How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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jolly, objective, honest physician, deeply devoted to his profession. His own nature is so honest that he was not in the least aware of his wife’s jealousy, although all his friends marvelled at his willingness to reassure his wife’s unreasonable suspicions by repeated recitals of fidelity which would enrage a less good-natured man. Once a grateful patient gave Dr. K. a beautiful clock. He admired and valued this token very highly. The clock stood near the corner of his desk. To his wife it was the arrogant and impudent symbol of his unfaithfulness. She hated it, and she was annoyed at the idea that he looked at the clock more often than he thought of her. One day she called on her husband in his consulting room, sitting in the chair in which patients usually sat while with her husband. After a brief conversation she arose, and swung her fur stole about her neck in such a way that the clock was caught by the tail, dashed to the floor and irreparably broken. The incident passed as an unfortunate accident, although any psychologist might have been suspicious of Mathilda’s unconscious malice, since no one of the doctor’s many other women patients had ever touched the clock in rising and putting on her wraps. When Dr. K. expressed regrets about the destruction of the clock, Mathilda, who had shown very little concern for her clumsiness, turned on her heel in a high rage, saying, “ I do believe, J. K., you value that damned clock more highly than you do your wife’s feelings ! ” Mathilda’s sense of inferiority had been stilled to some extent by her marriage to Dr. K., and his affection and regard for her had been the first experience of love which she had known in her life. But she could not crush her fear that this treasure might be taken away from her or shared with her. The more popular her husband grew, the more she tortured herself with doubts of his fidelity, and the more she watched and guarded his every gesture. She began to imagine that, when he was called out at night, he was calling on a mistress instead of attending a patient. At first she simply writhed mentally until the M