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

family, Elsie was at a loss to cope with the situation. Frantic telegrams to her mother were answered by equally frantic telegrams that bad investments precluded the mother s attempting a trip to Italy. To make matters worse, Elsie became pregnant, and after two months of anguish and hyperaemesis her pregnancy was brought to a fortunate end by a miscarriage. She returned to England and instituted divorce proceedings against her husband, and when she had won her case, retired to her bed and did not rise for six months. Her beauty had not faded and she was urged by her friends to remarry. She fell in love several times, but always with men in the diplomatic service who v/ere never present long enough to be serious contenders for her hand, or with handsome actors whom she loved from afar, or with married men who could not consummate any relation with her because they were tied to the responsibilities of their own families. She did no work, neglecting the music and painting which she had practised in a dilettante fashion as a younger woman. She began narrowing the circle of her acquaintances by insulting all who came to see her until only her mother and an old servant were left in her entourage. Doctors came and went. None were able to diagnose and cure her of her many ailments. Headaches were her constant accompani¬ ment, and at her menstrual periods, she retired from the world entirely from ten to fourteen days. Ihe older she grew, the more slovenly she became, the more introspective, the more concerned with her symptoms, the less interested in the wrorld. She could not hold a civil conversation with man or woman for more than ten minutes. Any caller who dared to remain longer was assaulted by a barrage of symptoms and the catalogue of all the painful sensations in the textbooks of physiology. She hated all her friends who urged her to get out into the sunshine—she lived in a dingy room that looked out on a dingier wall and a group of dingy dustbins—and she hated all her friends - who com¬ miserated with her and took her symptoms at her own