(_Miss Nightingale to Madame Mohl._) 32 SOUTH STREET, LONDON, _Dec_. 13 [1861]. I have read half your book thro' [_Madame Récamier_], and am immensely charmed by it. But some things I disagree with and more I do not understand. This does not apply to the characters, but to your conclusions, _e.g._ you say "women are more sympathetic than men." Now if I were to write a book out of my experience, I should begin _Women have no sympathy_. Yours is the tradition. Mine is the conviction of experience. I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions. Now look at my experience of men. A statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy--learns a science the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration, as far as it concerns the lives of men,--not, as I learnt it, in the field from stirring experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room by my sofa with me. This is what I call real sympathy. Another (Alexander, whom I made Director-General) does very nearly the same thing. He is dead too. Clough, a poet born if ever there was one, takes to nursing-administration in the same way, for me. I only mention three whose whole lives were remodelled by sympathy for me. But I could mention very many others--Farr, McNeill, Tulloch, Storks, Martin, who in a lesser degree have altered their work by my opinions. And, the most wonderful of all, a man born without a soul, like Undine--all these elderly men.