try just a few experiments. Hold your pain and suffering from
your appendix operation, and disappointment because you can't be
bridesmaid at your chum's wedding, up close to your eyes, and you cannot
see anything else. They crowd the whole field of vision. Look at the
world from the eyes of a spoiled woman of wealth who for twenty years
has had husband, friends, and servants obedient to her every whim. She
has grown selfish and demanding. What she has asked for, hitherto, has
been immediately forthcoming. Now she is ill, and she naturally
considers the doctors and nurses mere agents to secure her relief from
discomfort. She is willing to pay any price for that--and still she is
allowed to suffer. From her point of view it is utterly unreasonable,
inexcusable. What are hospitals and nurses for, anyway? And she is
carping, critical, and disagreeable. Her attitude is as sick as her
body. How could it be otherwise?

Look about you from an aching mind and body, after days of suffering and
sleeplessness, and unless you are a rare person and have a soul that
sees the sunshine back of everything--you will find the world a place of
torture. Look out from despair and loss of the ones you love best, or
from failure of will to meet disaster, and everybody may be involved in
bringing about your suffering, or in effecting your disgrace.

Look out on the world from the eyes of the immigrant who has lost all
his illusions of the land where dollars grow on the street and where
everyone has an equal chance to be president, and if you do not cringe
in abject humility, you are not unlikely to be insufferably
self-asserting, considering that the world has robbed you and that now
it is your turn to get all that is coming to you. So you make loud
demands in a rude, ordering voice. The nurse is there to wait upon
you--and finally you will have your innings.

Look out from the resentful eyes and smarting mind of the negro who is
just beginning in a northern city to realize that his boasted "equality"
is a farce, and you will try to prove to the white nurse that you are as
good as anybody. You are impossible; but back of all your bravado and
swagger and rudeness and complaint of neglect because of your color, you
realize that you cannot measure up. You know you belong to a different
race, most of whose members are daily giving evidences of inferiority;
and you are sure that the nurse is thinking that.

Look from the eyes of the "new rich," o