If still our weakness can
Love Him in loving man?”
There are those of whom Teresa herself said:
“They may have more merit in His eyes than their more favoured neighbours, because their obedience and their faith and their love have cost them more. Their Lord deals with them as with strong and valiant men, appointing them travail and trouble here, that they may fight for Him the good fight of faith, and only come in for the prize at the end.”
No portrait gives any adequate idea of Sophia Jex-Blake. Someone who saw her first in 1886 writes:
“Although too stout in figure, she had a fine commanding presence, and one was struck at once by the exceeding comeliness of her face. It was strong, wise and benevolent, capable of an extraordinary range of expression. The brow was ideally shaped, broad and serene in repose, though always liable to the summer lightnings that one half admired, half dreaded. Her hair was growing white, but the eyebrows remained black till the end, and the eyes, both by nature and by the long discipline of life, were extraordinarily fine and expressive.”
It was twenty years later than this that a girl friend said,—“She has the look of one ‘following fearlessly’.” Throughout life, the tendency to sadness of expression was wholly contradicted by her smile; her eyes very readily bubbled over with merriment; as some reporter had said in the days of the fight, “With those dimples she must be good-natured.” When an old servant was shown the final portrait in this volume, she said, “But I want her to look up at me and laugh as she used to do!”
One does not wish to dwell on the history of the last few months. From the physical point of view it is a familiar story. One by one every medicament lost its efficacy: the failing heart ceased to invigorate one organ after another. But the strong and disciplined will held the shattered tabernacle together. Sometimes acute symptoms forced her to stay in bed for a day or two, but she always struggled on to her feet again at the earliest possible moment and went for the daily drive through her beloved lanes and woods. True that towards the end she noticed these less and less,—drowsed most of the way; but, if there was occasion to rouse herself and speak to anyone, she did so almost as of old.
“The worst of lying awake at night,” she used to say whimsically, “is that one realizes all the mistakes one has made in one’s life.” It was not even lying awake sometimes: it was a weary sitting up or lying down as each position in turn became intolerable. And often, after only three minutes’ unconsciousness, she would exclaim in something like the old happy voice, “I have had such a lovely sleep!”