successive stabs of the ill-served unsuccessful dinner. At
times, the table, the guests, the room itself, wavered before
her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance. She
did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and
eating nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing
for the end of things, and darkness and quiet.

When it was all over and her husband was compelled to recognize that
it had been a failure, his mental attitude is thus expressed:

He had determined to preserve at all costs the appearance
of the indulgent, non-critical, over-patient husband that he
intensely felt himself to be. No force, he thought grimly,
shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of
his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous
resolution, his sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked
about, locking doors and windows, and reviewing bitterly the
events of the evening. If he was to restrain himself from
saying, he would at least allow himself the privilege of
feeling all that was possible to a man deeply injured.

And that night Lydia felt for the "first time the quickening to life
of her child. And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten
that she was to know motherhood." Can words more forcefully depict the
_worry of the squirrel-cage_ than this--that an unnecessary dinner,
given in unnecessary style, at unnecessary expense, to visitors to
whom it was unnecessary should have driven from her thought, and
doubtless seriously injured, the new life that she was so soon to give
to the world?

Oh, men and women of divine descent and divine heritage, quit your
squirrel-cage stage of existence. Is life to be one mere whirling
around of the cage of useless toil or pleasure, of mere imagining that
you are doing something? Work with an object. Know your object, that
it is worthy the highest endeavor of a human being, and then pursue it
with a divine enthusiasm that no obstacle can daunt, an ardor that no
weariness can quench. Then it is you will begin to live. There is no
life in _worry_. Worry is a waste of life. If you are a worrier, that
is a proof you (in so far as you worry) do not appreciate the value of
your own life, for a worthy object, a divine enthusiasm, a noble ardor
are in themselves the best possible preventives against worry. They
dignify life above worry. Worry is undignified, petty, paltry. Where
you k