She was to do her duty, quite irrespective of Catherine

The letter was a word of warning; it informed him that the Doctor had come home more impracticable than ever.
She might have reflected that Catherine would supply him with all the information he needed on this point; but we know that Mrs. Penniman's reflexions were rarely just; and, moreover, she felt that it was not for her to depend on what Catherine might do.
She was to do her duty, quite irrespective of Catherine.
I have said that her young friend took his ease with her, and it is an illustration of the fact that he made no answer to her letter.
He took note of it, amply; but he lighted his cigar with it, and he waited, in tranquil confidence that he should receive another.
"His state of mind really freezes my blood," Mrs. Penniman had written, alluding to her brother; and it would have seemed that upon this statement she could hardly improve.
Nevertheless, she wrote again, expressing herself with the aid of a different figure. "His hatred of you burns with a lurid flame--the flame that never dies," she wrote.
She seems to expect to be married very soon, and has evidently made preparations in Europe-- quantities of clothing, ten pairs of shoes, etc.
My dear friend, you cannot set up in married life simply with a few pairs of shoes, can you?
In spite of the suggestion about the reticule, Morris appeared to think poorly of the plan, for he gave Mrs. Penniman no encouragement whatever to visit his office, which he had already represented to her as a place peculiarly and unnaturally difficult to find.
But as she persisted in desiring an interview--up to the last, after months of intimate colloquy, she called these meetings "interviews"--he agreed that they should take a walk together, and was even kind enough to leave his office for this purpose, during the hours at which business might have been supposed to be liveliest.
It was no surprise to him, when they met at a street corner, in a region of empty lots and undeveloped pavements (Mrs. Penniman being attired as much as possible like a "woman of the people"), to find that, in spite of her urgency, what she chiefly had to convey to him was the assurance of her sympathy.
Of such assurances, however, he had already a voluminous collection, and it would not have been worth his while to forsake a fruitful avocation merely to hear Mrs. Penniman say, for the thousandth time, that she had made his cause her own.