I shall be really delighted if you will come down with your girls and spend a week or two with me while they are at Morton. You and I have never had any really quiet time together since our student days, and I cannot tell you how much I should enjoy some talks with you, and how glad I should be of your advice about lots of things in my Dispensary and otherwise. Dr. Sewall you know always said you were the doctor among us, and I quite believe it. I wish so very often that I could ask you about things.”
To a colleague in London she writes a month or two later:
“Your thanking me so much for a very moderate amount of good nature shown to Miss X., makes me wonder how you expect one to behave to people who are ill and poor. I am sure you yourself act upon the ‘aux plus déshérités le plus amour’ principle? Seriously I have done very little for her beyond what I should have done for anybody more or less in her position, except perhaps half a dozen drives and dinners which I promised ‘pour l’amour de vos beaux yeux' before I saw her.
I am afraid you must think me a very ungrateful person in my turn, for I don’t say a quarter as much about your various kindnesses to me and my friends.”
She always had a word of brave and wise advice for colleagues who appealed to her:
“I am inclined to think you had better send Miss Z. off to Australia. I am sure Miss Du Pre will gladly do her part if you write to her about it. She is now at ‘Surbiton, S.W.,’—no farther address required.
I think you are quite wrong to think you will ‘not forgive yourself’ if the plan does not succeed. I have long ago come to the conclusion that ‘efforts are ours, results are God’s,’—and, if you don’t like that phraseology, you can paraphrase it as you like, so long as you acquiesce in my conclusion that we are not to blame or worry ourselves if things go wrong when we have done our best.
How I wish we could sit by that upstairs window and have a chat over it all!”
“No, life isn’t a bit of a failure, and you wouldn’t think so if we could get ten days’ holiday together up in the highlands!—don’t I wish we could!—for I am very tired too.