It's been a long, hot uncomfortable summer for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and more and more, it seems as if her discomfort is showing.

Clinton's latest bout of pique came on Monday at a town hall-style meeting in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, a little more than half-way through her current 10-day trip to Africa. A Congolese student made the mistake of asking the SecState what her husband, the former president, thought about China's offer in billions in loans to the Congo.

Clinton, incredulous, snapped back. "Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not the Secretary of State. I am. So you ask my opinion? I will tell you my opinion. I’m not going to be channeling my husband." Then she abruptly moved on to the next question.

Not exactly diplomatic. Turns out that the unfortunate student meant to ask her about President Obama's opinion, not President Clinton's, according to news accounts. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, explaining the remark the next day, told reporters that Clinton reacted the way she did partly because a major theme of her Africa trip is empowering women.

"As the question was posed to her, it was posed in a way that said I want to get the views of two men (Bill Clinton and former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo, with whom she shared the Kinshasa stage), but not you, the Secretary of State. And I think it – obviously, she reacted to that," Crowley said. He said he didn't know if Clinton regretted her reaction.

The optics, as they say, of the incident weren't helped by the fact that Bill Clinton had just returned from successfully rescuing two American journalists from North Korea, where they were looking at 12 years in a labor camp--a news event that overshadowed his wife's first major Africa trip as  SecState.

But more may be at work here than Clintonian family drama. Several well-placed former US officials tell us that Hillary Clinton is increasingly discomfited by the role she finds herself playingas Secretary of State visa vis the White House. On one front, we're told, Obama aides have nixed some of her personnel choices. There is still no nominee to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, a post that Clinton sees as highly important to her policy goals, and as N&S previously reported, Clinton let fly with her frustrations on that score last month.

Clinton's rough patch began in mid-June, when she fractured her elbow in a fall at the State Department, a painful injury that put her on the injured reserve for a few weeks. Then followed a spate of stories questioning whether she was making much of a mark as Secretary of State. Pundit Tina Brown wrote that "It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa."

Clinton tried to reintroduce herself with what was billed as a major policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, but the speech got (and we're being diplomatic here) luke-warm reviews.

She's scheduled for some much-needed downtime after she returns to Washington from Africa at week's end, and then it will be time to tackle a bunch of simple little diplomatic issues -- the Middle East conflict, Iran, North Korea, climate change -- that will determine if she can put her summer blues behind her.