result. We have strained to work and strained to play and strained
to live for so long that when the need for rest gets so imperative
that we feel we must rest the habit of strain is so upon us that we
strain to rest. And what does such "rest" amount to? What strength
does it bring us? What enlightenment do we get from it?

With the little lady of whom I first spoke rest was a
steadily-weakening process. She was resting her body straight toward
its grave. When a body rests and rests the circulation gets more and
more sluggish until it breeds disease in the weakest organ, and then
the physicians seem inclined to give their attention to the disease,
and not to the cause of the abnormal strain which was behind the
disease. Again, as we have seen, the abnormal, rushed feeling can
exist just as painfully with too much and the wrong kind of rest as
with too much work and the wrong way of working.

We have been, as a nation, inclined toward "Americanitis" for so
long now that children and children's children have inherited a
sense of rush, and they suffer intensely from it with a perfectly
clear understanding of the fact that they have nothing whatever to
hurry about. This is quite as true of men as it is of women. In such
cases the first care should be not to fasten this sense of rush on
to anything; the second care should be to go to work to cure it, to
relax out of that contraction--just as you would work to cure
twitching St. Vitus's dance, or any other nervous habit.

Many women will get up and dress in the morning as if they had to
catch a train, and they will come in to breakfast as if it were a
steamer for the other side of the world that they had to get, and no
other steamer went for six months. They do not know that they are in