“What can I do?”
“Work.”
“Work!”
“Yes, you are clever enough to feel that you have a mind; and mind is a restless inmate of body: it craves occupation of some sort, and regular occupation too; it needs its daily constitutional exercise. Do you give your mind that?”
“I am sure I don’t know, but my mind is always busying itself about something or other.”
“In a desultory way,—with no fixed object.”
“True.”
“Write a book, and then it will have its constitutional.”
“Nay, my mind is always writing a book (though it may not publish one), always jotting down impressions, or inventing incidents, or investigating characters; and between you and me, I do not think that I do bore myself so much as I did formerly. Other people bore me more than they did.”
“Because you will not create an object in common with other people: come into Parliament, side with a party, and you have that object.”