until the automobile becomes an ordinary impression to him, and
he is no longer afraid of it.

There is, however, just this difference between a woman and a horse:
the woman has her own free will behind her annoyance, and a horse has
not. If my friend had asked Mrs. Smith to supper twice a week, and had
served baked beans each time and herself passed her the sugar with
careful courtesy, and if she had done it all deliberately for the sake
of getting over her annoyance, she would probably have only increased
it until the strain would have got on her nerves much more seriously
than Mrs. Smith ever had. Not only that, but she would have found
herself resisting other people's peculiarities more than ever before; I
have seen people in nervous prostration from causes no more serious
than that, on the surface. It is the habit of resistance and resentment
back of the surface annoyance which is the serious cause of many a
woman's attack of nerves.

Every woman is a slave to every other woman who annoys her. She is tied
to each separate woman who has got on her nerves by a wire which is
pulling, pulling the nervous force right out of her. And it is not the
other woman's fault--it is her own. The wire is pulling, whether or not
we are seeing or thinking of the other woman, for, having once been
annoyed by her, the contraction is right there in our brains. It is
just so much deposited strain in our nervous systems which will stay
there until we, of our own free wills, have yielded out of it.

The horse was not resenting nor resisting the automobile; therefore the
strain of his fright was at once removed when the automobile became an
ordinary impression. A woman, when she gets a new impression that she
does not like, resents and resists it with her will, and she has got to
get in behind that resistance and drop it with her will before she is a
free woman.

To be sure, there are many disagreeable things that annoy for a time,
and then, as the expression goes, we get hardened to them. But few of
us know that this hardening is just so much packed resistance which is
going to show itself later in some unpleasant form and make us ill in
mind or body. We have got to yield, yield, yield out of every bit of
resistance and resentment to other people if we want to be free. No
reasoning about it is going to do us any good. No passing back and
forth in front of it is going to free us. We must yield first and then
we can see clearly and rea