If this, then, be “womanliness,” can athletic games injure it?  Do they spoil woman’s usefulness as a woman?  Do they damage her specific excellence?  Do they tend to give her less endurance and nerve at critical times?  I do not think so.  Certainly lawn tennis does not.  It is undoubtedly a strenuous game.  There is more energy of physical frame, more brain-tax and will-discipline demanded in one hardly contested match than would suffice for a whole day’s devotion to many other games.  These requirements must help a woman, and in the possession of the qualities that games bestow athletic girls have a great pull over their sisters.  If you are skilled and well drilled in discipline and sportsmanship, you are bound to benefit in the strife of the world.  You are the better able to face disappointments and sorrows.  For what do these strenuous games mean?  Exercise in the open air, and exercise of a thorough and engrossing character, carried out with cheerful and stimulating surroundings, with scientific methods, rational aims, and absorbing chances.  Surely that is the foundation of health culture.

The truth is, games have done for women what the dervish’s subtle prescription did for the sick sultan.  You perhaps remember the story.  The sultan, having very bad health from over-feeding, sedentary habits, and luxurious ease, consulted the clever dervish.  The dervish knew that it would be useless to recommend the sultan simply to take exercise.  He therefore said to him, “Here is a ball, which I have stuffed with certain rare and costly medicinal herbs, and here is a bat, the handle of which I have also stuffed with similar herbs.  Your highness must take this bat and with it beat about this ball until you perspire freely.  You must do this every day.”  His highness acquiesced, and in a short time the exercise of playing bat and ball with the dervish greatly improved his health, and by degrees cured him of his ailment.  Now, the tennis ball, to my mind, is stuffed with medicinal herbs which impart vigour and health to the player.  The racket is possessed with a magic handle that has the power of quickening all the pulses of life in the plenitude of healthy vigour and wholesome excitement.  In a medical book now before me the subject is put tersely thus:  “Health and strength depend on rapid disorganisation, and rapid disorganisation depends on rapid exertion.”  Now, if this is true, what better and more interesting method of rapid exertion could be devised than a game of lawn tennis?  Body and mind alike are wholly absorbed with the utmost rapidity, and there is no doubt the sense of refreshment is largely due to the rapid exertion demanded for the proper playing of the game.  The medical book goes on to say, “During exertion we drink, as it were, oxygen from the air.”  This oxygen is the only stimulating drink we can take with lasting advantage to ourselves for the purpose of invigorating our strength.  It is the wine and spirit of life, an abundance of which Nature has supplied us with ready-made.  If you are low-spirited, drink oxygen.  Take active exercise in the open air and inhale it.  When next you see a lawn tennis player hard at a strenuous game, remember he or she is not necessarily overstraining or injuring health, but taking long, deep draughts of oxygen, imbibing the wine and spirit of life and laying up a store of vigour in readiness for the varied experiences of life.