In this passage, Mrs. Elphinstone—one of the women the narrator’s brother encounters and travels with while fleeing London—unexpectedly tries to turn around, deciding that she doesn’t want to board the steamboat that her sister-in-law and the narrator’s brother have arranged to take them out of the country. Mrs. Elphinstone is apparently too afraid to leave the country, since she’s never done so and because—as the narrator jokes—she thinks the “French and the Martians might prove very similar.” This mentality suggests that she is, above all, rather xenophobic and unwilling to open her mind to new experiences or people. That she…