Her resources were of the obvious kind; but even if one had not the journalistic talent and a genius for guessing, as Henrietta said, what the public was going to want, one was not therefore to conclude that one had no vocation, no beneficent aptitude of any sort, and resign one's self to being frivolous and hollow.

Isabel was stoutly determined not to be hollow.

If one should wait with the right patience one would find some happy work to one's hand.

Of course, among her theories, this young lady was not without a collection of views on the subject of marriage.

The first on the list was a conviction of the vulgarity of thinking too much of it.
From lapsing into eagerness on this point she earnestly prayed she might be delivered; she held that a woman ought to be able to live to herself, in the absence of exceptional flimsiness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex.