edlessly, and how she
does keep his telephone busy! It is true that a cough may be early
tuberculosis, but this is the last possibility rather than the first.

If the husband is late, Heaven knows what may have happened. She has
visions of him lying dead in some morgue, picked up by the police, or
he's in a hospital terribly injured by an automobile, or, perchance, a
robber has sandbagged him and dragged him into a dark alley. If she is a
bit jealous, and he is at all attractive, then the disaster lies that
way. It doesn't matter that his work may be such that he cannot be at
home regularly or on schedule; the sinister explanation takes possession
of her to the exclusion of the more rational; _she has a sort of
affinity for the terrible_. And when her husband comes home, the
profound fear in many cases turns sharply and quickly to anger at him.
Her distorted sense of responsibility makes him the culprit for her
unnecessary fear.

Now it is true that almost every woman has something of this tendency,
but it is only the extreme case that I am here depicting. In this
extreme form, this type of woman is commonly found among the Jews. The
Jewish home reverberates with emotionality and largely through this
attitude of the Jewish housewife.

Such a woman is apt to make a slave of her family through their fear of
arousing her emotions. How frequently people are chained by their
sympathies, how frequently they are impeded in enjoyment by the tyranny
of some one else's weakness, would fill one of the biggest chapters in a
true history of the human race,--a book that will probably never be
written.

Naturally enough, this housewife finds plenty to worry about, to react
to, and since these reactions are physical, they have a lowering effect
on her energy.

To those familiar with the conception that every emotion, every feeling,
needs a discharge, it will seem heretical when I say that the excessive
discharge of emotion is harmful. Freud finds the root of most nervous
trouble in repressed emotion. That is in part true, but it is also true
that excessive emotionality is a high-grade injury, for emotional
discharge is habit forming. It becomes habitual to cry too much, to act
too angry, to fear too much. The conquest and disciplining of emotion is
one of the great objects of training. It has for its goal the supremacy
of the noblest organ of the human being, his brain. For proper living
there must be emotion--there always will b