As to your unworthy fears, fie upon them! You are more to be envied than the Sultan, the Pope or Brigham Young.
Hoping to have a chance some other time of doing homage to the Trinity, and to have the pleasure soon of calling upon Mrs. Russel.
I rest,
Ever Yours,
——.”
And her fame—or notoriety—extended to the most unexpected classes of society. “Miss Jex-Blake had that house last year,” the driver of a Highland coach would say, pointing with his whip in the direction of the farm where she had stayed. Her name occurred repeatedly in that year’s pantomime, and Harlequin and Columbine had called to ask if she had any objection to this,—an incident which she always recalled with amusement and appreciation. The main reference, as it happened, was quite complimentary. A game was played on the stage in which various Edinburgh dignitaries were the cards; but “Miss Jex-Blake” took the trick.
Her dislike of publicity was great, but she had long since hardened herself to endure it in so far as was necessary for her work’s sake. Beyond that she drew the line absolutely. The press rang with her name for a few years, but she steadily refused to be interviewed. It was nothing to her that the public had not the smallest idea of the more human side of her character. “Nothing,” she wrote in response to many requests, “would induce her to consent to the sale of her photograph.” Her holidays were spent in absolute retirement, and intimate friends will never forget how, on the first day in the country, the words would rise to her lips,—
“The pulse of dew upon the grass kept his within its number,
And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber.”
A memorandum of this period directs that, in case of her death, the funeral shall be as simple and inexpensive as possible, and that the headstone—if headstone there be—shall bear only her name, the dates, and the words,—“Then are they glad because they be quiet.”