DURING THE 1890s, Mary Elcho began a practice of visiting the Continent several times a year, often spending weeks at a spa such as Pau in the Pyrenees or Bad Kissingen in Bavaria. While there she went through a regular health regime, caught up on her reading and enjoyed the freedom to do what she wanted without immediate responsibilities – which she praised more than any actual treatment she received. Most in these circles, including Arthur, treated Europe's cultural and geographic attractions as a cross-Channel backyard to Britain itself. They imbibed the art treasures of Italy, risked the gambling casinos of the Mediterranean or cycled through the lowlands. Enterprising men such as Willie Grenfell and Alfred Lyttelton – in the aftermath of Laura's death – went farther afield to experience the grandeur and dangers of US expansionism into the Rockies. Evan Charteris, Harry Cust and George Curzon took round-the-world trips that lasted months, and in the early years of the 1890s as Egypt opened to travellers, both Margot Tennant and DD Balfour visited the sites of the Nile. Ettie Grenfell was intrepid enough to stay with the Wenlocks during their official tour of duty in Madras in 1891.

The letters that these tourists wrote mostly demonstrated and reaffirmed psychic equilibrium by dwelling on home ties and mildly or caustically disparaging the strange worlds encountered. None reported the mental or cultural dislocations that Pembroke had experienced in the South Seas a quarter century before. Margot's journal of her trip to Egypt contained more about the young army officers and British officials she charmed than the local inhabitants, though she did write that talks with the de facto ruler Lord Cromer and his finance secretary Alfred Milner made her realise for the first time the grandeur of the imperial mission.

Actual social worlds – not merely their mental representations – went with these travellers. Harry Cust and Violet Granby were quite disconcerted when they unexpectedly met Ettie Grenfell in Venice, where they were escaping for a passionate liaison meant to be secret from all back home. Evan Charteris and George Curzon, separately, stumbled across people they knew on the streets of Tokyo.