the household cat is purring gently in contentment. Happiness is the
predominant note.

Then Old Moneybags savagely rings the bell. Enters the butler,
obsequious and solicitous. "The coffee is bad, the toast is vile,
everything is wrong. You are a _deleted deleted deleted deleted_
rascal." Exit the butler, outwardly humble, inwardly a raging flood of
anger, and he meets the maid, who archly invites his attentions. She
gets them, only they are in the form of an angry shove and an oath.
White with indignation, she stamps her foot and runs into the kitchen,
bursting into tears. The cook, solicitous, receives a slap in the face,
and as the maid bounces out, the cook, seeking a victim, grabs away the
gingerbread from the butcher's boy. And that still hungry juvenile
slams the door as he leaves and kicks the slumbering cat off the back
doorstep.

Unfortunately the film did not show what the outraged cat did. Possibly
it started a devastation that reached back into Moneybags' career; at
any rate the unusual little picture (which later went on to the usual
happy ending) showed how emotion spreads through the world, just as
disease does. The infection that starts in the hovel finally strikes
down the rich man's child, enthroned in the palace. The mood engendered
by the humiliation of poverty or cruelty or any injustice finally shakes
a king off his throne.

So when we trace the deënergizing emotions of the housewife, we are
tracing factors that affect her husband, his work, and Society at large;
we trace the things that mold her children, and thus we follow her mood,
her emotion, into the future, into history.