on, "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.

Mr. Haberton, immersed in affairs, had little time to consider his
daughter's whims. Mrs. Haberton, long an invalid, was too much occupied
in battling with her own ailments, and bearing the pain which was her
daily lot, to feel acute sympathy with Claudia's woes.

"My dear," she said one day, when her daughter had been more than
commonly eloquent upon the want of purpose in her life, "why don't you
think of some occupation?"

"But what occupation?" said Claudia. "Here I am at home, with everything
around me, and no wants to supply----"

"That is something," put in Mrs. Haberton.

"Oh, yes, people always tell you that; but after all, wouldn't it be
better to have life to face, and to----"

"Poor dear!" said Mrs. Haberton, stroking her daughter's cheek with a
thin hand.

"Please don't, mamma," said Claudia; "you know how I dislike being
petted like a child."

"My dear," said Mrs. Haberton, "I feel my pain again; do give me my
medicine."

She had asked for it a quarter of an hour before, but Claudia had
forgotten so trivial a matter in the statement of her own woes. No