n so-called
civilized life. These causes are complex and various. They include
_vanity, undue attention to what our neighbors think of us, a false
appreciation of the values of things_, and they may all be summed
up into what I propose to call--with due acknowledgement to Mrs.
Canfield--_the Worry of the Squirrel Cage_.

I will let the author express her own meaning of this latter term. If
the story leading up seems to be long please seek to read it in the
light of this expression:[A]

[Footnote A: Reprinted from "The Squirrel-Cage" by Dorothy Canfield
($1.35 net); published by Henry Holt and Company, New York City.]

When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after their wedding in a
small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio,
they had spent their tiny capital in building a small
story-and-a-half cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and
fancy turning popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus
of their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home.
Every step in the long series of changes which had led from
its first state to its last had a profound and gratifying
significance for the Emerys and its final condition,
prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of
wood work in every room that showed, with the latest, most
unobtrusively artistic effects in decoration, represented
their culminating well-earned position in the inner circle of
the best society of Endbury.

Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained
with effort, self-denial, and careful calculations, yet still
without incurring debt, so their social position had been
secured by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss of
self-respect or even of dignity. They were honestly proud of
both their house and of their list of acquaintances and saw
no reason to regard them as less worthy achievements of an
industrious life than their four creditable grown-up children
or Judge Emery's honorable reputation at the bar.

The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember
those early struggling days with as fresh an emotion as
that of their parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent,
sharp-eyed matron of thirty-two, could not see the most
innocuous colored lithograph without an uncontrollable wave
of bitterness, so present to her mind was the period when they
painfully groped their way out