their emotions; but back of these reasons is the fact that they want
their own way altogether too much. Even if a woman's own way is right,
she has no business to push for it selfishly. If any woman thinks, "I
could take intelligent care of my own body if I did not have to work so
hard, or have this or that interference," let her go to work with her
mind well armed to do what she can, and she will soon find that there
are many ways in which she can improve in the normal care of her body,
in spite of all the work and all the interferences.

To adapt an old saying, the women who are overworked and clogged with
real interferences should aim to be healthy; and, if they cannot be
healthy, then they should be as healthy as they can.

CHAPTER XXVII

_Positive and Negative Effort_

DID you ever have the grip? If you ever have you may know how truly it
is named and how it does actually grip you so that it seems as if there
were nothing else in the world at the time--it appears to entirely
possess you. As the Irishman says, the grip is "the disease that lasts
fur a week and it takes yer six weeks ter get over it." That is because
it has possessed you so thoroughly that it must be routed out of every
little fiber in your body before you are yourself again, and there are
hidden corners where it lurks and hides, and it often has to be
actually pulled out of them. Now it has been already recognized that if
we relax and do not resist a severe cold it leaves us open so that our
natural circulation carries away the cold much more quickly than if we
allowed ourselves to be full of resistance to the discomfort and the
consequent physical contraction that impeded the circulation and holds
the cold in our system.

My point is this--that it is comparatively easy to relax out of a cold.
We can do it with only a negative effort, but to relax so that nature
in her steady and unswerving tendency toward health can lift us out of
the grip is quite another matter. When we feel ourselves entirely in
the power of such a monster as that is at its worst, it is only by a
very strong and positive effort of the will that we can yield so that
nature can guide us into health, and we do not need the six weeks of
getting well.

In order to gain this positive sense of yielding away from the disease
rather than of letting it hold us, we must do what seems at the time
the impossible--we must refuse to give our attention to the pain or
discomfort a