Margaret E. Sangster, who is the kind and gracious foster mother to all the girls of her time and generation, says that "being in bondage to the blues is precisely like being lost in a London fog. The latter is thick and black and obliterates familiar landmarks. A man may be within a few doors of his home, yet grope hopelessly through the murk to find the well-worn threshold. A person under the tyranny of the blues is temporarily unable to adjust life to its usual limitations. He or she cannot see an inch beyond the dreadful present. Everything looks dark and forbidding, and despair with an iron clutch pins its victim down. People think, loosely, that trials that may be weighed and measured and felt and handled are the worst trials to which flesh is heir. But they are mistaken. Hearts are elastic, and real sorrows seldom crush them. Souls have in them a wonderful capacity for recovering after knockdown blows. It is the intangible, the thing that one dreads vaguely, that catches one in the dark, that suggests and intimates a peril that is spiritual rather than mortal; it is the burden that carries dismay and terror to the imagination."
A single member of a household who is given to having "the blues" often darkens a home that would otherwise be bright and sunny. Such an unfortunate person should bear in mind that when a servant is employed the whole household expects her to be kind, tidy, industrious, moral, gentle, and, above all, good natured in her attitude toward all. Surely the daughter of a household cannot wish to feel that she holds her position by accident of birth, and that if her family were not compelled to keep her they would not.
Charles Dickens says: "It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted, duty-doing man flows out into the world." A bright, cheerful, sunshiny daughter in a home can never know how great is her influence for making the little household world holier and happier for all whose life interests are centered therein. Hamilton Wright Mabie says: "The day is dark only when the mind is dark; all weathers are pleasant when the heart is at rest." Bliss Carman observes that "happiness, perhaps, comes by the grace of Heaven, but the wearing of a happy countenance, the preserving of a happy mien, is a duty, not a blessing." This thought that it is one's duty to be happy is set forth still more forcibly by Lilian Whiting: "No one has any more right to go about unhappy than he has to go about ill-bred."