“Do you know, Miss Quincy, I have felt a little envy of you ever since Dick first told us about you.”
“Envy! Of me?” Lena exclaimed, moved to genuine surprise.
“Yes,” Madeline went on, leaning forward, eager to explain herself. “You see, I seem to have had a good deal of training, which looks as though it should prepare me to do something, and then—then I don’t do anything. It makes me feel flat and unprofitable. I’d like to feel like you every night—as though I’d really accomplished a thing or two.”
“Isn’t it like Madeline to try to make the girl feel the dignity of drudgery!” Mrs. Lenox said to herself.
“The stuck-up thing!” thought Lena; “rubbing it into me that she does not have to work for her living.”
She was tempted to make a sharp answer, but remembered her diplomacy and held it in.
“Work isn’t always so pleasant when you’re in it,” she said.
“Everything is apt to look rough around the edges until you hold it off and get a view of it as a whole,” Mrs. Lenox put in. “Even love—sometimes. But I think that, next to love, work is about the best thing in life.”
“Oh, that depends,” Madeline cried. “When I read papers at clubs, people talk about my ‘work’, but nobody thinks that it is worth while. I’d like to earn a dollar, just as a guaranty that some one thought the thing I did was worth it.”
“Gracious!” Lena exclaimed in genuine surprise. “Do you really feel that way about earning money?”