Now there are women, and also men, to whom emotion acts like an overdose of a drug.  Parenthetically, emotion and certain drugs have very similar effects.  No matter how joyous the occasion and how exuberant their joy, a mood may settle into their lives like a fog and obscure everything.  This mood may arise from the smallest disappointment; or a sudden vision of possible disaster to one they love may appear before them through some stray mental association.  They are at the mercy of every sad memory and of every look into the future.

Preeminently, they are the victims of that form of chronic fear called worry, more aptly named by Fletcher “fearthought.”  He implied by this name that it was a sort of degenerated “forethought.”

If the baby has a cough, then it may have tuberculosis or pneumonia or some disastrous illness, of which death is the commonest ending.  How often is the doctor called in by these women and needlessly, 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.