To adapt an old saying, the women who are overworked and clogged
with real interferences should aim to be healthy; and, if they
cannot be healthy, then they should be as healthy as they can.
CHAPTER XXVII
_Positive and Negative Effort_
DID you ever have the grip? If you ever have you may know how truly
it is named and how it does actually grip you so that it seems as if
there were nothing else in the world at the time--it appears to
entirely possess you. As the Irishman says, the grip is "the disease
that lasts fur a week and it takes yer six weeks ter get over it."
That is because it has possessed you so thoroughly that it must be
routed out of every little fiber in your body before you are
yourself again, and there are hidden corners where it lurks and
hides, and it often has to be actually pulled out of them. Now it
has been already recognized that if we relax and do not resist a
severe cold it leaves us open so that our natural circulation
carries away the cold much more quickly than if we allowed ourselves
to be full of resistance to the discomfort and the consequent
physical contraction that impeded the circulation and holds the cold
in our system.
My point is this--that it is comparatively easy to relax out of a
cold. We can do it with only a negative effort, but to relax so that
nature in her steady and unswerving tendency toward health can lift
us out of the grip is quite another matter.
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