Figuratively speaking, Mrs. Restless is in a chronic state of moral perspiration; effort oozes out of every pore of her being. She does not understand repose, but rather seems to have discovered the secret of perpetual motion. She cannot sit still. If in her drawing-room you be calmly and comfortably ensconced in a luxurious armchair, from which you feel convinced that wild horses would be powerless to drag you, Mrs. Restless will enter, dusting the back of a chair, or changing the position of some trivial ornament as she approaches. Then when you think she is actually settled for conversation, she will rise to rearrange an antimacassar at the further end of the room, and probably insist upon your assisting her to move the piano. At the breakfast-table Mrs. Restless is very trying, for she will never allow a plate or dish, or any eating utensil, to remain in the position into which it naturally falls in the course of the meal. She plays therefore a perpetual game of draughts with the breakfast things. I remember on one occasion watching an amusing game. Mrs. Restless was discussing some philanthropic plan—she is nothing if not philanthropic—with an old gentleman, whose constant habit as he talked was to push everything by degrees into the middle of the table; but Mrs. Restless could not stand that, so she as persistently pushed everything back again, thus giving fresh play to the old gentleman’s idle fingers, while she was kept constantly occupied at this purposeless business. And this is typical of all that Mrs. Restless does. If she goes into the garden, and you invite her to the tempting repose of a hammock which hangs under sun-shading boughs, or of a long wicker-chair which, surrounded by rose-trees, suggests the “idle dreaming of an empty day,” and into which, but for politeness sake, you would fain have flung yourself, will she enjoy the proffered luxuries of lounging restfulness? Not a bit of it. She cannot waste the opportunity of plucking dead leaves from the flower-bushes, sweeping fallen leaves from the gravel paths—all the gardener’s actual business. Heavens! you expect her next to take a duster and flip off all the casual dust from the trees, or dry the dew from the flowers. And meanwhile you have self-denyingly taken the less comfortable lounge, leaving the place of perfect repose vacant for this busy-idle woman, who will not enjoy it.