This unquietness comes especially in the eyes. It is a rare thing to
see a really quiet eye; and very pleasant and beautiful it is when
we do see it. And the more we see and observe the unquiet eyes and
the unquiet faces the better worth while it seems to work to have
ours more quiet, but not to put on a mask, or be in any other way a
hypocrite.
The exercise described in a previous chapter will help to bring a
quiet face. We must drop our heads with a sense of letting every
strain go out of our faces, and then let our heads carry our bodies
down as far as possible, dropping strain all the time, and while
rising slowly we must take the same care to drop all strain.
In taking the long breath, we must inhale without effort, and exhale
so easily that it seems as if the breath went out of itself, like
the balloons that children blow up and then watch them shrink as the
air leaves them.
Five minutes a day is very little time to spend to get a quiet face,
but just that five minutes--if followed consistently--will make us
so much more sensitive to the unquiet that we will sooner or later
turn away from it as by a natural instinct.
CHAPTER XIX
_About Voices_
I KNEW an old German--a wonderful teacher of the speaking voice--who
said "the ancients believed that the soul of the man is
here"--pointing to the pit of his stomach. "I do not know," and he
shrugged his shoulders with expressive interest, "it may be and it
may not be--but I know the soul of the voice is here--and you
Americans--you squeeze the life out of the word in your throat and
it is born dead.
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