Mrs. Denton was helpful, and would have been more so, if Joan had only understood.  Mrs. Denton lived alone in an old house in Gower Street, with a high stone hall that was always echoing to sounds that no one but itself could ever hear.  Her son had settled, it was supposed, in one of the Colonies.  No one knew what had become of him, and Mrs. Denton herself never spoke of him; while her daughter, on whom she had centred all her remaining hopes, had died years ago.  To those who remembered the girl, with her weak eyes and wispy ginger coloured hair, it would have seemed comical, the idea that Joan resembled her.  But Mrs. Denton’s memory had lost itself in dreams; and to her the likeness had appeared quite wonderful.  The gods had given her child back to her, grown strong and brave and clever.  Life would have a new meaning 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.”