Sometimes a sharp pain rushes across,—‘Ah, if Mother shouldn’t live to _see_ me succeed!’—She does seem woven in with the heartstrings,—my old darling who _cannot_ forget.
All this health and new life—more than ever hoped for—comes mediately from L.E.S.”
If this estimate of herself is just, one can only say that the lulling for the time of her higher emotional nature was probably a blessing in disguise. It helped her to make her foundation of knowledge sure. She had in her measure to learn—what every true scientist must learn—that “the natural is the rational and the divine,” that “there is no real break between the natural and the supernatural.”
“A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye—”
and if his eye be single his whole body may yet be full of light.
In any case the closing words of S. J.-B.’s ‘balance sheet’ are significant enough,—
It was in the course of this summer of 1868 that S. J.-B. realized her earnest wish to welcome her friend Dr. Lucy Sewall in England. She had raised great expectations among her friends, but, notwithstanding this, the visitor’s sweetness and grace won all hearts. “That woman is fit to be the apostle of a great movement,” Dr. T. W. Jex-Blake had said when he first saw her photograph, “with a face at once so strong and so tender.” And a closer acquaintance only served to confirm this judgment.
It is impossible to exaggerate the pride with which S. J.-B. took “the Doctor” everywhere, in a world that knew not the “sweet girl graduate” of the present day, and showed her off—for choice in a pretty pale-blue frock—with secret triumph to the friends who were expecting something very masculine and aggressive. Quite a number of sick people—Mrs. Unwin among the number—were eagerly waiting to consult her: and many were the requests that she would come and settle in England.
What Mr. Jex-Blake thought of her may be gathered from the following most characteristic note written a month or two later to his daughter:
“13 Sussex Square, Brighton. 2nd August 1868.
It is so much in my head and heart, and in the dear Mother’s, to have the privilege of presenting your most valued friend with some memento of her visit, that I beg you to use all your influence, and entreat Dr. Lucy Sewall to accept a carriage, or any other thing that she would value, as a remembrance of your dear Mother and myself, when she has returned home. She can little imagine how much she would please us both by doing so.