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

recalls : “I was lost in a large forest and wild beasts were peering out at me from behind the trees and making menacing gestures at me. I began to cry and to feel very ill, especially when the trees seemed, to make unfriendly sounds. Presently a very large woman who had a hat like my mother’s, came toward me and took me under her cloak. I felt very happy, but immediately realized that it was not my mother but an old witch. I became even more frightened, struggled to free myself, and cried out aloud. I awoke and my mother and father were standing over my bed, asking me what the trouble was.” This dream beautifully epitomizes Elsie’s own evalua¬ tion of her childhood situation. We know from our acquaintance with psychological mechanisms that her night terrors were the best possible device for attracting and holding the attention of her parents during the night as well as she did during the day by means of all those little obstinacies, tantrums, timidities, and misbehaviours that made up her childhood kit of tools for enslaving her mother. Everything went well. She attained her goal which we could formulate thus : ” I must be the centre of all attention. My mother and father must always be at my side to help me. I am quite weak alone.” Then her year of sickness provided her with a new and better set of tools. “ Illness is the best weapon. When you are ill, not only your parents, but also the doctors and nurses run to do your bidding and your friends come and bring you toys, sweets, and flowers,” she thought. Her beautiful body, which she cultivated with assiduous vanity up to the time of her marriage, wras an accessory weapon. Her fiance, inadequate human being that he was, had nevertheless acquired an excellent technique for putting people at their ease. It was part of his armament, and he had deluded this innocent child into believing that marriage to him would be a continua¬ tion of her childhood paradise, plus the pleasures of love. He was the typical fairy-prince who would always keep her princessdom intact. She had married him at what