"What I feel," said Claudia Haberton, sitting up with a movement of indignation, "is the miserable lack of purpose in one's life."
"Nothing to do?" said Mary Windsor.
"To do! Yes, of a kind; common, insignificant work about which it is impossible to feel any enthusiasm."
"'The trivial round'?"
"Trivial enough. A thousand could do it as well or better than I can. I want more—to feel that I am in my place, and doing the very thing for which I am fitted."
"Sure your liver is all right?"
"There you go; just like the others. One can't express a wish to be of more use in the world without people muttering about discontent, and telling you you are out of sorts."
"Well, I had better go before I say worse." And Mary went.
Perhaps it was as well; for Claudia's aspirations were so often expressed in terms like these that she began to bore her friends. One, in a moment of exasperation, had advised her to go out as a nursery governess. "You would," she said, "have a wonderful opportunity of showing what is in you, and if you really succeed, you might make at least one mother happy." But Claudia put the idea aside with scorn.
Another said it all came of being surrounded with comfort, and that if Claudia had been poorer, she would have been troubled with no such yearnings; the actual anxieties of life would have filled the vacuum. That, too, brought a cloud over their friendship. And the problem remained unsolved.