“Do you think, darling,” her Father writes, “that by divine grace you are less self-willed day by day? How earnestly do I desire to see you a loving happy child. Everybody seems to deprecate your presence as that which will spread discomfort all around.... God bless you and help you and give you His Holy Spirit to guide you continually.”
“Everybody” was an overstatement. At no time was the child without her own little circle of admiring friends. A schoolfellow with whom she remained on terms of intimate friendship throughout life says,—“At our house she was always good and happy, and a very welcome guest. My father thought very highly of her.”
A fortnight later Mrs. Jex-Blake writes:
“I rejoice at the nice accounts I have of you from school, and I hope (against experience) that you will when we see you again, be a pleasant child, the comfort you might so easily be to me.”
“Day and night,” her Father writes, “you are on my heart. You know how I love you. Why will you thus be your own enemy?”
The faith and perseverance of the parents is astounding: not less so the fact that at bottom the affection and filial piety of the child never flagged.
One has to remind oneself constantly—what the daughter never forgot, though small trace of it appears in the letters of this period—that Mrs. Jex-Blake had a keen sense of humour. When she and Sophy were together, they had many a good joke in common. It was when the mesmerism of the child’s presence was removed that the sense of responsibility asserted itself in full force. It is impossible to read the long series of letters without being profoundly convinced,—1. That the parents were devotedly attached to their youngest child (“Sophy was the favourite,” was the elder sister’s deliberate comment some sixty years later). 2. That their affection was returned with an intensity of which few children are capable. 3. That the warning that she was injuring her Mother’s health and must therefore be kept away from her dearly-loved home did not provide a motive strong enough to make the child run in harness like other people. The inference is that no motive would have been strong enough.
Did she ever really make an honest effort? One comes upon many impassioned scraps of prayer for grace to resist temptation. “Oh, that when a word irritates me I may remember how often I have said more unkind things and been forgiven.” “Oh, Lord, punish me, reduce me to submission in any way Thou seest fit, but oh, let me not alone, abandon me not despite my wickedness.” And, although these prayers are apt to run into conventional exaggerated language, it is impossible to doubt their sincerity. Her tiny booklets and papers were always kept with the strictest secrecy, and it is all but certain that no eye but her own ever saw them before her death.
Here is an isolated scrap of diary, recording probably a time of special effort.
“Feb. 26th, 1854. Oh, keep Thou my foot when I go up into Thy house of prayer. O how difficult it is to fix the mind for even that short time! Miss X. will treat me unlike any other human being, but that is no reason for transgressing the commandment of my God. She says she does not like to hear me name the name of Christ for I do not depart from iniquity, she thinks I had better not hold conversations on sacred subjects.