"If you keep up excitement a long time you get very tired of it. If you follow my suggestion you have a comfortable feeling all the time. My process is just like housecleaning a room; before you clean the walls and floor you remove the furniture. When the bare room is fresh once more you move in the articles that you want there for use or adornment."
"Clean out bad thoughts and put in—"
"Only such thoughts as you are going to find valuable. For instance, after you have cleaned out of your mind the idea that you are very superior to Ethel Blue you ought to fill your mind with thoughts of helpfulness for her. You must think of all the good points she has; think how gentle she is and truthful and how brave she is about taking blame when she deserves it. You never find Ethel Blue failing to admit her responsibility for accidents or mistakes even when it takes a good deal of moral courage to do it."
Ethel Brown flushed. She remembered times when, according to her, accidents had happened without any human assistance.
"You must give Ethel Blue a feeling that you believe in her physical courage as well as her moral courage. You must always think of her as brave and when you talk with her on any such subjects you must take it for granted that she is brave. It is natural for a person to try to live up to the opinion that other people hold of him."
"That is true, I believe," said Ethel thoughtfully. "Is that why you said 'Dicky is quite old enough to do that errand for me' yesterday after I had said, 'Dicky, you're such a baby, you'll never remember that'?"
"It was. If you treat Dicky as a baby he'll stay a baby long after he ought to. He's not a baby now just because Roger has always treated him as a companion and Helen has let him help her when he could. Don't you remember that Roger went to the Boys' Club with Dicky for three or four days after he entered? That was to see how Dicky behaved. He didn't say to Dicky, 'You're just a baby so I'm going to see whether you act like a baby.' If he had said that Dicky probably would have behaved like the baby he was told he was. But Roger told Dicky that no babies were allowed in the Boys' Club, and the result was that Dicky stood on his own feet and met the other youngsters as boy to boy and not as if they were real boys and he was just a baby there on sufferance."
"I never thought before that we had any influence on other people like that."
"Once I knew a girl who was rather slow in speech. It gave people an impression that she was not very bright, and they began to treat her as if she were stupid."
"Wasn't she really?"