Her sympathies were so strong that she would have been useless in the presence of danger and pain but for her remarkable self-control. I asked her once how she acquired this, and she said it was simply by forgetting herself. She saw something that needed to be done, and went about the doing of it so promptly, so completely absorbed by the necessity of it, that she forgot to be horrified by the sight of blood, forgot to faint as timid females were supposed to do. Days and weeks and months and years of it she would endure and never once give way. Then would come a revulsion and a horror and a weakness and a collapse. Again and again she held herself in hand through nervous strain that would have crushed most women or men, and when it was all over went nervously to pieces. It appears a pity that, being capable of maintaining her self-control till the end of the crisis, she could not still have maintained it when the need was over. But it was a part of her delicately strung organism to bear any manner of strain while the need lasted, and then to snap. The remarkable fact is, not that she ultimately gave way, but that she endured so long and so much. Clara Barton was a woman to her finger-tips. Nothing that she saw or suffered ever coarsened her or made her oblivious to the finer things of life. Nothing that came of her association with men--and rough men at that--made her anything less than a woman and a lady. She was distinctly feminine. She had her own way of ignoring any incident occurring in her presence at which she might have been expected to be shocked, but of stickling at any trivial act which implied that she was indifferent to proprieties. Teamsters, with their wagons deep to the hubs in mud, might swear at their mules and she would never hear it; but at night by the camp-fire she could rebuke with a quiet and effective word or look the slightest approach to impropriety of word or deed. She was no prude when she had a duty to perform, and conventionalities meant little to her in the presence of human need. But on her return to home life, she was gentle, ladylike, and a stickler for proprieties. She had no love for the mannish woman. She was much in the society of men. In many respects she preferred the society of men to that of women. She entered into their joys and experiences appreciatively. But in it all she was distinctly feminine. She was a woman always, a lady always. People who expected to meet in her a big, aggressive female, with a long stride and a heavy voice and a domineering attitude, were amazed. She was a little, undemonstrative gentlewoman of the old school.