Dear Lucy,
I should like exceedingly to see you if it were possible before sailing for America, and your letter has made me wish more than ever to do so.
If I found it just possible to come to you for one day and night, would you think it worth while to have me? I do not know what the possibilities are,—are you in the town?—or would it be an undertaking to get to you from the station? Would it upset you all terribly if I came and went at unearthly hours as I might have to do?
I should like to see you exceedingly, and I should like very much to see your husband,—if my coming in such a rush and making such a fuss wouldn’t make him hate me.
Thank you very much for your photograph. There are no decent ones of me, but I will see if I can find you up one of the least bad.”
The visit was paid in due course, and proved successful in every way. Mr. Unwin frankly shared his wife’s admiration for the character and gifts of her old college friend, and this was by no means the last visit she paid to their Yorkshire home.
In the meantime S. J.-B. had carried out another idea that had been simmering in her mind for long. It may be remembered how in her childhood she had “bought tracts (for 6d) with Carry,” and had even, apparently, been encouraged by her Father to give them away. The distribution of evangelical tracts was a great feature of the religious world in which she had been brought up, and, with the hopefulness of youth, she felt how much good might be done by circulating helpful religious pamphlets of a non-doctrinal kind. As a first step towards the realization of this scheme, she herself wrote three tracts,[[36]] and had them printed at her own expense. The most remarkable thing about them—in view of the writer’s youth—is their non-controversial spirit. A Father of the Church could not have written more simply. With proper machinery for distribution they might have met with some considerable success: as it was the poor little booklets crept timidly into the world only to be pronounced sadly wanting in essentials by most of those who read them.
“Very harmless, but very useless,” said Mrs. Jex-Blake, and she at least knew enough of tracts to be an authority on the subject. She had evaded reading these as long as possible, and, of course it was not to the dearly-loved writer of them that she made the crushing comment.
The Guardian, strangely enough, reviewed them rather favourably, and a few total strangers wrote to say that this was the thing for which they had long been looking; but on the whole appreciation was rare.