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

herself with their sufferings at the hands of a cruel and wicked world. Saint Perpetua, who left husband, a suckling child, and a position of eminence in society for her faith, who suffered a brutal goring by a wild bull rather than recant, was her favourite saint, and she knew every detail of her heroic martyrdom by heart. Even her reading prepared her for her goal of being a misunder¬ stood princess in a cruel and unreasonable world. For years Elsie avenged herself upon her mother in this fashion for the wrongs she had suffered as a result of her poor training. By her discourtesy she isolated herself completely, surely an exquisite device for alienating the affections of those who came with sympathy and gifts to assuage the boredom of her illness. Her turning on the wireless at all hours was a slap in the face for her neighbours. Alcohol was, at one and the same time, an escape from the boredom of her illness, a thrust at her Puritan mother who was a strict teetotaler, and a trick to concentrate her mother’s attention on her night and day. The rational advice of her friends that she should leave her mother’s house was countered by the quickly created filial affection and a hypocritical regard for her aging mother. Any reader with a primitive knowledge of psychology can see how she really hated and plagued her mother, and how little filial affection there was in Elsie’s make-up. But filial affection was an important pillar in the structure of her self-esteem, and effectually silenced all those who advised her to remove herself from the vicious circle of her home life. Finally the psychiatrist persuaded her to leave and begin life as an independent being. The strange interlude of her week’s life in an hotel room is one of the most instructive episodes in her whole life, because it proves so beautifully the purposive nature of all her character traits. You will remember that while she moved into her hotel room accompanied by all her medicines, her wireless, and her liquor, she did not take any pills, did not turn on the wireless, and drank not a drop of liquor during her absence from her home. The