The question had become instant thereupon, What was she to do next? Mr. Jowett's letters to her at this time, as also her own private notes, show that she was in a mood of great depression; due in part to much physical weakness and suffering, but in part also to unsettlement in her plan of life. She knew not exactly what to be at. She saw before her, as she wrote, "no consecutive path growing out of one's own deeds, but only a succession of disjointed lives and unconnected events." "Never," she wrote again, "has God let me feel weariness of active life, but only anxiety to get on. Now in old age I never wish to be relieved from new work, but only to have it to do." With what zeal she threw herself into fuller work for the Nightingale School at St. Thomas's, we shall hear; but that was not enough. She could not see nurses and write to nurses all day long--though indeed she devoted to such duties as many hours as some people would consider a sufficient day's work, and besides she was now spending a large part of the year with her father or mother in the country. She needed some recreation, and the only recreation she ever found was in change of work. She sought no "glory-crown" over folded hands. Mr. Jowett seized the occasion to repeat his advice that she should find recreation in literary work. Now that she meant to free herself from official drudgery, let her gain permanent influence by writing books or essays. "I think," he said, "that you seem to me to have more ideas than any one whom I know." And again (Dec. 14, 1871): "You have many original thoughts, but you either insert them in Blue-books or cast them before swine--that is me, and I sometimes insert them in sermons. You should have a more consecutive way of going on." She recalled, too, advice and remonstrances which she had received from Mr. Mill. In 1867 the "National Society for Woman's Suffrage" was founded. Mill had asked her to join it and she had at first refused:--