Upright the Nine of Coins is read as self-sufficiency and comfort earned by one's own effort; reversed, as an independence purchased at the price of overwork, or a luxury that depends on someone else's labor rather than one's own.
Waite's printed meaning for the card leans toward prudence, discernment and material provision achieved through good sense, and says relatively little about solitude. The emphasis on independence and self-reliance that most contemporary readers now give the card is a later development, one that tracks the twentieth century's changing sense of what a solitary, propertied woman in a garden represents; readers of the 1970s and after, reading the image rather than Waite's older text, increasingly saw the card as being about a woman answering to no one, a reading the picture supports but that his own companion book does not spell out.
The card's reversed meanings are correspondingly unstable across sources. Waite gives roguery, deception and a bad bargain for the reversed card, which has little to do with the overwork or dependency many modern readers assign it; this is one of the clearer instances in the deck where present-day practice has moved well past its stated nineteenth-century origin, largely because the picture itself, rather than the printed keyword list beneath it, has become the primary text most readers actually consult.