“The first thing of all I want to do is to write and tell you what I said so very imperfectly in my hurry and worry when you left,—how much your kind thought for me in arranging even the little things of my cabin has touched me.... Even now when I am going home—and going under such circumstances—the thought of all you have done for me and of all I owe you, comes uppermost....
Mrs. Browning says,—
‘God gives what he gives—be content,
He resumes nothing given, be sure,’
and your love and help have been given to me, and I know it is not all over now....
I am going home now to try and be a child once more,—simply to love and serve my Mother, as God will help me (for I do believe in Him in my pain and my love in my heart of hearts) and I believe that by being a child I shall learn to grow a better woman.”
Such was her resolve, and for months she struggled hard to carry it out, with no small success when one considers the complexity of the elements involved. She had come from a busy bustling beneficent life, with an outlook that appealed keenly to her energetic and ambitious nature, and she found herself in the quiet, smoothly-ordered home of her childhood, where she was only “Miss Sophy,” where her medical books and microscope slides were roughly classified as “nasty,” and where she was expected to conform to a rule of life which had never given scope to her possibilities, and was little likely to do so now that all its music was set in a minor key. The free life in America had developed her capabilities; quite possibly it had also rubbed off some few of those superficial elegancies that were regarded as a primary essential in the Englishwoman of her class.
There was another side to the question too. Glad as Mrs. Jex-Blake always was to see her “youngest little one” again, one can imagine that in the circumstances so electrical a presence in the house was not an unmixed boon. “I had much rather know you well and happy there [in Boston] than see you ill and know you worried here,” the Mother had written years before, and there is no reason to think that her feeling in the matter had changed. Nothing could alter the deep undercurrent of love and understanding between this Mother and child, but neither of them had a naturally equable temperament, and one gathers that on the surface things were not always smooth.
“Poor little woman,” S.J.-B. writes to Dr. Sewall, on receipt of the first letter from Boston, “I do feel so sorry for you all alone and dreary, but don’t you think I am even worse off than you are? You can fancy what this house is now,—so silent and mourning,—and so much cut off even from outside, and at any rate no people or work or occupation of any interest outside ourselves.
M. and C. have their regular ways and plans, I suppose, but it is so long since I have been at home except for a visit, that it’s hard for me to fit in anywhere, and of course everybody’s feeling more or less sad and pained doesn’t make matters smoother. Just at present I am getting my books and drawers, etc., to rights, and after that is done I mean to try and read some Medicine at least,—perhaps if we stay here all winter I may apply to visit at the Hospital, etc.—only it would be rather disagreeable all alone.