regular occupation too; it needs its daily constitutional exercise.
Do you give your mind that?"

"I am sure I don't know, but my mind is always busying itself about
something or other."

"In a desultory way,--with no fixed object."

"True."

"Write a book, and then it will have its constitutional."

"Nay, my mind is always writing a book (though it may not publish
one), always jotting down impressions, or inventing incidents, or
investigating characters; and between you and me, I do not think that
I do bore myself so much as I did formerly. Other people bore me more
than they did."

"Because you will not create an object in common with other people:
come into Parliament, side with a party, and you have that object."

"Do you mean seriously to tell me that you are not bored in the House
of Commons?"

"With the speakers very often, yes; but with the strife between the
speakers, no. The House of Commons life has a peculiar excitement
scarcely understood out of it; but you may conceive its charm when you
observe that a man who has once been in the thick of it feels forlorn
and shelved if he lose his seat, and even repines when the accident of
birth transfers him to the serener air of the Upper House. Try that