Mohl, and comfort him for his disaster. I am so repentant that I can say nothing--which, the Catholics tell me, is the "marque" of a true "humiliation." Thank you a thousand times for all your kindness. I come to England next week. F. N. M. Mohl required no comfort. Miss Nightingale's father wrote to thank him for his kindness to her. The kindness, he gallantly replied, was on her side in giving him the advantage of her society and conversation. "Her gentle manner," he wrote (July 25), "covers such a depth and strength of mind and thought, that I am afraid of nothing for her, but that her health should fail her." IV Convalescence was rapid. On July 13 she returned to London, and a month later, on August 12, 1853, Miss Nightingale went into residence in her first "situation." The place in question, already briefly described in one of her letters to Madame Mohl, was that of Superintendent of an "Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness." This institution had been founded a few years before, at 8 Chandos Street, Cavendish Square, to give medical assistance and a home to sick governesses and other gentlewomen of narrow means. It was managed by a Council, which in its turn appointed a "Committee of Ladies" and a "Committee of Gentlemen." We need not trouble ourselves with the relations between the two committees, though they much troubled Miss Nightingale; but it is characteristic of the ideas of the time that the ladies made over to the gentlemen "all payments, contracts, and financial arrangements," as also "the selection of medical officers and male servants." Some years later Kinglake devoted several pages of his most elaborate satire to a comparison of the male pretensions and the female performances in their respective spheres in the hospitals of the Crimea; but on the present occasion Miss Nightingale found the ladies more difficult than the gentlemen. The institution had languished in Chandos Street. She was called in to give it new life. Suitable new premises had been found at No. 1 Upper Harley Street, and there Miss Nightingale lived, with a few brief intervals, until October 1854. She had also a _pied-à-terre_ in some lodgings taken for her by her aunt in Pall Mall, where she occasionally saw her friends, and whither she resorted on Sunday mornings, in order not to scandalize the patients in Harley Street by being known not to go to church. She had stipulated for extensive powers of control, and she was not one to let any agreed powers suffer diminution from desuetude. The ladies on the Council and the Committee included (besides Lady Canning already mentioned) Lady Ellesmere, Lady Cranworth, Lady Monteagle, Lady Caroline Murray, and others well known in the worlds of society and philanthropy. Miss Nightingale had her special friends and allies among them, such as Lady Canning and Lady Inglis, and Mrs.