It is perhaps needless to say that she was a nervous
invalid, and in the process of gaining her health she had to be set
to work and kept at work. Many and many a time she has cried and
begged for rest when it was not rest she needed at all: it was work.
She has started off to some good, healthy work crying and sobbing at
the cruelty that made her go, and has returned from the work as
happy and healthy, apparently, as a little child. Then she could go
to rest and rest to some purpose. She had been busy in wholesome
action and the normal reaction came in her rest. As she grew more
naturally interested in her work she rested less and less, and she
rested better and better because she had something to rest from and
something to rest for.
Now she does only a normal amount of resting, but gets new life from
every moment of rest she takes; before, all her rest only made her
want more rest and kept her always in the strain of fatigue. And
what might seem to many a very curious result is that as the
abnormal desire for rest disappeared the rushed feeling disappeared,
too.
There is no one thing that American women need more than a healthy
habit of rest, but it has got to be real rest, not strained nor
self-indulgent rest.
Another example of this effort at rest which is a sham and a strain
is the woman who insists upon taking a certain time every day in
which to rest. She insists upon doing everything quietly and
with--as she thinks--a sense of leisure, and yet she keeps the whole
household in a sense of turmoil and does not know it.
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