aning for her. Her work
would not die with her.

She thought she could harness Joan's enthusiasm to her own wisdom. She
would warn her of the errors and pitfalls into which she herself had
fallen: for she, too, had started as a rebel. Youth should begin where
age left off. Had the old lady remembered a faded dogs-eared volume
labelled "Oddments" that for many years had rested undisturbed upon its
shelf in her great library, and opening it had turned to the letter E,
she would have read recorded there, in her own precise thin penmanship,
this very wise reflection:

"Experience is a book that all men write, but no man reads."

To which she would have found added, by way of complement, "Experience is
untranslatable. We write it in the cipher of our sufferings, and the key
is hidden in our memories."

And turning to the letter Y, she might have read:

"Youth comes to teach. Age remains to listen," and underneath the
following:

"The ability to learn is the last lesson we acquire."

Mrs. Denton had long ago given up the practice of jotting down her
thoughts, experience having taught her that so often, when one comes to
use them, one finds that one has changed them. But in the case of Joan
the recollection of these twin "oddments" might have saved her
disappointment. Joan knew of a new road that avoided Mrs. Denton's
pitfalls. She grew impatient of being perpetually pulled back.

For the _Nursing Times_ she wrote a series of condensed biographies,
entitled "Ladies of the Lamp," commencing with Elizabeth Fry. They
formed a record of good women who had battled for the weak and suffering,
winning justice for even the uninteresting. Miss Lavery was delighted
with them. But when Joan proposed exposing the neglect and even cruelty
too often inflicted upon the helpless patients of private Nursing Homes,
Miss Lavery shook her head.

"I know," she said. "One does hear complaints about them. Unfortunately
it is one of the few businesses managed entirely by women; and just now,
in particular, if we were to say anything, it would be made use of by our
enemies to injure the Cause."

There was a summer years ago--it came back to Joan's mind--when she had
shared lodgings with a girl chum at a crowded sea-side watering-place.
The rooms were shockingly dirty; and tired of dropping hints she
determined one morning to clean them herself. She climbed a chair and
started on a row of shelves where lay the dust of ages.