YOU’D better be joking than kicking or croaking, you’d better be saying
that life is a joy, then folks will caress you and praise you and bless
you, and say you’re a peach and a broth of a boy. You’d better be
cheery, not drooling and dreary, from the time you get up till you go to
your couch; or people will hate you and roast and berate you—they don’t
like the man with a hangover grouch. You’d better be leaving the
groaning and grieving to men who have woes of the genuine kind; you know
that your troubles are fragile as bubbles, they are but the growth of a
colicky mind. You’d better be grinning while you have your inning, or
when a real trouble is racking your soul, your friends will be growling,
“He always is howling—he wouldn’t touch joy with a twenty-foot pole.”
You’d better be pleasant; if sorrow is present, there’s no use in
chaining it fast to your door; far better to shoo it, and hoot and
pursue it, and then it may go and come back never more.
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