For a woman, old age is never pretty.

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

But hers was a strange heart, sad in its very nature, and she could never weep and ease it as other women do, for her tears never brought her comfort.

and woman must wait and weep.

Not funny, not funny says she, didn't like it!

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

We shall find no fiend in hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman,—scorned, slighted, dismissed without a parting pang.

It was disappointing, as if a wish she didn’t know she’d made hadn’t come true.

Grim-visaged comfortless Despair.

"I'm no angel." And, to say the truth, she certainly was not.

The woman was in abject misery—that worst of poverty, which is haunted by shame—the only relic left by better days. She shrunk from all efforts at recovery, refused to administer the medicines, and spoke of the child's death but as a blessing.
My God! and is the daily page of life
Darken'd with wretchedness like this?

It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. In her first despair she is not satisfied to tread the path with her feet: she is determined to crawl it on her knees, choosing the way that is steepest and roughest. She desires no helping hand and will not lift her head — let it sink down with its own heaviness, so that she may put her face to the ground and taste the dust with her tongue!

She was painfully aware that doing one’s best was never assurance that it wasn’t the wrong choice anyway.

And I'm a woman made of sorrow.