But in the case of the subject, as Strachey has so well shown, the call was pursued with a self-willed, pitiless, unscrupulous determination, worthy of Satan himself upon the most ferocious evil bent.  In its pursuit indeed she became what her latest biographer has called a “woman possessed by a Demon.”  All necessary, not alone because if she had been meek and mild she would have existed in futility, but because of the high percentage of the masculine endocrines in her composition.  It is most regrettable that we have no statement of the findings of a gynecologic examination of her.  That she was almost consciously masculine may be inferred not only from the way she bullied Lord Pannure and worked to death her dearest friend with the angelic temper, Sidney Herbert, who was so amiable that he could be driven by one who wrote:  “I have done with being amiable.  It is the mother of all mischief.”  She could also write, “I attribute my success to this:  I never gave or took an excuse.  Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men.  When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses.”

Lytton Strachey has painted superbly all this in his essay.  But for us his most significant passage is the following:  “When old age actually came, something curious happened.  Destiny, having waited patiently, played a queer trick upon Miss Nightingale.  The benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity.  Her virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips.  And now the sacredness of years brought the proud woman her punishment.  She was not to die as she had lived.  The sting was to be taken out of her:  she was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency.  The change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable.”

“There appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mould. The thin, angular woman, with her haughty eye, and her acrid mouth, had vanished, and in her place was the rounded, bulky form of a fat old lady, smiling all day long.  Then something else became visible.  The brain which had been steeled at Scutari was, indeed, literally growing soft.  Senility—­an ever more and more amiable senility—­descended.”

We have here an absolutely typical pituitary history, with another case of pituitocentric natural ability.  What happens when pituitary hyperfunction or superiority becomes underfunction or inferiority is precisely as Strachey has described so cleverly of the “ministering angel”:  the acrid, thin and keen degenerate every time into the amiable, fat and dull.  Just as Napoleon was transformed by the mutations of his pituitary, so was the Saint with the Lamp.  And in both instances the contrasting modifications, from one extreme of glandular function to the other, supply us with the clue to the secret hand of their inner being and becoming, which worked upon the twists and turns of circumstance about them as a sculptor upon clay.