"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." "You must have some of these sublime delights mixed in with the humbler. You are, in some degree, educating these children while teaching them." "Yes: but it is more a negative than a positive function, a very humble one. Governesses to children at home can do little more than stand between children and the faults of the people about them. I speak quite generally." "Is such an occupation one in which anybody can be happy?" "Why not, as well as in making pins' heads, or in nursing sick people, or in cutting square blocks out of a chalk pit for thirty years together, or in any other occupation which may be ordained to prove to us that happiness lies in the temper, and not in the object of a pursuit? Are there not free and happy pin-makers, and sick-nurses, and chalk-cutters?" "Yes: but they know how much to expect. They have no idea of pin-making in itself being great happiness." "Just so. Well: let a governess learn what to expect; set her free from a hankering after happiness in her work, and you have a happy governess." "I thought such a thing was out of the order of nature."