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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: they recommended her to try bonnet making, to get a situation in a shop, or--
if she was more ambitious--to advertise for a place of dame de compagnie.
She did advertise, and an old lady wrote her a letter and bade her come
and see her. The old lady liked her, and offered her her living and six
hundred francs a year; but Noemie discovered that she passed her life
in her arm-chair and had only two visitors, her confessor and her nephew:
the confessor very strict, and the nephew a man of fifty, with a
broken nose and a government clerkship of two thousand francs.
She threw her old lady over, bought a paint-box, a canvas, and a new dress,
and went and set up her easel in the Louvre. There in one place and another,
she has passed the last two years; I can't say it has made us millionaires.
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