other-in-law _vs._
daughter-in-law situation come to the ears of the old lady.
Conscientious and well-meaning, that lady announced her determination to
take up her residence with a married daughter who already had a
well-organized household, and whose husband was a favorite of the
mother's. Despite the mother-in-law joke of the humorists, the
mother-in-law is far more friendly to a daughter's husband than to a
son's wife.

This solved part of my patient's problem. There remained the adjustment
to domestic life. This was hard, and though in part successful, it was
delayed by the sterility of the marriage. The husband and wife agreed
that pending a child she might well become active again in the larger
world. Though the best place would have been her old work, pride and
convention stood in the way, and so she entered upon more or less
amateurish social work. Finally, perhaps as an unconsciously humorous
compensation for her own troubles, she became an ardent and thoroughly
efficient secretary to a league of housewives that aimed at better
conditions. This work took up her time except for the supervising of a
servant, and this nondomestic arrangement worked well since she had no
children.

Case VIII. The childless, neglected woman.

It happened that two of the severest cases I have seen occurred, one in
a Jewish woman and the other in a young Irish woman, with such an
identity of symptoms and social domestic background that either case
might have been interchanged for the other without any appreciable
difference. The factors in the cases might simply be summarized as
childlessness, anxiety, neglect, and loneliness, and in each case the
main symptoms were anxiety, attacks of cardiac symptoms, fatigue, and
sleeplessness.

The young Jewish woman, thirty years of age, had been married since the
age of twenty. Before marriage she worked in the needle trades, was well
and strong and had no knowledge of any particular nervous or mental
disease in her family. She married a man of twenty-four, who had also
been in the tailoring business and had branched out in a small way in
business. This business required him to go to work at about seven-thirty
in the morning and he finished at nine-thirty in the evening. In the
earlier years of their marriage he came home rather promptly at the end
of his long day and the pair were quite happy.

At about the third year after marriage the woman became quite alarmed at
her continued sterili