intelligence and the appropriate educational background could easily have been ascertained before his plan was endorsed. He had not originally suggested it with conviction and it would not have been difficult to show him that the idea was unwise. He might have been spared the additional handicap of the sense of failure which the experience brought him. Only too often a sanguine and enthusiastic personality will embark a man upon plans in which he has no fundamental interest, mistaking his acquiescence for a positive desire. Once the buoyancy and optimism of the helper is removed, the individual slackens his efforts because he has never really made the plan his own.
Sometimes the person in trouble will have a plan which is genuine, but which is unsound. He is so eager to start upon the project that neither persuasion nor advice is enough to make its undesirability evident. Under such circumstances it may be wisest to help him to learn in the only way by which, after all, most people learn, that is, by experience.
A widow with two children was invited by her sister and her brother-in-law to make her home with them. They lived in a city three hundred miles distant. A social case worker learned that
