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Show KATHLEEN NORMS One Person Can Spoil the Scene faithful old workers and put raw college sons and nephews into positions po-sitions of trust. As long as girls do indiscreet things for just a temporary tem-porary loan, there will be sneaks about who will cash in on these secrets later on. And in the too-common too-common story of divorce and remarriage re-marriage there wlD always be children chil-dren drifting about to come between be-tween the grown-ups problems with acute problems of their own. So do what the bees do. When they find a foreign body In the hive, they rapidly wall it away in sheets of clean wax and go merrily on storing honey in the cells all about. Wall away your problem with philosophy phi-losophy and good sense. Don't let any one other individual spoil your life. Don't wish anyone dead; it's a sort of murder to begin with, and it's perfectly futile anyway. Time works inevitable changes here as everywhere. And the awful truth is this. Just as soon as one bothersome personality per-sonality is gone, and the funeral over and the will read, another shows up. This peculiar twisted life of ours allows us only a few deep breaths of relief, a deceptive brief time in which we can feel that at last everything is all right, and then the new shadow begins to form, and Helen goes about the house busy with murder plans again. "That girl in the office Mollie saw them lunching she's handsome, hand-some, too. I wish to goodness something some-thing would happen to her " DON'T YOU THINK it's pretty hard," asks 22-year-old Mar-cella Mar-cella Ward, "when just one person per-son stands between you and being perfectly happy? My mother-in-law lives with us, and although she tries to be nice, she spoils everything. every-thing. She has no money, nowhere else to go, and she's only 58. She thinks I don't take the right care of the baby.i she demands a lot of attention from Andrew and me, and she talks all the time. I find myself wishing she would die, and hoping she will, and it makes me feel awful. What can I do?" Unfortunately, Marcella, you can't do much, and even more unfortunately, un-fortunately, you are far from being alone in your trouble. For most of us, at long periods in our lives, the existence and demands of just one person just onel darkens our whole scene. Sometimes it's an old relative, as in your case, who simply can not step up his tempo to meet the household requirements, and drags on and on, year after year, stubbornly, stub-bornly, clinging to life. Sometimes it's the rich uncle, who doesn't enjoy en-joy life anyway, and whose money will some day make the greatest difference to his heirs. Often it is the office tyrant the man or woman wo-man who rises to the manager's job without any qualifications for it, and who upsets, delays, confuses everything complacently and puts all the other workers out of step. Superfluous Persons Often, today, that superfluous person right in the middle of the picture is the stepchild, in a second marriage. When Helen serenely watched her boss getting his divorce, di-vorce, and thought that she would always love his little girl, she didn't . . . one person darkens the scene . . . realize what a pest and even worse, what a bore! a ten-year-old girl can be. Pamela had been well schooled by her mother to believe that her father's new wife is a home breaker and a gold digger. And Pamela's schooling and teeth-straightening teeth-straightening and clothing are expenses ex-penses upon which Helen didn't count. As for those unhappy women who are being blackmailed and there are more than you might imagine, their thoughts as the sneaking triumphant tri-umphant figure goes his way, with their money in his pockets, can be easily imagined. Yes, Marcella, everyone, at one time or another, finds herself saying say-ing "if only she would die." Death ends' everyone's story, and there are certain stories to which we want to write finis. We find ourselves our-selves thinking of the freedom of the inherited money, of the office with a rational and capable figure at its head; of the relief of not having to send John's first wife that enormous check every month, of the easier household without dead old Uncle Peter or John's critical old mother. Courage to Endure But wiser than waiting for a dramatic dra-matic change is the character and courage that accepts the utterly inacceptable and endures the completely com-pletely unendurable. As long as there are young households, there will be fumbling, troublesome old persons in them. As long as there are offices at all, the higher-ups will step right over the claims of |