Please let us know, for Mr. Sidgwick and I have been consulting together, and have made up our minds that we will try all that we can now for your admission to this university, and we are ready to begin, if you feel that this is your best place to turn to, and if you need it. Let us know then.
We feel quite sure of ultimate success here in the matter of full admission of women to the whole benefits of the university.
Still we do not know how distant ‘Ultimate’ may be. We are not sanguine of success at present in your cause. Still we think it worth while trying, if it would materially help you.
I am,
Yours truly,
James Stuart.”
So there were very brave people in Cambridge as well as in Edinburgh: for Mr. Stuart as well as Mr. Sidgwick knew all about that unfortunate speech and the lawsuit to which it led. S. J.-B. had scrupulously sent them the records; and, as a matter of fact, Mr. Sidgwick had been one of the many distinguished people who subscribed to the Fund for defraying the expenses of the lawsuit.
If only the struggle had ended here: if only the University had consented to give the women the little ledge they coveted on its precipitous wall: or, failing that, if some young, enlightened university had said, “Come to us!”—the story would be in all ways a pleasanter one to tell. But that is not how things happen in life. Removal to another university at this stage would simply have meant beginning the fight all over again; and Edinburgh—blundering old Edinburgh—was so kind, so homelike, with its great army of friends, many of them convinced that victory lay within sight, that the inducement to stay in spite of all was great. The very next turn of the wheel might revolutionize all things.
Meanwhile the protagonist had been on the strain for nearly three years, and she was growing very weary of the struggle: she was losing a little of the verve that had carried her on hitherto. The incessant canvassing, organizing and writing had developed her inherent business capacity to the last point, and was making her a little intolerant of unbusinesslike ways in other people. It was more difficult than formerly in journalism and in verbal argument to show herself all things to all men as she had done so finely in those first calls on the Professors. But she had not the smallest idea of giving in: like a strong man lost in the snow, she was conscious mainly of a resolute determination to keep going on somehow.
“Your cause is sure to win,” Dr. Guthrie said to her about this time; “but a cause may be won at the cost of a life.”