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 "out with it." The nervous mother worrying about her baby shows it even to the unconscious child at her breast. When the child is older she still shows it, until the little one knows as well as it knows when the sun is shining that "mother is worrying again." The worrying wife does not keep her worry to herself; she pours it out to, or upon, her husband. The worrying husband is just the same. If it is the wife that causes him to worry--or to think so--he pours out his worry in turbulent words, thus adding fuel to a fire already too hot for comfort.