The fourth stage is known as _microbophobic moscophobia_, which is the pathological term describing the fear of flies as carriers of infection. You get new screens, interrupt the housemaid every half hour with orders to see whether there are more flies to be found, cover the baby and yourself with netting when you nap, have a cement pit made for the garbage can, and repaper or repaint your interiors--that is, the interiors of your house--every six months. You read, too, that mosquitoes carry yellow fever in the West Indies, and malaria in Italy--distant places, indeed; but still, why shouldn't mosquitoes fly across the sea and land and light on the baby, or yourself? So you screen the household by day as well as by night, and avoid evenings out and picnics in the shade.
In the latter part of this stage you also change your religion on account of the communion service, have your letters disinfected, leave off kissing the baby, steer to windward of rug-beaters and street sweepers, hold your breath as you pass dogs and cats, eat nothing not cooked, drink nothing not boiled, carry a bottle of microbicide in your pocket, dream that the earth is full of microbes as the waters cover the sea, and that the hand of every one of them is lifted against you, and have cold sweats at night and cold feet by day. You realize that you are uncomfortable, but the real cause of it never occurs to you: you attribute your condition to the uncleanliness of your environment, and to your willingness to sacrifice your own comfort to the cause of scientific sanitation.
By this time, too, your sense of humor, never very robust, has decayed, atrophied, and disappeared. Your fat, good-humored, unscientific neighbor calls out from his back porch as you come out to yours to get the milk bottle: "Dangerous stuff, that there! They say they's forty-three million four hundred an' ninety-nine thousand two hundred an' seventeen microbes in a half a drop of it"--and you don't laugh, any more than you laugh when you advise your professor friend to disinfect the contents of his pay envelope, and he replies, "Don't worry--there's no microbe could ever live on my salary!"
In the fifth stage you begin to be physically as well as spiritually uncomfortable. In the eloquent words of the old hymn, you are a prey to "fightings without and fears within." What with the insufficiency of your means to meet the demands of disinfection, and what with the difficulty of getting properly prepared food even if you have the money, and what with the continual strain of anxiety lest you entertain a microbe unawares, you grow thin and nervous. Of course you continue to lay it to microbes, and double your precautions--and worry more, and starve more. If you are not rescued, you finally pass into _delirium microbophobicum_, which is as much more awful than _delirium tremens_ as microbes are smaller and more insidious and wiser than serpents.