But I am getting more and more doubtful whether I myself shall ever finish my education. I think when once the fight is won, I shall creep away into some wood and lie and sleep for a year.
However all that is beside the question.”
A letter from Miss Pechey—written in September—takes a sterner tone than is her wont. After reporting about her work at Endell Street, she goes on:
“You have never told me how you are getting on with your exam. subjects; such silence is very ominous, and I’m afraid you haven’t been doing anything at them. You really must, if you intend to go up in October, for it is by no means child’s play getting up three such different subjects, and it would be simply awful if you went up and didn’t pass....”
Here the writer has obviously dried the ink, and sat looking at the space that remained, appalled, we may suppose, by the contingency she has called up.
“Don’t you like me to lecture you?” she concludes finally, and passes on to another subject.
There certainly were not many people who dared to ‘lecture’ S. J.-B. The mingled love and fear with which her juniors (and not her juniors only) regarded her scarcely comes out in the correspondence, though one gets more than a glimpse of it in the following letter from one of the two who went to Boston, the humourist and enfant gâtée of the little circle:
“Dear Miss Pechey,
I write to you for several reasons, the one chiefly worth mentioning being that I want you to give some messages to Miss Jex-Blake, as, however busy you are, you are not likely to be so busy as she is, and therefore a letter is less waste of time to you. I believe though at the bottom of my heart that my real reason is that I am, even away from her, frightened of her. See how deep the feeling is. (The writer proceeds to relate a perfectly fantastic dream.)
Miss Jex-Blake, as you know, has written to Dr. Sewall, advising me to stay in Boston this winter; the Dr. is so good as to say she will keep me with her, and I am quite willing to stay, so unless my father and mother object, that is settled....