The poor woman must be rather uncomfortable.

She is always building castles and knocking them down again--always casting her nets and pulling them in.

If her daughter were less of a beauty, her transparent ambition would be very ridiculous; but there is something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates.

'Who, after all, was the Empress of the French ?' Mrs.Light is forever saying.
'And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!'" "And what does Christina say ?" "She makes no scruple, as you know, of saying that her mother is a fool.
What she thinks, heaven knows.

I suspect that, practically, she does not commit herself.