Her relatives had supposed that she would return to her own country, but Mrs.Redwing had tastes which lacked gratification in a provincial manufacturing town.
Without having achieved much positive culture, she had received from her husband an impulse towards the development of certain higher possibilities in her nature, and she liked the society of mentally active people.

The state of her health alone withheld her from a second marriage; she was not a very patient invalid, and suffered keenly in the sense of missing the happiness which life had offered her.

In the matter of her daughter's education she exercised much care.

Doctrinal religion had a strong hold upon her, and it was her solicitude that Beatrice should walk from the first in the ways of Anglican salvation.

She dreaded the 'spirit of the age.' With a better judgment in pure literature than falls to the lot of most women--or men either--she yet banished from her abode, wherever it might be anything that remotely savoured of intellectual emancipation; her aesthetic leanings she deemed the great temptation of her life, for she frankly owned to her friends that many things powerfully attracted her, which her con science bade her shun as dangerous.