Six years after the Act had passed in 1884, I received a letter from a very energetic and prominent woman-worker with whom I had a slight acquaintance, in which the following passages occur. I quote them here (though with some hesitation on the score of vanity) for they have comforted me much and deeply, and will do so to my life’s end.

“On Wednesday last I was two hours with a widow,—of O——, near W——; one of those persons who make a country so good, brave, loving and hardworking! For 33 long years she lived with a fiend of a husband, and suffered furious blows, kicks, and attacks with ropes, hot water, and crockery; was hurled down cellar-steps, &c., starved and insulted. All the time, up early and at work managing a large shop and superintending 35 girls....

“I wish you could have been there to hear her tell me that ‘the law was altered now,’ and how her niece had got a separation for brutal treatment; and (best of all) ‘her two bairns’ (children). As for the 8s. a week ordered,—the wife never ‘bothers after that.’ ‘The Lord has stopped that villain’s ways, and she wants no more.’ I could not help crying, as I looked at the exquisitely clean person and home,—the determined face, and thought of the diabolical horrors this good, clever woman had gone through. I told her how you had got the law altered—and she kept saying ‘She’s a lady—she’s a lady. Bring her to O——, Missis! and we’ll percession her down t’ street!’...

“You have love and gratitude from our hearts, I assure you; we live wider lives and better for your presence. I have ventured to write freely on a subject some would find wearisome, but your heart is big and will sympathise; and I am always longing for you to know the active result of your achieved work. This! that poor battered, bruised women are relieved—are safer—and bless you, and so do I, from a full heart.

“I am, dear Miss Cobbe,

“Yours faithfully,

“A. S.”

If I could hear before I die that I had been able to do as much for tortured brutes, I should say “Nunc Dimittis,” and wish no more.

Some time after this (I have kept no copy or record of date) I delivered a Lecture, which was a good deal noticed at the time, on the Little Health of Ladies. It was an exposure of the evils resulting to families from the state of semi-invalidism in which so many women live, usually gently lapped therein by interested advisers. I exhorted women to do, as a duty to God and man, everything possible to avoid falling into this wretched condition, with the self-indulgence and neglect of home and social duties leading to it or consequent on it. I did not then know as much as I subsequently learned of the inner history of a great deal of this misery, or I might have added to my warning some remarkable denunciations by honourable doctors of the practices of their colleagues.[[32]]

A singular incident followed the publication of this address in one of the Magazines.