“A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

“Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”

“What woman, indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness?”

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”

“The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.”

“I. At TeaTHE kettle descants in a cosy drone,And the young wife looks in her husband's face,And then in her guest's, and shows in her ownHer sense that she fills an envied place;And the visiting lady is all abloom,And says there was never so sweet a room.And the happy young housewife does not knowThat the woman beside her was his first choice,Till the fates ordained it could not be so....Betraying nothing in look or voiceThe guest sits smiling and sips her tea,And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.”

“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”