There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.

Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.