During the next year she found some congenial work in London. She inspected hospitals. She worked in Ragged Schools. She spoke of her "little thieves at Westminster" as her "greatest joy in London." But these unconventional attractions of the London season set her all the more against the life of country houses. "Ought not one's externals," she wrote in her diary (July 2, 1849), "to be as nearly as possible an incarnation of what life really is? Life is _not_ a green pasture and a still water, as our homes make it. Life is to some a forty days' fasting, moral or physical, in the wilderness; to some it is a fainting under the carrying of the crop; to some it is a crucifixion; to all, a struggle for truth, for safety. Life is seen in a much truer form in London than in the country. In an English country place everything that is painful is so carefully removed out of sight, behind those fine trees, to a village three miles off. In London, at all events if you open your eyes, you cannot help seeing in the next street that life is not as it has been made to you. You cannot get out of a carriage at a party without seeing what is in the faces making the lane on either side, and without feeling tempted to rush back and say, 'Those are my brothers and sisters.'" She longed to rush back, to be able to go out freely into the slums, to comfort some old woman who was dying unattended, or rescue some child who was going astray untaught. But the proprieties prevented. "It would never do," she was told, "for a young woman in her station in life to go out in London without a servant." In the autumn of 1849 the distraction of another foreign tour was offered. Her parents and her sister hoped once more that Florence would return a different and a more comfortable woman. Those with whom we are cast into the nearest intimacy sometimes understand us least. CHAPTER VI FOREIGN TRAVEL: EGYPT AND GREECE (1849-1850) When o'er the world we range 'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change. HORACE. In the autumn of 1849 Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, who were to spend some months in the East, again proposed that Miss Nightingale should travel with them, and again the offer was gladly accepted. Her sister was delighted. The expedition to Rome had not done what was hoped, but here was a second chance. The sister reported to her friends that "Flo had taken tea with the Bunsens to receive the _dernier mot_ on Egyptology," and that she was going out "laden with learned books." Perhaps Florence would become absorbed in such studies, and adopt a life of gracefully learned leisure. The literary temptation did, it is true, assail Florence, but she put it behind her. * * * * *