[63] _Life of Lord Houghton_, vol. i. p. 475. Lord Houghton read the manuscript attentively, and did not forget it. Several years later, when Miss Nightingale was ill, and thought likely to die, he wrote to her suggesting that if she had made no other arrangements for the preservation and possible publication of her essay, she might think of entrusting it to him. "I have often thought," he said (March 11, '61), "of asking you what you meant to do with the papers you have written on social and speculative subjects. They surely should not be destroyed; and yet I hardly know to whom you will entrust them, who would not misunderstand, misinterpret, and misuse them. If you were to leave them in my hands, they would be, at any rate, safe from irreverent handling or crude exposure, and could be used in any way more or less future that you might think fit." By that time, however, the work had been submitted to the judgment of other men of letters; and to that later period further reference to the subject had better be postponed. IV The formulating of a religion, whether for the tailors or others, is no short task, and Miss Nightingale's "Works" must have well filled her mind during otherwise unoccupied hours in 1852. But the "Works" were only bye-work. Her main concern was to continue her apprenticeship in nursing. Some vexatious delays and difficulties were still to be encountered, but she faced them with a brighter confidence than before, and the last stage of the struggle wears an aspect more of comedy than of tragedy. She had successfully asserted her independence once in going to Kaiserswerth. In an imaginary dialogue with her mother, she makes herself say, "Why, my dear, you don't suppose that with my 'talents' and my 'European reputation' and my 'beautiful letters,' and all that, I'm going to stay dangling about my mother's drawing-room all my life! I shall go and look out for work, to be sure. You must look upon me as your son. I should have cost you a great deal more if I had married or been a son. You must now consider me married or a son. You were willing to part with me to be married." In presenting the case in this light to her parents, Florence had now a valuable ally in her Aunt Mai. Something of a diplomatist, as well as of a philosopher, was within the powers of that excellent woman. Without any interference which could be resented, by insinuating a word here, suggesting a phrase there, and pouring oil upon troubled waters everywhere, Aunt Mai did a good deal to smooth the last stages in her niece's struggle for independence.