Her letters refer also to plans to go to a dance secretly and to go to New York secretly. There is nothing in the letters to indicate that she ever put her plan about coming to New York into effect. Esther denies emphatically that she has been to New York and her employer thinks it very unlikely that she could go without her knowledge. They show also she thought she was diseased and had been to a doctor about it before she came to the institution. She still worries about it whether or not there is any cause. (First blood test was S—— G——.) Subject’s attitude expressed in these letters is far more serious to my mind than anything she has done, but it is a question whether it is anything for which she should be blamed or punished. She is unquestionably abnormally sensitive, suspicious and secretive and these traits have been unfortunately emphasized by her arrest and commitment here. She evidently suffers bitterly and constantly because she is on parole to the institution and that resentment poisons everything she does and thinks. She must have been under a frightful strain during these months while she was working with the lawyer to win her freedom, with the constant pressure he put on her for money and to come to New York to see him. Then too the conflict of what may be merely normal and natural sex interests and her fear of breaking her parole by expressing these in any way has probably been bad for her and has emphasized these sex interests. I think all of the references in the letters to “nice young mens” who smiled at her and tipped their hats to her on the train, to the nice young mens she sees at picture shows, to the men who invited her to a dance, may be explained as a boastful desire to appear bad and to be having attention and a good time, arising from a regretful realization of how much she is missing in these lines. Possibly she was just beginning to have a taste of “gay life” before she came to us and the institution may have done much to whet her curiosity. She seems to ridicule the idea of being considered “innocent and good”—“Sunday School girls”—and asks co-defendant to send her the picture of her (Esther’s) Bohemian sweetheart (she has always claimed to be engaged to a man now fighting in the Austrian army) so she can show her employer she has a sweetheart, “make her employer jealous” as she puts it. Certainly if she had not been determined to keep her parole, with such a demand on her for money from the lawyer and such an interest in men, she would have solicited long before this. I think it is to her credit that she has worked so steadily and satisfactorily and has tried to keep, as she understood it, the letter at least of her parole.