What is essential--What not?
Is it essential to be a society leader, to belong to every club, to hold office, to give as many dinners as one's neighbors, to have a bigger house, furniture with brighter polish, bigger carvings and more ugly designs than anyone else in town, to have our names in the papers oftener than others, to have more servants, a newer style automobile, put on more show, pomp, ceremony and circumstance than our friends?
By no means! Oh for men and women who have the discerning power--the sight for the essential things, the determination to have them and let non-essentials go.

They are the wise ones, the happy ones, the free-from-worry ones.
Later I shall refer extensively to Mrs.Canfield's book _The Squirrel Cage_.

She has many wise utterances on this phase of the worry question.

For instance, in referring to the mad race for wealth and position that keeps a man away from home so many hours of the day that his wife and child scarce know him she introduces the following dialogue: One of them whose house isn't far from mine, told me that he hadn't seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks.
'But something ought to be done about it!' The girl's deep-lying instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.
'Are they so much worse off than most American business men ?' queried Rankin.

'Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more than the outside of their children; and isn't seeing them asleep about as--' Lydia cut him short quickly.