To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imaginatio… - Henry James

She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side — a place which became, to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

"I know, of course, nothing about vice, but I have known virtue when it was very tiresome."
"Ah, then it was a poor affair. It was poor virtue. The best virtue is never tiresome."
Miss Vivian looked at him a little, with her fine discriminating eye.
"What a dreadful thing to have to think any virtue poor!"

The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.