says Mrs. Burr, "a child's illness, an over-gay season,
the loss of an investment, a family jar,--these are accepted as
sufficient cause for over-strained nerves and temporary retirement
to a sanitarium. _Then_, war, rapine, fire, sword, prolonged and
mortal peril, were considered as furnishing no excuse to men or women
for altering the habits, or slackening the energies, of their daily
existence."

As a matter of fact, Isabella d' Este witnessed the sacking of Rome
without so much as thinking of nervous prostration. This was nearly
four hundred years ago, but it is the high-water mark of feminine
fortitude. To live through such days and nights of horror, and emerge
therefrom with unimpaired vitality, and unquenched love for a
beautiful and dangerous world, is to rob the words "shock" and
"strain" of all dignity and meaning. To resume at once the
interrupted duties and pleasures of life was, for the Marchioness
of Mantua, obligatory; but none the less we marvel that she could
play her role so well.

A hundred and thirty years later, Sir Ralph Verney, an exiled
royalist, sent his young wife back to England to petition Parliament
for the restoration of his sequestrated estates. Lady Verney's path
was beset by difficulties and dangers. She had few friends and many
enemies, little money and cruel cares. She was, it is needless to
state, pregnant when she left France, and paused in her work long
enough to bear her husband "a lusty boy"; after which Sir Ralph writes
that he fears she is neglecting her guitar, and urges her to practise
some new music before she returns to the Continent.

Such pages of history make tonic reading for comfortable ladies who,
in their comfortable homes, are bidden by their comfortable doctors
to avoid the strain of anything and everything which makes the game
of life worth living. It is our wont to think of our
great-great-great-grandmothers as spending their days in
undisturbed tranquillity. We take imaginary naps in their quiet
rooms, envying the serenity of an existence unvexed by telegrams,
telephones, clubs, lectures, committee-meetings, suffrage
demonstrations, and societies for harrying our neighbours. How sweet
and still those spacious rooms must have been! What was the remote
tinkling of a harp, compared to pianolas, and phonographs, and all
the infernal contrivances of science for producing and perpetuating
noise? What was a fear of ghosts compared to a knowledge of germs?
What was