likes power.  But to go back to the more helpful case.  If you are wise, you ask what she means by nervousness.  You soon learn that she suffers in one of two, or probably in both of two, ways.  The parentage is always mental in a large sense, the results either mental or physical or both.  She has become doubtful and fearful, where formerly she was ready-minded and courageous.  Once decisive, she is now indecisive.  When well, unemotional, she is now too readily disturbed by a sad tale or a startling newspaper-paragraph.  A telegram alarms her; even an unopened letter makes her hesitate and conjure up dreams of disaster.  Very likely she is irritable and recognizes the unreasonableness of her temper.  Her daily tasks distress her sorely.  She can no longer sit still and sew or read.  Conversation no longer interests, or it even troubles her.  Noises, especially sudden noises, startle her, and the cries and laughter of children have become distresses of which she is ashamed, and of which she complains or not, as her nature is weak or enduring.  Perhaps, too, she is so restless as to want to be in constant motion, but that seems to tire her as it once did not.  Her sense of moral proportion becomes impaired.  Trifles grow large to her; the grasshopper is a burden.  With all this, and in a measure out of all this, come certain bodily disabilities.  The telegram or any cause of emotion sets her to shaking.  She cries for no cause; the least alarm makes her hand shake, and even her writing, if she should chance to become the subject of observation when at the desk, betrays her state of tremor.  What caused all this trouble?  What made her, as she says, good for nothing?  I have, of course, put an extreme case.  We may, as a rule, be pretty sure, as to this condition, that the woman has had some sudden shock, some severe domestic trial, some long strain, or that it is the outcome of acute illness or of one of the forms of chronic disturbance of nutrition which result in what we now call general neurasthenia or nervous weakness,—­a condition which has a most varied parentage.  With the ultimate medical causation of these disorderly states of body I do not mean to concern myself here, except to add also that the great physiological revolutions of a woman’s life are often responsible for the physical failures which create nervousness.

If she is at the worst she becomes a ready victim of hysteria.  The emotions so easily called into activity give rise to tears.  Too weak for wholesome restraint, she yields.  The little convulsive act we call crying brings uncontrollable, or what seems to her to be uncontrollable, twitching of the face.  The jaw and hands get rigid, and she has a hysterical convulsion, and is on the way to worse perils.  The intelligent despotism of self-control is at an end, and every new attack upon its normal prerogatives leaves her less and less able to resist.