I think deaf women are more likely than men to be exceedingly jealous. Mrs. Helen Brewster was deaf, and she made life a burden to her husband, Frank. He was really one of the most circumspect of men, but if he stopped for a moment to talk with Miss Kempton, the sixty-year-old dressmaker, poor Helen was quick to imagine him taking advantage of her affliction to exchange nonsense with the other ladies. And right here let me say to the deaf and the near-deaf: force yourselves to believe that your friends, and particularly the members of your family, are absolutely true; do not ever permit your mind to suggest that those upon whom you must rely for help or interpretation are unfaithful. Never admit this until you cannot escape the conviction. Remember that most persons we meet are kindly and well disposed, if selfish and thoughtless. They are not plotting our destruction or even our unhappiness. It is too easy for the deaf to turn life into a veritable hell by permitting the hideous devils of depression to master the brain. Now, Helen Brewster was jealous without reason, and perhaps the unreasonable phase of that disease runs its most violent course. The Brewsters lived on the ground floor of an old-fashioned town house. In the family living on the upper floor was a daughter, Mary Crimmins, who caused Helen’s worst paroxysms. In Winter, after an unusually hard storm, the old roof was endangered by its load of snow. Mary Crimmins called from her window to Frank as the only man then in the house to mount the roof and shovel away the snow. And Helen, washing dinner dishes at the sink, saw the two talking, Frank looking up and smiling, and immediately concluded that the topic was much warmer than snow. Frank got a ladder and a shovel, and mounted to the roof, while poor Helen sat in the sitting-room bathing her soul in misery, for while men do not usually present a ladder when planning an elopement in broad daylight, all things were possible to her distorted mind. Soon there came a small avalanche of snow from the roof, but the distracted deaf woman did not hear it. Then her son came rushing into the room, screaming with such breath as was left in him: “Oh, ma! It’s terrible!” “What’s the matter?” “The snow all slipped and knocked the ladder down, and pa—” “What about pa?” “He’s up there hugging—” Johnnie really finished his sentence, but the words “pa” and “hugging” were enough for Helen. “He is, is he? I’ll attend to him!” And she rushed upstairs and knocked loudly at the door; then, without waiting for any invitation, she strode in. Old Mrs. Crimmins sat knitting by the window, while in a corner behind her sat Mary with a stranger, a fine-looking young man. Before the irate deaf woman could properly unload her mind, Mary blushing red, came and screamed in her neighbor’s ear: “This is my fiance, Henry Jordon. We meant to keep it secret, and you are the first one I’ve told. I know you won’t repeat it.”