Ethel Baxter's childhood had been remarkably well influenced,
considering the nervous intensity of both parents. For the mother's
sake, their winters had been spent in Florida, their summers on Long
Island. Her mother, in face of the fact that she rarely knew a day of
physical comfort and for years had not felt the thrill of physical
strength, most conscientiously gave time, thought and prayer to her
child's rearing. Hours were devoted to daily lessons, and many habits
of consideration and refinement, many ideals of beauty, many niceties
of domestic duty and practically all her studies, were mother-taught.
Ethel was active, physically restless, impulsive, cheerful, fairly
intense in her eagerness for an expression of the thrilling activities
within. She was truly a high-type product of generations of fine
living, and her blue blood did show from the first in the rapid
development of keenness of mind and acuteness of feeling. Typically of
the nervous temperament, she early showed a superb capacity for
complex adjustments. Yet, with one damaging, and later threatening
idea, the mother infected the child's mind; the conception of
invalidism entered into the constructive fabric of the child-thought
all the more deeply, because there was little of offensively selfish
invalidism ever displayed by the mother. But many of the concessions
and considerations instinctively demanded by the nervous sufferer were
for years matters-of-course in the Baxter home; and these demands,
almost unconsciously made by the mother, could but modify much of the
natural expression of her child's young years.

Another damaging attitude-reaction, intense in its expression,
followed the unexpected death of Ethel's father. The mother, true to
the ancient and honorable precedents of her family, went into a month
of helplessness following the sad news. She could not attend the
funeral, and for weeks the activities of the household were muffled by