Betts miscellany: "valuable antiques"

In chapter eight of Britannia, Britannia and Mevrouw Luitingh van Thien are touring the house. They tour "magnificent bedrooms furnished with what Britannia could see were valuable antiques". A page later, Britannia picks up a figurine: "'Longton Hall,' she said absent-mindedly, 'mid-eighteenth century and quite charming. Madeleine hates me.'"
Well, if she'd kept the part about Madeleine hating her in mind, I reckon there wouldn't be the tiresome plot development that took up the second half of chapter eight and (no doubt) most of chapter nine, but I digress. What's interesting to me here is the way she looks at the furniture and decorations on this tour.
A friend of mine says she always notices what other people notice, because it's revealing. Some people always notice what a person is wearing, or what books are in a room, or details about the lighting. But here, twice, Britannia doesn't note the color scheme, or the books. She notes the value of the objects: note that "quite charming" comes after the manufacturer and approximate age of the figurine.
(I just looked up "Longton Hall", because I didn't know anything about it. It was soft-paste porcelain made from 1749-1760. Britannia's right about the age, but since all Longton Hall is from the mid-18th century, why mention it?)

Britannia all at Sea, chapter 7

Jake proposes! "I have brought you here [to a small room away from the party] to ask you, in peace and quiet, to marry me, Britannia." By Betts standards, that's not a bad proposal. Of course, she's wildly surprised, because she assumed he would marry the tiresome Madeleine.
It's a family party, including Madeleine, who has been invited for so many years that they think it would be rude not to invite her. She's furious at Jake's attentions to Britannia, and for once I have some sympathy. It wouldn't have killed Jake to pull her aside and say, "look, I've been taking you around for years, but now I'm going to propose to Britannia." Though if he had, it would have lessened her wrath and made it less likely she'll cause trouble in chapter eight or nine.
It won't be hard to cause trouble; Jake proposed, and Britannia said yes, but there is no formal announcement or ring yet, possible because Britannia wants to talk to her parents first. Seems reasonable to me, but as I said, it might be left that way so Madeleine can cause trouble in the next two chapters.
This chapter is filled with antiques. At dinner, they eat off seventeenth-century silver. Relatives of Jake's receive antique jewelry from Sint Nikolaas, and at the end of the chapter Jake shows Britannia his house, including antique furniture and paintings commissioned in the nineteenth century. In other words: old money.

Britannia All at Sea, chapter 3

Britannia runs into Jake again - and I mean that almost literally; he comes very close to knocking her down with his car. Some tiresome and "spirited" (or so Betts thought, I'm sure, and maybe it was in 1978) dialogue follows. He even stops by for no apparent reason. Funnily enough, at the end of the chapter Britannia still doesn't even grasp that he lives nearby, despite the fact that she keeps running into him on the street.
She goes to church and sees Jake there. He's accompanied by a lovely ("if one liked glossy magazine types", the envious Britannia thinks, p. 49) woman.
Before church, Britannia goes riding with her English friend and their host, and sees a lovely house that she longs to see at closer range, but time doesn't allow for it. She promises herself that she will come back to see the house. Jake comes over and suggests that they ride bicycles together, so she suggests that they go to see the house, and explains that "I had a funny feeling when I saw it first - as though it meant something to me" (p. 51). She goes on (and I can't believe I'm bothering to recap this, because it's so blindingly obvious) that it's strange, because the only people she knows in the Netherlands are her hosts, and Jake. Jake even lets on that he knows the owners, and she's too thick to catch on. The chapter ends with this incredible mystery unsolved.
But before the chapter ends, Jake takes her for a tour of one of the local hospitals. On the way there, they encounter a family in distress, and give a little girl an emergency tracheotomy with the plastic from a ballpoint pen (!). Britannia never does get her tour, because the little girl needs surgery and all that.
By the way, I'l going to introduce a new tag: antiques. Betts heroines are often surprisingly knowledgeable about them - surprising, because they rarely have interests outside of the hero and work. Britannia comes by her knowledge honestly; she used to accompany her father to antique sales and auctions.