ng it to you, even though she shares your work and
is sitting in the next chair to you.

Another most healthy process of resting while you work is by means of
lowering the pressure.

Suppose you were an engine, whose normal pressure was six hundred
pounds, we will say. Make yourself work at a pressure of only three
hundred pounds.

The human engine works with so much more strain than is necessary that
if a woman gets overtired and tries to lighten her work by lightening
the pressure with which she does it, she will find that really she has
only thrown off the unnecessary strain, and is not only getting over
her fatigue by working restfully, but is doing her work better, too.

In the process of learning to use less pressure, the work may seem to
be going a little more slowly at first, but we shall find that it will
soon go faster, and better, as time establishes the better habit.

One thing seems singular; and yet it appeals entirely to our common
sense as we think of it. There never comes a time when we cannot learn
to work more effectively at a lower pressure. We never get to where we
cannot lessen our pressure and thus increase our power.

The very interest of using less pressure adds zest to our work, however
it may have seemed like drudging before, and the possibility of resting
while we work opens to us much that is new and refreshing, and gives us
clearer understanding of how to rest more completely while we rest.

All kinds of resting, and all kinds of working, can bring more vitality
than most of us know, until we have learned to rest and to work without
strain.

CHAPTER XIII

_The Woman at the Next Desk_

IT may be the woman sewing in the next chair; it may be the woman
standing next at the same counter; it may be the woman next at a
working table, or it may be the woman at the next desk.

Whichever one it is, many a working woman has her life made wretched by
her, and it would be a strange thing for this miserable woman to hear
and a stranger thing--at first--for her to believe that the woman at
the next desk need not trouble her at all.

That, if she only could realize it, the cause of the irritation which
annoyed her every day and dragged her down so that many and many a
night she had been home with a sick headache was entirely and solely in
herself and not at all in the woman who worked next to her, however
disagreeable that woman may have been.

Every morning when she wakes the woma