“By the bye if you do decide to leave India next year, and if it could possibly be made to fit in with Mr. Phipson’s plans,[[156]] I wish with all my heart that you could see your way to come and settle in Edinburgh, and take up with your splendid energy the very wide field in Scotland that is almost ripe to harvest. My strength is about spent, and besides you have elements of social success that I never should have. You are far more of a woman of the world and a far more able diplomatist. My Hospital will never develop in my tired hands, but I believe you might make a splendid thing of it; and at the same time I believe you would have a capital west-end practice almost immediately, and of course a lectureship if you cared to have it. Think this idea over thoroughly before you decide against it.
Yours sincerely,
S. Jex-Blake.”
The feeling that her time of work was drawing to an end was intensified by the news of the death of her friend, Dr. Lucy Sewall. This was the last heavy bereavement she had to face, and she took it hard. To her friend, Mrs. Brander, her “eldest daughter,” she had written a month or two before the above correspondence with Dr. Pechey:
“Feb. 27. 1890.
Dearest Bel,
For the second time I have to send you terribly bad news. My dear friend, Dr. Sewall, has been as you know in bad health for the last 4 or 5 years, and last month she was seized with a very severe attack of bronchitis, from which she never regained strength, and she passed away ‘very peacefully’ on Feb. 13th.
Though I have seen so little of her for some years back, it is a great blow to me,—the greatest I have felt since 1881.
How I hope that she is again with the mother and father she loved so very dearly. Indeed she has never really rallied, I believe, from her father’s death (at 90) a year ago.
A whiter sweeter soul never lived, and her memory ‘smells sweet and blossoms in the dust.’