Lucius Davoren, Volume I by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

While Lucius dreamed his dream beside the wharf where the barges lay moored under the smoky London sky, Geoffrey was following his siren from one provincial town to another, not without some enjoyment in the chase, which filled his empty life with some kind of object, no matter though it were a foolish one. Given youth, health, activity, and a handsome income, there yet remains something wanting to a man's existence, without which it is apt to become more or less a burden to him. That something is a purpose. Geoffrey having failed-from very easiness of temper, from being everybody's favourite, first in every pleasure-party, foremost in every sport that needed pluck and endurance, rather than from lack of ability-to achieve distinction at the University, had concluded that he was fit for nothing particular in life; that he had no vocation, no capacity for distinguishing himself from the ruck of his fellow men; and that the best thing he could do was to live upon the ample fortune his merchant father had amassed for him, and get as much pleasure as he could out of life.

Almost his first experience of pleasure and independence had been those two years' travel in the Far West. Pleasure in that particular instance had brought him face to face with death, but was counted pleasure nevertheless. After doing America, he had done as much of the old world as he happened to feel interested in doing, not scampering round the globe in ninety days like Mr. Cook's excursionists, but taking an autumn in Norway, a winter in Rome, a spring in Greece, a summer in Sweden, and so on, until he began to feel, in his own colloquial phrase, that he had used up the map of Europe.