Have I named one single river? Have I claimed one single acre? Have I kept one single nugget—(barring samples)? No, not I.

Kipling.

Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.

Emerson.

CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS IN PRACTICE

The dramatic days were over. The task that now lay before S. J.-B. was to pick up all that remained of herself after the conflict, and settle down to practice. It is a solemn moment in the history of any doctor when he or she deliberately takes in hand the issues of life and death: mistakes can no more be avoided in this than in any other walk of life, and yet the consequences here are so much more apparently important.

And if it is a solemn moment for any man or woman, it was surely not less so for her who for years had been a city set on a hill. In the course of the long struggle youth had quite slipped away; her best energies were spent; her nervous system was overstrained beyond the possibility of complete recuperation. If George Eliot could say with some truth that she began Romola as a young woman and ended it an old one, how much more might S. J.-B. have said this of her education in medicine. Perhaps the coward in her would gladly now have shunned the conflict altogether.

Small say was allowed to that coward at any time, and at this juncture few even of S. J.-B.’s friends realized that—as regarded output of energy—she had already done a life’s work. No one would have been surprised if she had died a few years before, in the stress of the fight; but the human memory is short, and, as she had survived, almost everyone now looked upon the toil of the last ten years as simply the introduction to the volume. She was now expected to show how great a success a woman doctor can be.

First came the anxious question where to settle, and, while she meditated on this, she was making good, at Brompton and wherever she could find an entry,[[135]] the deficiencies in her hospital education.

Her original plan had been to settle in London, to foster the School she had founded, and at the same time to be within easy reach of her Mother,—the Mother for whom she would at any moment in her life have thrown up every hope and plan that guided her.