Dear Miss Jex-Blake,
I have seen with very great regret the notice of your sorrow.
Knowing as I do how very close and tender was the tie between you and your Mother and also what a fine and ennobling influence she must have been to all within her range I am very full of sympathy for you. It is always very sad to break away from the past by losing one of these main links with it, but in your case there is very much to increase your sense of this. You have not (as so many others unhappily allow themselves to do) outlived the tenderness of the relationship. I hope that after a time it will be a comfort to you to remember this and to recal how happy she was in having so much affection from you.
I was very sorry to find I had written on business last Sunday at such a time.
Yours very truly,
E. G. Anderson.”
S. J.-B.’s own letters are calm and restrained, of course. To her assistant in Edinburgh she writes,
“July 11th.
... Thanks for your kind note, and [your Mother’s] kind thoughtfulness.
But nothing would grieve me more than needlessly to part a Mother and daughter who still have each other, and I beg her to remain with you at least as arranged until the end of this month during which time I shall almost certainly remain here and try to get rested.