"But," you say, "I am far less disturbed by the over work than I am by
the discomfort that comes from the dust." Then all I can say is that
you are wrongly balanced, according to my notion of things. Your
health should be of far more value to you than your ideas of house
tidiness, but you have reversed the importance of the two. Teach
yourself the relative value of things. A hundred dollar bill is of
greater value than one for five dollars, and the life of your baby
more important than the value of the hundred dollar bill. Put first
things first, and secondly, and tertiary, and quarternary things
in their relative positions. Your health and self-poise should come
first, the comfort and happiness of husband and family next, the more
or less spotlessness and tidiness of the house afterwards. Then, if
you cannot have your house as tidy as you wish, resolutely resolve
that you will not be disturbed. You will control your own life and not
allow a dusty room--be it never so dusty--to destroy your comfort and
peace of mind, and that of your loved ones.

When a woman of this worrying type has children she soon learns that
she must choose between the health and happiness of her children
and the gratification of her own passionate desire for spotless
cleanliness. This gratification, if permanently indulged in, soon
becomes a disease, for surely only a diseased mind can value the
spotlessness of a house more than the health, comfort, and happiness
of children. Yet many women do--more's the pity. Such poor creatures
should learn that there is a dirtiness that is far worse than dirt in
a house--a dirtiness, a muddiness of mind, a cluttering of thought, a
making of the mind a harboring place for wrong thoughts. Not wrong in
the sense of immoral or wicked, as these words are generally used, but
wrong in this sense, viz., that reason shows the folly, the inutility,