a rush and a hurry, and they do not find it out until the strain has
been on them for so long that they get nervously ill from it--and
then they find themselves suffering from "that rushed feeling."

Watch some women in an argument pushing, actually rushing, to prove
themselves right; they will hardly let their opponent have an
opportunity to speak, much less will they stop to consider what he
says and see if by chance he may not be right and they wrong.

The rushing habit is not by any means in the fact of doing many
things. It asserts itself in our brains in talking, in writing, in
thinking. How many of us, I wonder, have what might be called a
quiet working brain? Most of us do not even know the standard of a
brain that thinks and talks and lives quietly: a brain that never
pushes and never rushes, or, if by any chance it is led into pushing
or rushing, is so wholesomely sensitive that it drops the push or
the rush as a bare hand would drop a red-hot coal.

None of us can appreciate the weakening power of this strained habit
of rush until we have, by the use of our own wills, directed our
minds toward finding a normal habit of quiet, and yet I do not in
the least exaggerate when I say that its weakening effect on the
brain and nerves is frightful.

And again I repeat, the rushed feeling has nothing whatever to do
with the work before us. A woman can feel quite as rushed when she
has nothing to do as when she is extremely busy.

"But," some one says, "may I not feel pressed for time when I have
more to do than I can possibly put into the time before me ?"