f our present day society and is one of the causes of
many a man's and woman's physical and mental ruin. In the words of our
author elsewhere:

They are killing themselves to get what they really don't want
and don't need, and are starving for things they could easily
have by just putting out their hands.

Where life's struggle is reduced to this kind of thing, there is
little compensation, hence we are not surprised to read that:

Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the
day's work found him--overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an
ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife's tocsin, while
she was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia's
course ran smooth through a thousand complications was not
accomplished without an incalculable expenditure of nervous
force on her mother's part. Dr. Melton had several times of
late predicted that he would have his old patient back under
his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy, was
now moved by his wife's pale agitation to a heart-sickening
mixture or apprehension for her and of recollection of his own
extreme discomfort whenever she was sick.

Yet in spite of this intense tension, she was unable to stop--felt
she must go on, until finally, a breakdown intervened and she was
compelled to lay by.

On another page a friend tells of his great-aunt's experience:

'She told me that all through her childhood her family was
saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They
worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they
finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that
was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And
it took the womenfolks every minute of their time, and more
to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
heated, furnished, repaired, painted and everything the way a
fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The
fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took
so much time to--'

Finally Lydia herself becomes awakened, startled as she sees what
everybody is trying to make her life become and she bursts out to her
sister:

'I'm just frightened of--everything--what everybody expects me
to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never have any
time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there'll be
more thi