Yours sincerely,
S. Jex-Blake.”
In December 1885 she writes to Miss Du Pre:
“Yes, we shall miss poor old X. sadly. It does seem pathetic, doesn’t it?—and yet don’t you think it is something to be taken away just when you have attained your highest ambition?... The first thing I thought,—as it almost always is,—was, I wonder what he thinks now that he ‘knows what Rhamses knows’. It always does strike me so very curiously when someone who has never, I suppose, thought half as much as I about the mysteries of life and death, goes in in front of me,—if there is any ‘going in’. I thought it so very strongly about Vanderbilt. How will he get on where everything isn’t reckoned as on the Stock Exchange?”
Although the new house was certainly not in a central position, S. J.-B.’s practice steadily grew. As the first woman doctor in Scotland, she had, as she had told Sir Thomas Barlow, numerous cases that had long gone untreated, and she was the recipient of many a pent-up confidence. The Edinburgh that criticized her would have been surprised if it had known some of the secrets that lay, so safely, in her keeping. She was often called upon to be a Mother Confessor, and, although she always declared that “one profession is enough for one person,” her practice was by no means so rigid in this respect as was her theory. Many strange problems were discussed in that quiet consulting-room, with its book-lined walls and green spaces outside. To the end of life her impulsiveness led her into mistakes for which she had to suffer, but her advice to others was extraordinarily sane and good. Yet the idealist in her never slept. “I took Colani from the shelf,” she says on one occasion, “and read, ‘Cast thyself down,—for the devil can suggest; compel can he never.’”
She was often asked, too, to take a resident patient who wished to have her own suite of rooms and sometimes her own attendant. More than one of these patients became personal friends.
She of course received high fees for cases of this kind, but she often had resident patients who paid no fees at all. Some governess who could not get well in dreary lodgings would be simply wrapped up in blankets and carried off in the brougham—or was it on a comet’s tail?—a messenger having been sent up to the house,—“Have blue room ready in half-an-hour. Am bringing patient.”[[149]]
“I wonder,” writes a patient at this time, “if you have any idea how pleasant it is to be lifted on somebody’s shoulders and carried away from the shadows of your own life into the brightness of theirs. No I do not think you can have; you do not seem to have dwelt in the shadows.”
And another writes,
“I know you will believe me when I say that I have rarely, if ever, been so supremely happy as during the past few weeks. The feeling of peace and comfort was so delicious, and I only wish I could prove myself just a little worthy of all I have enjoyed.”