All this she understood, and she did not censure him. But she could not do what he asked of her. The statement which he had prepared was not hers. The opinions expressed were in full accord with her own, and the language was as good as any she could have chosen, and there was nothing in the document to which she could object; but it was not hers. Her idea of a document which she could sign as her own was one which she should have thought out on first wakening, perhaps in the middle of the night, and sketched in pencil on the pages of the little pad at the head of her bed, and then thoughtfully copied in her own hand with careful weighing of each word and phrase. That would have been her own. Certainly that was a needlessly narrow conception of the extent to which she might honorably have employed the minds and willing hands of others in her own too heavy toil. But it was a conception grounded in the highest possible conviction of honor. Clara Barton was a self-willed woman. So was Mother Bickerdyke. So was Dorothea Dix. So, most emphatically and uncomfortably for those who withstood her, was Florence Nightingale. If comparisons were in order, which they certainly are not, she was not the least considerate of the four of other people’s opinion, nor most reluctant to admit herself in the wrong. Like Florence Nightingale, she had opportunities of marriage in her youth, and resolutely turned to other work under force of a strong conviction, and that conviction had mighty impelling power. Lytton Strachey, in his remarkably penetrating sketch, says: Every one knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succor the afflicted, the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of the hospital at Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her goodness the dying soldier’s couch--the vision is familiar to all. But the truth was different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile as fancy painted her. She worked in another fashion, and toward another end; she moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular imagination. A Demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.