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

the mature beauty that radiates from a wholesome personality, it is just as true that a beautiful child who invests his or*her total life’s interests in the maintenance of physical beauty, largely spoils that beauty by the shallowness of vanity. The tragic end is that the hollow shell of mere physical beauty crumbles with time, and the beautiful child, having developed no emergency supports for old age, finds himself mentally bankrupt, commits suicide, or suffers from melancholia as a poor substitute for popular esteem and attention. The host of women who crowd psychiatrists’ waiting-rooms when they reach the “ dangerous age ” are usually women who have trusted too much in their beauty to “ get them across ”. In a later chapter we shall tell the story of such a woman, and point out the mistakes of her life’s pattern, and describe a better technique of growing old gracefully. 2. The Family Constellation Just as no one is born with a perfect body, and all may therefore find physical disabilities a source of an inferiority complex, so no one escapes the dangers of his peculiar position in his family. A good judge of human nature can often tell whether a grown man or woman has been an only child or a youngest child or an eldest child in his family. A young woman once applied to us for a position as secretary. When we asked her what she studied in college she answered, “ You’ll laugh when I tell you, but I’m really most interested in archaeology.” We immediately asked her whether she was the eldest child in her family and with a surprised look she admitted that she was the eldest of seven children. This is neither magic nor clairvoyance, but simply an application of the fact that an individual whose focus of interest is in the “ good old days ” probably regards his childhood as a lost paradise whose ancient flavour he wishes to recapture, and the family situation in which this most frequently occurs is the situation of the eldest child.