slightly and letting your jaw hang loosely. These again are two
extremes, but, if the habit has been one of tension, a persistent
practice of the extreme of looseness will lead to a quiet mode of
writing in which ten pages can be finished with the effort it
formerly took to write one.

Sometimes the habit of needless strain has taken such a strong hold
that the very effort to work quietly seems so unnatural as to cause
much nervous suffering. To turn the corner from a bad habit into a
true and wholesome one is often very painful, but, the first pain
worked through, the right habit grows more and more easy, until
finally the better way carries us along and we take it
involuntarily.

For the young woman who felt she had come to the end of her powers,
it was work or die; therefore, when she had become rested enough to
see and understand at all, she welcomed the idea that it was not her
work that tired her, but the way in which she did it, and she
listened eagerly to the directions that should teach her to do it
with less fatigue, and, as an experiment, offered to go back and try
the "lazy way" for a week. At the end of a week she reported that
the "lazy way" had rested her remarkably, but she did not do her
work so well. Then she had to learn that she could keep more quietly
and steadily concentrated upon her work, doing it accurately and
well, without in the least interfering with the "lazy way." Indeed,
the better concentrated we are, the more easily and restfully we can
work, for concentration does not mean straining every nerve and
muscle toward our work,--it means _dropping everything that
interferes,_ and strained nerves and muscles constitute a very
bondage of interference.