"Miss Willard seems to see us not as we are, but as we hope we are becoming," one of her girls said. "And so we simply have to do what she believes we can do."
No one was a stranger or indifferent to her. When her clear blue eyes looked into the eyes of another, they always saw a friend.
Through these early years of teaching Frances Willard was learning not only from constant study and work with others, but also from sorrow. Her sister Mary was taken from her. The story of what her gentle life and loving comradeship meant to Frank is told in the first and best of Miss Willard's books, "Nineteen Beautiful Years," which gives many delightful glimpses of their childhood on the Wisconsin farm and the school-girl years together. Soon after Mary's death "Forest Home" was sold and the family separated. Frank wrote in her journal at this time:
I am to lose sight of the old familiar landmarks; old things are passing from me, whose love is for old things. I am pushing out all by myself into the wide, wide sea.
The writing of the story of Mary's life, together with essays and articles of general interest for the papers and magazines, "took the harm out of life for a while." In all her writing, as in her teaching and later in her public speaking, her instinctive faith in people was the secret of her power and influence as a leader.
"For myself, I liked the world, believed it friendly, and could see no reason why I might not confide in it," she said.
When another sorrow, the loss of her father, threatened to darken her life for a time, a friend came to the rescue and "opened a new door" for her—the door of travel and study abroad. They lived for two and a half years in Europe, and made a journey to Syria and Egypt. During much of this time Miss Willard spent nine hours a day in study. She longed to make her own the impressions of beauty and the haunting charm of the past.
"I must really enter into the life of each place," she said, "if it is only for a few weeks or months. I want to feel that I have a right to the landscape—that I'm not just an intruding tourist, caring only for random sight-seeing."
But Miss Willard brought back much more than a general culture gained through a study of art, history, and literature, and a contact with civilization. She gained, above all, a vital interest in conditions of life, particularly those that concern women and their opportunities for education, self-expression, and service. The Frances E. Willard that the world knows, the organizer and leader in social reform, was born at this time. On her thirtieth birthday she wrote:
I can do so much more when I go home. I shall have a hold on life, and a fitness for it so much more assured. Perhaps—who knows?—there may be noble, wide-reaching work for me in the years ahead.