The chief point of pain was the fear that she was fickle,—that the new interests and friendships were making her disloyal to the strange unearthly friendship for Octavia Hill. Whether this would have been blameworthy is a question that it is unnecessary to discuss, as the contingency never arose. The flame may have flickered and sunk low, but it continued to burn for another forty years. Then “after long travail good repose.”
And in any case she was very happy that winter term. Strangely enough,[[57]] her family were thoroughly sympathetic with her aims. Discussing the volume of Essays to which she had contributed, her brother wrote:
“Miss Cobbe was very vigorous and suggestive: might have been longer. So might yours without any risk of the interest flagging; and more details of fact would (I think) have driven the nail deeper in the Philistine’s understanding.... I should say that Mrs. Butler’s and yours will hit the public hardest; most dissimilar as they are.... On the main question, for you personally, I am very glad that you are on the medical rails. They are real and solid and really lead somewhere. There is more specialty about them than in the somewhat vague educational line. They belong to an old strong well-paid profession. They tend to the alleviation of intense human misery; and that for a large class of delicate cases women when properly trained are the right physicians I have felt for years and feel increasingly. Stick to them head and hands and feet. Don’t be drawn aside into tempting but irrelevant bye-ways. You will be very useful and very happy in your work: and to have helped to bring about the result that for the years to come girls shall not be without the pale of professional and University education,—shall not waste their best years in chafing at want of elbow room at home—will be a great and additional satisfaction. Nothing succeeds like success, and what you have got to do is to prove that a Lady Physician can be trustworthy and a success. Do nothing but your work, and you will do your work well. Of course get hold of the widest and deepest Professional education within reach.
Your aff. brother,
T. W. J.-B.”
This last point, on which the writer touches so lightly, was precisely the rub.
“Everything is just as we would have it,” wrote S. J.-B. at this time to Dr. Sewall, “but that Professors are not compelled to lecture to us. We have already arranged for two courses for this winter,—5 lectures a week each,—Physiology and Chemistry; and we are now arranging for Anatomy, both in lectures and dissecting.
As we have to make entirely separate arrangements, the Anatomy will be very expensive,—about £100 probably for us five,—and of this I shall pay about one-third, as two of the students are not at all rich.
Still it is worth any money to get the thing done, and I am only thankful that I can spend the money. Of course I borrow it from my Mother.[[58]] My fees for this year will be about £55 or £60,—about $400,—for the 6 months.
I have made up my mind to spend if needful £1000 on this business. I feel sure that one does more good in thus concentrating one’s energies and one’s funds to get one thing done thoroughly, than in frittering away lots of small sums in charity,—Don’t you think so? It is a grand thing to enter the very first British University ever opened to women, isn’t it?