“Indeed! then I am very sorry for you.”
“Thank you; but there’s no need to be sorry for me. Do you suppose that one’s comfort lies in having a choice of employments? My experience leads me to think the contrary.”
“I do not think I could be happy,” said Hester, “to be tied down to an employment I did not like.”
“Not to a positively disgusting one. But I am disposed to think that the greatest number of happy people may be found busy in employments that they have not chosen for themselves, and never would have chosen.”
“I am afraid these very happy people are haunted by longings to be doing something else.”
“Yes: there is their great trouble. They think, till experience makes them wiser, that if they were only in another set of circumstances, if they only had a choice what they would do, a chance for the exercise of the powers they are conscious of, they would do such things as should be the wonder and the terror of the earth. But their powers may be doubted, if they do not appear in the conquest of circumstances.”
“So you conquer these giddy children, when you had rather be conquering German metaphysicians, or —, or —, what else?”
“There is little to conquer in these children,” said Miss Young; “they are very good with me. I assure you I have much more to conquer in myself, with regard to them. It is but little that I can do for them; and that little I am apt to despise, in the vain desire to do more.”
“How more?”
“If I had them in a house by myself, to spend their whole time with me, so that I could educate, instead of merely teaching them. But here I am doing just what we were talking of just now,—laying out a pretty-looking field of duty, in which there would probably be as many thorns as in any other. Teaching has its pleasures,—its great occasional, and small daily pleasures, though they are not to be compared to the sublime delights of education.”