak which possibly would be entertaining, and might at all events be indulged after a lifetime of sobriety.