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

happens to be the purser of the ship, a married man with two children in New York, and a wife he loves very dearly. Our young lady immediately abandons her critical faculties and surrenders herself to the imaginary enjoyment of her life’s dream. She leaves out of account the fact that the purser is a man of little education and a social background dissimilar to hers, that he is already married, and that he is only very mildly interested in her. She distorts every pleasant word he utters into a con¬ fession of love, and fully expects him to leave his ship and return to Europe to marry her at the first possible opportunity. She has “ fallen in love ”. There is no doubt of the sincerity of her feelings, of her genuine regard. She seems hypnotized by the man’s personality. She can dream only of the recapitulation of her childhood paradise in the company of this man who seemingly fits into her pattern exactly. To an outside observer who sees the manifest incongruities of the situation, her attitude and her apparent inability to recognize or weigh the obvious obstacles to her scheme appear insane. “ Falling in love ” may be considered a form of temporary insanity. Like the electrical robot, tuned to open a door when the password <c Kismet 1 ” is uttered, our young lady has set the entire machinery of her emotional life into its irreversible, complicated courses, because a psychological password, this time in the form of a certain physical human type, has touched her. She feels that she is the victim of some ineluctable and ineffable passion, completely beyond the control of her personality. When the disinterested bystander objects to her marriage, saying that the man is already married, has children, cannot support her in the style in which she lives, that he would be a poor mate because he is com¬ mitted to his ship most of the time, that he w^ould refuse to live in England, that he is ten years too old to be her mate—-she answers simply, “ But I love him. He must leave his wife and come to me, I love him, I tell you.”