if
you cannot have your house as tidy as you wish, resolutely resolve
that you will not be disturbed. You will control your own life and not
allow a dusty room--be it never so dusty--to destroy your comfort and
peace of mind, and that of your loved ones.

When a woman of this worrying type has children she soon learns that
she must choose between the health and happiness of her children
and the gratification of her own passionate desire for spotless
cleanliness. This gratification, if permanently indulged in, soon
becomes a disease, for surely only a diseased mind can value the
spotlessness of a house more than the health, comfort, and happiness
of children. Yet many women do--more's the pity. Such poor creatures
should learn that there is a dirtiness that is far worse than dirt in
a house--a dirtiness, a muddiness of mind, a cluttering of thought, a
making of the mind a harboring place for wrong thoughts. Not wrong in
the sense of immoral or wicked, as these words are generally used, but
wrong in this sense, viz., that reason shows the folly, the inutility,
the impracticability of attempting to bring up sane, healthy, happy,
normal children in a household controlled by the idea that spotless
cleanliness is the matter of prime importance to be observed. The
discomfort of children, husband, mother herself are nothing as
compared with keeping the house in perfect order. Any woman so
obsessed should be sent for a short time to an insane asylum, for she
certainly has so reversed the proper order of values as to be so far
insane. She has "cluttered up" her mind with a wrong idea, an idea
which dirties, muddies, soils her mind far worse than dust soils her
house.

Reader, keep your mind free from such dirt--for dirt is but "matter in
the wrong place." Far better have dust, dirt, in your house, dirt on
your child's hands, face, and clothes, than on your own mind to give
you worry, discomfort and disease.

CHAPTER VI THE SELFISHNESS OF WORRY

If worry merely affected the one who worries it might be easier,
in many cases, to view worry with equanimity and calmness. But,
unfortunately, in the disagreeable features of life, far more than the
agreeable, the aphorism of the apostolic writer, "No man liveth unto
himself," seems to be more than ordinarily true. It is one proof of
the selfishness of the "worrier"--whether consciously or unconsciously
I do not say--that he never keeps his worry to himself. He must always