 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.
Entertainment she found in abundance. Though natural beauty made little if any
appeal to her, she interested herself greatly in Vesuvius, regarding it as a
serio-comic phenomenon which could only exist in a country inhabited by childish
triflers. Her memory was storing all manner of Italian absurdities - everything
being an absurdity which differed from English habit and custom - to furnish her
with matter for mirthful talk when she got safely back to Manchester and
civilization. With respect to the things which Jacob was constraining himself to
study - antiquities, sculptures, paintings, stored in the Naples museum - her
attitude was one of jocose indifference or of half-tolerant contempt. Puritanism
diluted with worldliness and a measure of common sense directed her views of art
in general. Works such as the Farnese Hercules and the group about the Bull she
looked upon much as she regarded the wall-scribbling of some dirty-minded
urchin; the robust matron is not horrified by such indecencies, but to be sure
will not stand and examine them. »Oh, come along, Jacob!« she exclaimed to her
husband, when, at their first visit to the Museum, he went to work at the
antiques with his Murray. »I've no patience! you ought to be ashamed of
yourself!«
    The Bradshaws were staying at the pension selected by Mrs. Lessingham.
Naturally the conversation at dinner turned much on that lady and her niece.
With Cecily's father Mr. Bradshaw had been well acquainted, but Cecily herself
he had not seen since her childhood, and his astonishment at meeting her as Miss
Doran was great.
    »What kind of society do they live among?«
