Windydene, Mark Cross, Sussex.
Dear,
I wrote enclosed mainly as an answer to yours in the Times, and as it has been sent back to me, crowded out, I send it to you,—to show you another old woman’s point of view.
I am rheumatic and lame now, and cannot go about much, but I wish you would come down and spend two or three days with me here on the Sussex hills, and we would thrash out this Suffrage question—surely one of us ought to be able to convince the other!
And I should like to see you again!
Yours sincerely,
S. Jex-Blake.
I grieved greatly with you in your loss in June.”[[162]]
Miss Octavia Hill had allowed herself no “sabbatical year,” and she was flagging in harness. Her life had been spent in unremitting service of her fellow men. She answered her old friend’s letter, but she could not respond. One has no difficulty in understanding her attitude now. A conventional meeting would have been useless, and anything else would have involved a greater upheaval than most people are willing to face as life goes on.
And it well may be that she had acted wisely all along. As Mrs. Jex-Blake had said many years before with that strange prevision that is given sometimes to the pure in heart,—“God has two great works,—one for her, one for you.”