Smith--"her boy" of old days. The letters of Mr. Coltman, one of her father's executors, were full of humour, but Florence was never able to take things lightly. There were questions of property and residence to be discussed; servants to be dismissed and engaged; her mother's immediate movements and future mode of life to be settled. Everybody had a different plan, and Florence complained that nobody but she had the same plan for two days running. Her letters and notes at this period are of a quite tragic intensity. Something may be ascribed to a characteristic over-emphasis. "We Smiths," she said once of herself, "all exaggerate"; and Mr. Jowett said of some remarks made by her about him: "You are as nearly right as an habitual spirit of exaggeration will ever allow you to be." "We are a great many too many strong characters," she wrote of herself and her family, "and very different: all pulling different ways. And we are so dreadfully _au sérieux_. Oh, how much good it does us to have some one to laugh at us!" But there was no exaggeration in one of her woes. A third of her time was taken up with the Nightingale Nurses; another third with Indian affairs (for in relation to India, as we shall hear, she never quite "went out of office"); the remaining third, which might have been devoted to working out a scheme of social and moral science on the statistical methods of M. Quetelet, or on preparing for the press her selections from the Mystics, was being wasted in family worries. M. Quetelet, with whom she had been corresponding, had recently died. "I cannot say," she wrote to Dr. Farr (Feb. 23, 1874), "how the death of our old friend touches me: he was the founder of the most important science in the whole world. Some months ago I prepared the first sketch of an Essay I meant to publish and dedicate to him on the application of his discoveries to explain the Plan of God in teaching us by these results the laws by which our Moral Progress is to be attained. I had pleased myself with thinking that this would please him. But painful and indispensable business prevented the finishing of my paper." "O God," she exclaimed in the bitterness of her heart, "let me not sink in these perplexities: but give me a great cause to do and die for." And again: "What makes the difference between man and woman? Quetelet did his work, and I am so disturbed by my family that I can't do mine." IV