Curatives.
Dinna forget that medicines are, as a rule, but palliative, and to call them curatives is, in nine cases out of ten, a very great misnomer. All doctors will tell you the same; but they are exceedingly useful and even most necessary at times. Only dinna forget that they do not repair, nor rebuild the framework of our bodies. Only good, well-chosen food can do that. But, as it does not do to eat when you are not hungry, because then the stomach and other organs are too delicate to digest, you must get up an appetite by exercise, recreation and fresh air.
I don't want you to go about as if you were an invalid. That will make you worse, and your friends will pretend to pity you, and this acting on your mind will soon make you an invalid in earnest. No, keep up bravely and do not complain. Fate will then say—
"Oh, there is no frightening that girl to death! She doesn't scare worth sixpence. Look at her now, on her bit of a bike, with her lips like a half-cut cherry, and the rose tint upon her cheek. Bah, I'll go and try to frighten someone else!"
Then your nerves are re-strung, muscles get hard, you grow a biceps, and every ache and pain flies away to the Back o' Bell-Fuff.
At this time of Year.
At this time of year many girls whose nerves are finely strung suffer from hypochondriasis, or lowness of spirits, more especially if the ground is soft and the sky grey and ugly.
The real hypochondriac is more or less verging on lunacy, because she has delusions. Nothing seems to go right with her, nothing ever will be right again. There is no beauty anywhere in life, which, taken on the whole, is a great big fraud. Why was she ever sent into this world at all, at all, against her will? She is sure she didn't wish to be born, and she wishes she were well out of it. She is sad, melancholy, abstracted, and does nothing with any will.
Well, what shall we do with a girl of this kind? What say you, mother? Medicine? Was that what you suggested? Well, medicine, even if she could swallow the whole pharmacopœia, would do her no more good than a pinch of snuff; in fact, not so much, for the snuff would make her sneeze, and that would help her for a time. She must have a change.
"A change, a change, and many a change,
Faces and footsteps and all things strange."