deeply and soberly reflective, and out of it there ensues a great
philanthropy, a great memorial to his grief. For the one, sorrow has
deënergized; for the other it has energized, has raised the efforts to a
nobler plane.

Now there are women, and also men, to whom emotion acts like an overdose
of a drug. Parenthetically, emotion and certain drugs have very similar
effects. No matter how joyous the occasion and how exuberant their joy,
a mood may settle into their lives like a fog and obscure everything.
This mood may arise from the smallest disappointment; or a sudden vision
of possible disaster to one they love may appear before them through
some stray mental association. They are at the mercy of every sad memory
and of every look into the future.

Preëminently, they are the victims of that form of chronic fear called
worry, more aptly named by Fletcher "fearthought." He implied by this
name that it was a sort of degenerated "forethought."

If the baby has a cough, then it may have tuberculosis or pneumonia or
some disastrous illness, of which death is the commonest ending. How
often is the doctor called in by these women and needlessly, and how she
does keep his telephone busy! It is true that a cough may be early
tuberculosis, but this is the last possibility rather than the first.

If the husband is late, Heaven knows what may have happened. She has
visions of him lying dead in some morgue, picked up by the police, or
he's in a hospital terribly injured by an automobile, or, perchance, a
robber has sandbagged him and dragged him into a dark alley. If she is a
bit jealous, and he is at all attractive, then the disaster lies that
way. It doesn't matter that his work may be such that he cannot be at