“Of course you won’t understand, Caroline,” she writes me. “There never was a day in your life when you would have understood. Books are people to you. You live placidly in that dull little mountain town, and when your time comes you’ll die there placidly. Had you been Eve the angel with the flaming sword would never have had the unpleasant duty of driving you out. You to tempt a man! You’re like that coldly beautiful statue Pygmalion fashioned. She waked to life, but you never will. I wonder why I tell you, Caroline. The probationers in this hospital—probably in all big city hospitals—are made to feel like the dirt under foot—if there was under foot any good honest earth-dirt. Every time her betters pass her she’s got to paste herself against the wall, and all the inmates of the hospital are her betters. There are some nice young doctors—but it is against discipline for her to speak to them. If she does the older nurses punish her with extra work. Last night, after a hard day, I walked on the Avenue—we are just a block away—and one of the beautiful doors opened just like enchantment, thrown back by a liveried servant. An old, old man came out. Perhaps it would have been different if youth and beauty had floated out. All that was his seemed so wasted. It was just the youth in me, I suppose, that was so fierce at life and its injustices. The lights down the Avenue beckoned and beckoned. I wanted to follow them. The distance was swallowing the old man in his car. Just for once in my life I wanted a taste of the city at night; I wanted to forget the groans of the sick and dying. You’ve never been a prune, and a potato, and a slice of bread. Try it, Caroline. I, who used to be Henrietta Dickenson, am now one thousand four hundred prunes. I am one thousand and ninety-five potatoes. I spare you the slices of bread. If you think I exaggerate make the count yourself. Prunes four times a week—five of them to a saucer. Potatoes each meal—meals three per day. Potatoes, prunes, and bread—plain, common food—maybe that’s why I have done such a common thing. “I turned off the Avenue. At a news stand I picked up the _Herald_. ‘You don’t want that. You want an evening paper,’ the boy said. Fate or the boy, I know not which, I took the _Herald_. The ‘ad’ I answered says the man is lonely; that he wants an attractive woman friend. The ‘ad’ was signed Telemachus. His letter fairly scintillated. I answered. He wrote again. Now he asks for a meeting. But the letter is oh, so chivalrous, so witty, so wonderful, Caroline. And there’s a reticence, an impersonal note in it that piques a woman’s fancy, stirs her imagination——