a turnkey is standing and listening to every word said! Let him
imagine how flattering for her! She might be more flattered, at any
rate more thrilled, if she knew that instead of thinking about his
business he was thinking about another woman. Could he shut the front
door every afternoon on his business, the effect would not only be
beneficial upon it and upon him, but his wife would smile the warm
smile of wisdom justified. Like most women, she has a firmer grasp of
the essence of life than the man upon whom she is dependent. She knows
with her heart (what he only knows with his brain) that business,
politics, and "all that sort of thing" are secondary to real
existence, the mere preliminaries of it. She would rejoice, in the
blush of the compliment he was paying her, that he had at last begun
to comprehend the ultimate values!

So far as I am aware, there is no patent device for suddenly gaining
that control of the mind which will enable one to free it from an
obsession such as the obsession of the plain man. The desirable end
can, however, be achieved by slow degrees, and by an obvious method
which contains naught of the miraculous. If the victim of the
obsession will deliberately try to think of something else, or to
think of nothing at all--every time he catches himself in the act of
thinking about his business out of hours, he certainly will, sooner or
later--probably in about a fortnight--cure the obsession, or at least
get the upper hand of it. The treatment demands perseverance, but it
emphatically does not demand an impossibly powerful effort. It is an
affair of trifling pertinacious touches.

It is a treatment easier to practise during daylight, in company, when
distractions are plentiful, than in the solitude of the night.
Triumphantly to battle with an obsession at night, when the vitality