How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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reason : no one in the hotel would be affected by these tricks which worked so beautifully on her mother and neighbours. The hotel had sound-proof walls, and no one could see her headaches, or watch the amount of wine she drank in twenty-four hours. But the reader must not forget that Elsie had had no training for an independent life. She had developed neither of the two techniques which we have demon¬ strated as so essential to a happy life—the art of getting along with others, or the art of filling your own life with some meaningful avocation. Therefore she had to look around for some device which would restore her to an atmosphere for which she was prepared. The window of the room on the top floor of the hotel was this ready-made tool. We can imagine that she unconsciously gravitated toward the window and began coquetting with the possibilities of self-destruction. Of real suicide there was no idea. She went through the dramatic fiction of a struggle to resist this “ irresistible force ” which seemed to drive her on to the fatal leap. Her vanity and cowardice were far too important to allow her to make such a mistake in reality. Viewed in terms of its purpose, Elsie’s struggle against suicide has but one meaning : “ Now I can leave the hotel and go back to my own room and bed.” Her apartment was on the first floor, a bare ten feet above the ground. A leap from her own bedroom to the drab alley could have resulted at most in a sprained ankle or a few bruises. But the fear of self-destruction led her unerringly to the scene of her life’s greatest victories against her mother and her neighbours. She had demonstrated to the psychiatrist the impossibility of living away from home.