Beginning with the social and moral pretensions of the English community abroad in “Mrs. General Talboys,” the stories move through rural Devon, Suez, an English Christmas household, southern Africa, Palestine, and Munich, exploring courtship, marriage, family responsibility, financial anxiety, cultural misunderstanding, and the compromises people make between affection, duty, reputation, and self-interest, while Trollope finds both comedy and melancholy in the ordinary choices exposed by travel and displacement. The collection closes with the comic confusion surrounding Mr. Greene and the box in which he carries his money and valuables, turning suspicion, trust, and financial anxiety among fellow travelers into a final social comedy and bringing the volume back to its central method of using foreign landscapes not merely for exotic color but as settings in which Victorian ideas about class, gender, love, marriage, money, and respectability become especially visible.