"Well, no, not exactly. Backwoods farming is not precisely in my line."
"What is in your line that you could study there?"
"It is not a bad place to study anything;—if you except, perhaps, art and antiquity."
"I did not know you studied anything but art."
"It is hardly a sufficient object to fill a man's life worthily; do you think so?"
"What would fill it worthily?" the lady asked, with a kind of dreary abstractedness. And if Philip had surprised her a moment before, he was surprised in his turn. As he did not answer immediately, Mrs. Wishart went on.
"A man's life, or a woman's life? What would fill it worthily? Do you know? Sometimes it seems to me that we are all living for nothing."
"I am ready to confess that has been the case with me,—to my shame be it said."
"I mean, that there is nothing really worth living for."
"That cannot be true, however."