A sign of the depth of Darcy's love for Elizabeth can be seen in that he tracks down Lydia and Wickham despite all of the costs. The scholar James Brown observed at the time transport via the mud roads of Britain was hugely expensive, citing the remark by the novelist Sir Walter Scott that it had cost him 50 pounds to travel from Edinburgh to London in 1828; in today's money the sum was equal to 2,500 pounds. Brown wrote the readers in Austen's time would had known it had been an expensive burden for Darcy to go off searching for Wickham and Lydia, and readers today almost missed the significance of Darcy's financial sacrifice caused by his love for Elizabeth. However, Brown wrote that Scott himself had admitted that he insisted on travelling in style on his trip, staying at the most expensive hotels and eating at the most expensive restaurants as befitting a gentleman of means, and that not all travellers at the time would have stayed and eaten at the same sort of establishments patronised by Scott.