Dearest,
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.
Your affectionate Father,
T. Jex-Blake.”
Two other happenings specially marked the holiday,—a visit from Mrs. Jenkinson (Mrs. Ballantyne), and a delightful rapprochement between S. J.-B. and her Father.
Of Mrs. Jenkinson she writes in her diary:
“So good, so fascinating and dainty! I haven’t had so much wide and deep talk with anyone for three years at least....
The proposal of her driving them to church ending in my doing so. Somehow the service moved me greatly. ‘Gethsemane, can I forget,’ etc....
‘What is truth?’—no jesting Pilate,—yet do I stay for an answer? Oh, dear, the certainties of p. [181], etc., and now! Yet I think the wheel is beginning to sway upwards again. Please God! Yes, surely the Ephesians stretched wise earnest hands (or may have done) to the Unknown God. ‘Strenuous souls ... to stand in the dark on the lowest stair.’”
“May 31st. Wonderful how content everyone is with my medical prospects. Daddy decides our residence (!) for Mount Street, Grosvenor Square. I say now pretty definitely,—in 4 more years England, three years study, and one of practice.