“Dear James,”—she wrote on one occasion,—“I want to make a codicil, leaving some money to ..., the income to her for life,—the capital between her daughters. Will you please tell me the simplest words in which I can do this?”
In sending a rough draft, he inserted the words,—“if only one such daughter.”
“Of course I can put in ‘if only one such daughter,’ if you like,” she replied, “but at present there are seven!”
The initial mistake, of course, was hers, and it was a kind of mistake that was very unusual with her.
Her correspondence was very large,—so large that she never had time to write a “proper letter about ‘Shakespeare and the musical glasses’,” as she would have said. To her most intimate friends she wrote with spontaneous charm,—letters circumstantial, tender, nonsensical, as the case might be. “Do you ever write any letters that would look well in your memoir?” asks Miss Du Pre. “I begin to be anxious about that book. It seems to me that it will be so fearfully dull,—unless your diaries ... prove to be amusing.”
On the other hand, strangers consulted her about manifold schemes and perplexities, and she always asked herself how she could help.
“Dear Madam,” wrote one of these, “As you sit alone in the evening with the curtains drawn, imagine that a woman steals into your room, hunted to death by men. I am that woman....”
Even this sensational beginning did not put S. J.-B. off, and it was weeks before she allowed herself to be persuaded—by Dr. Pechey and Miss Du Pre—that the case was one for Dr. Clouston rather than for her.
But it was in her Dispensary, with working women and girls, that one saw her, perhaps, at her best. She was so vital, so sympathetic, yet so full of humour and common sense that the regular provident patients were devoted to her. They knew there was nothing to be gained by arguing. “Well, I must just take my scolding,” they would say resignedly. So keenly did she sympathize with their difficulty in following out her directions in their own homes that in 1885 she added a few beds to the Dispensary, and thus formed the nucleus of the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children, which has since grown to great things and has been honoured by a visit from the Queen.