‘Caroline,’ demanded Miss Keeldar abruptly, ‘don’t you wish you had a profession - a trade?’

‘I wish it fifty times a day. As it is, I often wonder what I came into the world for. I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and to occupy my thoughts.’

‘Can labour alone make a human being happy?’

‘No; but it can give varieties of pain, and prevent us from breaking our hearts with a single tyrant master-torture. Besides, successful labour has its recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none.’