Instead of the big comfortable old-fashioned farmhouse at Hyley, with its mysterious passages and impenetrable obscurities in the way of cupboards, she occupied an intensely new detached villa in Bayswater, in which the eye that might chance to grow weary of sunshine and glitter would have sought in vain for a dark corner wherein to repose itself.
Mr.Sheldon's fortunes had prospered since his marriage with his friend's widow.

For a man of his practical mind and energetic temperament, eighteen thousand pounds was a strong starting-point.

His first step was to clear off all old engagements with Jews and Gentiles, and to turn his back on the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street.

The earlier months of his married life he devoted to a pleasant tour on the Continent; not wasting time in picturesque by-ways, or dawdling among inaccessible mountains, or mooning about drowsy old cathedrals, where there were pictures with curtains hanging before them, and prowling vergers who expected money for drawing aside the curtains; but rattling at the highest continental speed from one big commercial city to another, and rubbing off the rust of Bloomsbury in the exchanges and on the quays of the busiest places in Europe.

The time which Mr.Sheldon forbore to squander in shadowy gothic aisles and under the shelter of Alpine heights, he accounted well bestowed in crowded cafes, and at the public tables of noted hotels, where commercial men were wont to congregate; and as Georgy had no aspirings for the sublimity of Vandyke and Raphael, or the gigantic splendours of Alpine scenery, she was very well pleased to see continental life with the eyes of Philip Sheldon.
How could a half-educated little woman, whose worldly experience was bounded by the suburbs of Barlingford, be otherwise than delighted by the glare and glitter of foreign cities?
Georgy was childishly enraptured with everything she saw, from the sham diamonds and rubies of the Palais Royal, to the fantastical bonbons of Berlin.
Her husband was very kind to her--after his own particular fashion, which was very different from blustering Tom Halliday's weak indulgence.