She did work hard at what she wrote,--hard enough at any rate to cover her pages quickly; and was, by nature, a clever woman.

She could write after a glib, commonplace, sprightly fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface.

She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.

Had Mr Broune, in his closet, told her that her book was absolutely trash, but had undertaken at the same time to have it violently praised in the 'Breakfast Table', it may be doubted whether the critic's own opinion would have even wounded her vanity.

The woman was false from head to foot, but there was much of good in her, false though she was.
Whether Sir Felix, her son, had become what he was solely by bad training, or whether he had been born bad, who shall say?
It is hardly possible that he should not have been better had he been taken away as an infant and subjected to moral training by moral teachers.