“If you don’t come back to America,” she said, “you won’t give up the work. You will open the profession to women in England.”
And so it came about that Sophia Jex-Blake sought a medical education in her native land.
PART II
It is as hard a thing to maintain a sound understanding, a tender conscience, a lively, gracious, heavenly frame of spirit, and an upright life, amid contention, as it is to keep your candle lighted in the greatest storms.
Richard Baxter.
Individuals, feeling strongly, while on the one hand they are incidentally faulty in mode or language, are still peculiarly effective. No great work was done by a system; whereas systems rise out of individual exertions. Luther was an individual. The very faults of an individual excite attention; he loses, but his cause (if good, and he powerful-minded) gains. This is the way of things; we promote truth by a self-sacrifice.
John Henry Newman.
CHAPTER I
DRIFTING
S.J.-B. landed at Queenstown on November 27th, 1868, and “came rushing through Cork, Dublin and Holyhead on that weary 24 hours’ journey” back to the home in Brighton, to find that she had arrived too late. Her Father had died some three weeks before, and outwardly the household had already settled down to the old life—as households do—in a way that to her ardent nature must at first have seemed passing strange. There was the joy and pain of meeting her Mother again,—the joy and pain of finding that that Mother was too fine a Christian to be broken-hearted at the prospect of so brief a parting,—and then, little by little, there came for S.J.-B. the realization of all she had left behind.
On board the Java she had written to Dr. Sewall: