And indeed I
believe it is, for she is ill most of the time--and what could keep
one in nervous illness more entirely than this deep interior strain
which is necessary to such external appearance of placidity.
There comes to my mind at once a very comical illustration of
something quite akin to this although at first thought it seems
almost the reverse. A woman who constantly talked of the
preeminency of mind over matter, and the impossibility of being
moved by external circumstances to any one who believed as she
did--this woman I saw very angry.
She was sitting with her face drawn in a hundred cross lines and all
askew with her anger. She had been spouting and sputtering what she
called her righteous indignation for some minutes, when after a
brief pause and with the angry expression still on her face she
exclaimed: "Well, I don't care, it's all peace within."
I doubt if my masked lady would ever have declared to herself or to
any one else that "it was all peace within." The angry woman
was--without doubt--the deeper hypocrite, but the masked woman had
become rigid in her hypocrisy. I do not know which was the weaker of
the two, probably the one who was deceiving herself.
But to return to those drawn, strained lines we see on the people
about us. They do not come from hard work or deep thought. They come
from unnecessary contractions about the work. If we use our wills
consistently and steadily to drop such contractions, the result is a
more quiet and restful way of living, and so quieter and more
attractive faces.
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