How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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But Elizabeth delayed her marriage until she was twenty-
five years old, and finally married a young man who
showed promise, but had attained no eminence what¬
soever at the time of his marriage. For five years before
Elizabeth’s marriage her inability to effect a union which
would recoup the family’s fortune and social status was
the subject of continual conversation and the object of a
greater amount of whispered criticism. With this back¬
ground she approached her forthcoming marriage with
the fear that she had made a mistake. She hardly loved
her fiance when she did marry him, and looked forward
with great misgivings to the dangers of having a family.
Her husband conceded a great many points to her
worry in the beginning, and continued to protest his
love. Within a very short time he was better off than her
brother, and had made a name for himself in the en¬
gineering world. Elizabeth’s children were born without
the slightest danger or injury to her. They developed
normally during childhood, and her husband was not
only capable of educating them very well, but also of
contributing to her parents’ welfare in a very handsome
way. Elizabeth was envied the calm and quiet and
security of her life by most of her neighbours who
considered her good fortune remarkable.
Worry would seem to have no place in such a picture
of normal family life, and yet there was not a moment of
her life that Elizabeth was not worrying about some¬
thing. She had been brought up in an atmosphere of fear
and timidity, and she demanded a degree of security
quite beyond the confines of normal human life. Worry
had become her profession and as she grew older she
practised it with increasing assiduity. The objective
triumphs of her husband and the fine development of her
children robbed her of any real basis for concern from the
very outset, so she confined herself increasingly to vague
and unreasoning fears that her children would not find
the right professions, or would contract mesalliances, or
would become infected with the “ dreadful looseness ” of
the “ terrible younger generation Just what this