Where the case was serious, and the remedy lay in the husband’s hands, S. J.-B. always took the bull by the horns. “Ask him to come and have a little talk with me,” she would say breezily. “Tell him I can see him at such and such hours.” And he would come!
She was admirably fitted for work of this kind. No woman was ever more strictly fair. An injured husband was no less—and no more—sure of her sympathy than was an injured wife.
And, of course, it was the old and feeble who at once found the radiant side of her.
“The thanks and blessings of old J. G.—85—bring a rush of tears,—‘Ah, somebody be good to my old lady!’
And yet I suppose she may be ‘old’ no longer, but young and strong and bright, and sorry for my weakness and weariness,—
‘waits on the hills of Paradise
For her children’s coming feet.’”
She seldom rose quite above this sense of effort and weariness, though few would have guessed it. “I always get so much good from being with you,” writes Lady Jenkinson,—“body and soul—especially soul.... I wish you would ’fess when you feel downcast.”
In her inmost circle, of course, she did ’fess, pretty often. “Not strong enough for the place, John,” she used often to quote whimsically from Punch. And here is an interesting bit of heresy in a letter to Dr. Sewall—
“I don’t at all agree by the bye with your theory that ‘there is nothing like work for producing real happiness.’ I don’t find that it has even any tendency to produce it, though of course one must work if one is able. ‘Otherwise she drops at once below the dignity of man,’—so says Aurora Leigh.