“That’s all right, too. I understand your point of view, Beulah. You carry it a little bit too far, that’s all that’s wrong with it from my way of thinking.”
“Will you help me to go on, Peter?”
“How?”
“Talk to my aunt and my mother. Tell them that they’re all wrong in their treatment of me.” 230
“I think I could undertake to do that”—Peter was convinced that a less antagonistic attitude on the part of her relatives would be more successful—“and I will.”
Beulah’s eyes filled with tears.
“You’re the only one who comes anywhere near knowing,” she said, “or who ever will, I guess. I try so hard, Peter, and now when I don’t seem to be accomplishing as much as I want to, as much as it’s necessary for me to accomplish if I am to go on respecting myself, every one enters into a conspiracy to stop my doing anything at all. The only thing that makes me nervous is the way I am thwarted and opposed at every turn. I haven’t got nervous prostration.”
“Perhaps not, but you have something remarkably like ideê fixe,” Peter said to himself compassionately.
He found her actual condition less dangerous but much more difficult than he had anticipated. She was living wrong, that was the sum and substance of her malady. Her life was spent confronting theories and discounting conditions. She did not realize that it is only the interest of our investment in life that we can sanely contribute to 231 the cause of living. Our capital strength and energy must be used for the struggle for existence itself if we are to have a world of balanced individuals. There is an arrogance involved in assuming ourselves more humane than human that reacts insidiously on our health and morals. Peter, looking into the twitching hectic face before him with the telltale glint of mania in the eyes, felt himself becoming helpless with pity for a mind gone so far askew. He felt curiously responsible for Beulah’s condition.
“She wouldn’t have run herself so far aground,” he thought, “if I had been on the job a little more. I could have helped her to steer straighter. A word here and a lift there and she would have come through all right. Now something’s got to stop her or she can’t be stopped. She’ll preach once too often out of the tail of a cart on the subject of equal guardianship,—and—”