On July 7th all looked well, and S. J.-B. felt the wonderful supporting power of hope, but, on the following day, there was a sudden turn for the worse, and at half past six in the evening, the patient passed quietly away.
The event is recorded in the diary by a great sheaf of blank pages, with a pathetic notice from the Times in the middle of them.
That is all, but constantly for a year, intermittently for many years, the diary recurs to the old longings and regrets, the gropings and questionings, the heart-searching and tears, that have followed every great bereavement. The reader of the preceding pages will not need to be told that S. J.-B. drank the cup to the dregs.
There were not a few who had lost in Mrs. Jex-Blake their dearest friend, but everyone’s first thought was of her younger daughter.
“I do hope,” writes that wise Heron Watson, “that you are not overborne by over much sorrow.”
“No human being loses what I do in her,” S. J.-B. wrote to her friend, James Cordery, and this was perfectly true. No one had loved her Mother as she had; no one else had the same cause; and no one else had the same appalling capacity for suffering.
It is interesting to note that of many beautiful letters of sympathy there is not one that strikes the reader as more truly comprehending than does Mrs. Anderson’s:
“4 Upper Berkeley Street, W.
July 13th, 1881.