THE WORRY OF THE SQUIRREL CAGE Reference has already been made to _The Squirrel Cage_, by Dorothy Canfield.

Better than any book I have read for a long time, it reveals the causes of much of the worry that curses our modern so-called civilized life.

These causes are complex and various.

They include _vanity, undue attention to what our neighbors think of us, a false appreciation of the values of things_, and they may all be summed up into what I propose to call--with due acknowledgement to Mrs.
Canfield--_the Worry of the Squirrel Cage_.
I will let the author express her own meaning of this latter term.

If the story leading up seems to be long please seek to read it in the light of this expression:[A] [Footnote A: Reprinted from "The Squirrel-Cage" by Dorothy Canfield ($1.35 net); published by Henry Holt and Company, New York City.] When Mr.and Mrs.Emery, directly after their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio, they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home.
Every step in the long series of changes which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and gratifying significance for the Emerys and its final condition, prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of wood work in every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.
Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with effort, self-denial, and careful calculations, yet still without incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity.