Disorder filled her
with a sort of impatience which was akin to physical distress. If she
had been born a poor woman she would have worked hard for her living,
and found an interest, almost an exhilaration, in her labour. Such gifts
as she had would have been applied to the tasks she undertook. It had
frequently given her pleasure to imagine herself earning her livelihood
as a seamstress, a housemaid, a nurse. She knew what she could have put
into her service, and how she could have found it absorbing. Imagination
and initiative could make any service absorbing. The actual truth was
that if she had been a housemaid, the room she set in order would have
taken a character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her
work would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have invented
for her combinations of form and colour; if she had been a nursemaid,
the children under her care would never have been sufficiently bored
to become tiresome or intractable, and they also would have gained
character to which would have been added an undeniable vividness of
outlook. She could not have left them alone, so to speak. In obeying the
mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them.
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