How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

meal, and when his ancestral home was sold to pay for an unsuccessful speculation on the Stock Exchange, he had to content himself with very modest quarters in a boarding house. In short, Mr. Jones had to go out and get a job. The world had always furnished Mr. Jones with an excellent living, and he had become firmly convinced that the pleasantest possible living conditions, free of all ordinary responsibilities, were his inalienable right. Having spent most of his thirty-two years fostering the cult of his own ego, he had developed only the most rudimentary social feeling. His position as an unimportant underling had been secured for him by a friend of his father who had taken pity on his plight. Mr. Jones very quickly realized that being an employee of a. small business house entailed no great honours. Yet his unconscious goal demanded a position of great eminence. His was a chronic craving for the limelight. As he could not attain his goal directly in his work, he attained it indirectly by forcing his customers to wait upon him at appointments. He always appeared pressed for time by the burden of innumerable “ important engagements ”, and his glib tongue extricated him from numerous scrapes in which his impudence and egoism had involved him. The reader must see how very useful the trait of coming late to appointments was to Mr. Jones’s unsteady self-esteem. The reader must see, also, how his tardiness, his egoism, his impudence, and his fictional “ business ” are all woven of the same cloth. These are not accidental traits—they are the useful tools which Mr. Jones has acquired for the task of maintaining his egocentric self-esteem, subjectively, at the high peak he believes he deserves. But why should Mr. Johnson always wish to drive at the head of any procession of motor cars ? Can it not be true that there is an exceptional adrenalin pressure in his blood ? Could not his dammed-up sexual libido find its proper expression in this character trait ? Mr. Johnson is the oldest of three boys. He had a very severe and strict father who constantly belittled his efforts. At an early