“Women are more clinging than men,” she remarked somewhat hazily.
“You are shifting your ground,” he said. “It is not the clinging—the weak side of your nature—that is discontented just now. It is the energetic, working side that is so.”
“Yes,” she said eagerly, with a sparkle in her eyes, “yes, I think you are right.”
“Then satisfy it.”
“How can I?”
“Give it work to do.”
Her countenance fell. “I must say again as I did before, “I am a woman and you are a man,” she answered dejectedly.
He looked at her with more commiseration than he had yet shown. “I suppose it is true,” he said, at last. “It is harder for a woman who has anything in her to find a channel for her energies. Still, you need not despair. You don’t know what is before you.”
“Yes, I do,” she said gloomily. He glanced at her in surprise, and she grew scarlet.
“I mean to say,” she went on hastily, “I mean to say that I know quite well that my life will be very smooth and easy, and that I shall never have anything to do that—that anybody could not do. Don’t think me conceited,” she added pleadingly. “What makes me dull just now is that the only duties that I feel I can do specially well, that seem my own particular business, are going to be taken from me.”