ntion 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 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 whatev