Perhaps it was the price which she had paid for her ideal that led to what, in later years, some considered a certain hardness in her. When once a woman had devoted her life to the work of nursing, Miss Nightingale had little sympathy with any turning back. She seemed sometimes in such cases to regard marriage as the unpardonable sin.
But another and a loftier train of thought was prompted by her experience. At the end of one of her meditations upon marriage, and her refusal of it, I find these significant words: "I must strive after a better life for woman." She did not mean a better life than marriage; she meant also a life that should make the conditions of marriage better. In the world in which she lived, daughters, she wrote, "can only have a choice among those people whom their parents like, and who like their parents well enough to come to their house." One may doubt whether in the mid-Victorian or in any age, young men paid calls only because they liked the parents; but unquestionably restriction in the employments of women involves also limitation in the opportunities for choice in marriage. And at the same time the lack of interest and variety in the lives of girls at home makes many of them inclined to marriage as a mere means of escape. By throwing open new spheres of usefulness to women, Miss Nightingale hoped at one and the same time to improve the lot of those who were marked out to be wives, and to find satisfaction for those marked out for the single life.
The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, that he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled.--CARLYLE.
Foreign travel had, as we have seen, in no way changed Florence Nightingale's resolve to devote herself to a life of nursing. She had turned away deliberately from marriage, and was bent upon finding a new field of usefulness for unmarried women. But ways and means of doing this were not yet apparent. She had no independent fortune of her own. She returned to a family circle which understood her cravings no better than before. The call of domestic duties was the same as before. There were aunts and a grandmother to be visited, company at home to be entertained, a sister to be humoured, a father and mother to be pleased.