CAREER guidance time a gain. There is always a lot of worry about square pegs being placed in round holes. Now it seems even square pegs put into square holes are still not happy.

I refer to a piece in this paper by a teacher of business studies, who wrote of a young woman disc appointed by her first job in an insurance company. The writer discovered that many other young people are disillusioned and disenchanted by their newfound roles in the world of work, and asks if "we have given them [as the song says] impossible dreams".

We? Excuse me. I have nothing to do with this. I have (studiously) avoided dispensing specific career advice. I have never encouraged anyone to dream (as the song says) impossible dreams. I have not urged that anyone right unrightable wrongs or bear with unbearable sorrow what pain must be borne. It is not my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.

But look. Perhaps it is the recruitment methods of employers that are at fault.

Consider the case of the recently deceased Henry Guinness, the scion of the Grattan line of the Guinness clan who spent his life as a missionary, mostly in China.

In the 1930s, in central China, Henry realised one day that he needed a co worker. Did he advertise for one? No, he prayed for one. That night a burglar broke into his house Henry confronted him, sat him down and subjected him to readings from the Gospel of St John. The burglar saw the light, took up Christianity and became Henry's co worker, and by all accounts a very good one.

This was before the job recruitment business took off, naturally, and the whole useful exercise of person to person appraisal was abolished. But who is to say there are not many people out there, deeply disenchanted with their chosen profession, legal or otherwise, and waiting for a Henry Guinness to change their lives?

I read elsewhere the suggestion that current job dissatisfaction among young people is a result of their having life too easy. The writer suggests that a comfortable, well off background sets young people up for disenchantment in later life.

This does not hold if you look at the life of the late Marie Helene de Rothschild, wife of Baron Guy de Rothschild, head of the famous banking family.

It is true that she spent much of her time, and a tiny part of the Rothschild fortune, providing lavish hospitality at legendary balls in the Chateau de Ferrieres. (And how I still remember her Proust Ball of 1971, the late supper in the great dining room, the pheasant consomme, quenelles of lobster, duck stuffed with foiegras and foie de canard, the tiny mirabelles, the incomparable prune jam, the pistachio bombe glace - and all served on Sevres china on those famous pleated mauve tablecloths adorned with mauve orchids).

Nevertheless, Marie Helene spent much of her time as a very successful fund raiser for medical research, and was a generous patron of the arts (not to mention couturiers). According to one tribute, in her the Rothschild fortune "was more than matched by imagination, supreme good taste and generosity. She was like a child in a dream world and opened its possibilities to many who will never forget it."

Right. This is the way forward if you are wealthy. Her husband put it even better in the dedication of his memoirs: "To Marie Helene, without whom things would only be just what they are."

All the hope and possibility for anyone in any career is in the realm of the imagination that is the answer here. Even in insurance it will pay you to be a child in a dream world - perhaps even more so in insurance, which deals in all kinds of dreams, plus the odd nightmare.

But I want to bring in the writer Elizabeth Bowen. According to her biographer, Victoria Glendinning, Bowen was deeply ambivalent and uncertain, not knowing what the adult world would throw up: "She was a writer before she was a woman." Here we have someone choosing a career before deciding on her sex.

This may not be quite as odd an idea as it sounds, and it is an interesting slant on priorities.