Elizabeth von Arnim

Pitied? Horrid thought. The great thing in life was to be so situated that you can pity others. But to be pitied yourself?

By the time she was twenty-four, nearly all the girls who had when she did were married, and she felt as though she were a ghost haunting the s of a younger generation.

What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don't what besides, and would rend the air …