Page:Side talks with girls (1895).djvu/157

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The Restlessness of the Age
145

feelings are supersensitive, and all because hurry and fret have made of a healthy girl a wretched bundle of nerves and nothing else. Patience is asked from everybody. The tiny girl must be quiet so that "mamma may get over her headache." The healthy boy is asked to walk quietly because "your sister has done so much that she is trying to rest," and the whole household is under nerve-rule. What can be done? One can advise quieter methods, plenty of fresh air and a nourishing diet, but the nervous girl is apt to be very positive, for she counts herself a deep thinker, and advice is the last thing she wishes to hear or to follow. The end of it all? You can see it. There are quite enough nervous girls and nervous middle-aged women now. It is, alas, only too easy to picture what they will be when they are veritable old ladies.

THE QUESTION ASKED

"But," says one of my girls, "don't you want us to be intelligent? Don't you want us to know something, and don't you want us to enjoy ourselves?" Certainly I do, but I want you to do it as a woman should, and not after the fashion of a locomotive attached to a fast train, and which must keep up its record. Look at our English cousins; they study one thing and know it well. These women who attempt so much are usually entirely