“How ANY WOMAN can have a desire for the Medical Profession is indeed WONDERFUL,” she writes, “but of course only very talented ones could go through the stiff examinations that are required.”

She remarks too, with complacence, that men doctors will be kept up to the mark when they have to compete against women.

In some remote part of Norfolk, Mrs. Jex-Blake gave her name in a shop, whereupon “a lady stepped forward and said what good work you were doing, but, if we were English, we must think very ill of the Scotch. I said No, you had received far more kindness than unkindness, having had a great many real and warm friends.”

This incident leads one to note that the present year, 1871, saw the ripening into lifelong friendship of S. J.-B.’s acquaintance with Miss Agnes M‘Laren, daughter of the Member for Edinburgh,—a lady who adds one more to the gallery of truly noble women with whom we are brought into contact when reviewing S. J.-B.’s life. At the time of “the Edinburgh Fight,” Miss M‘Laren was engaged in Suffrage work with Miss Taylour, acting as Hon. Secretary to the Association (with no paid subordinate to do the drudgery), travelling on occasion all over Scotland in serious propagation of her principles.[[86]] She was perhaps the most public-spirited member of a public-spirited family, for the reason that in her the strong purpose, shrewd judgment and liberal sympathies that characterized all, were combined with an instinctive aloofness and even shyness, with a spirit almost of quietism, with a real old-world grace of womanhood.

She was hailed with something like reverence by the work-worn, hard-driven students at 15 Buccleuch Place, and almost from the first they spoke of her among themselves as “St. Agnes,” a name to which she characteristically took exception as soon as it reached her ears.

“Dear Miss M‘Laren,” writes S. J.-B. in this connection,—

“You can’t seriously suppose that anybody in this house,—least of all that I,—should really laugh at you!—though I don’t doubt that you are a great deal too humble-minded to understand in the least the sort of light in which most of us working women do regard you. However we’ll keep our pet name for you to ourselves if you don’t like it.”

And again a few weeks later:

“15 Buccleuch Place,

Edinburgh. June 7th.