The coffee crop had failed in Ceylon several years and the money difficulties became very serious for the Camerons. Photography might have paid better if the photographer had been less lavish in her gifts and ways. She was a true artist in her attitude towards money.
She, the most recklessly generous of women, was able to write:
‘I myself have never felt humiliated at the idea of receiving charities, for I always feel about friendship and love that what it is good to give it is also good to take.’
‘I do not mean to let you ruin yourself by giving the photographs away,’ Mrs. Tennyson wrote: ‘I cannot pretend to say that I do not prize a kindness done to mine, more than if it were done to myself, still I feel bound to point with a solemn finger to those stalwart boys of yours, saying “Remember.” I see that I shall have to set up a shop for the sale of photographs myself all for your benefit.’
To these remonstrances the photographer would answer: ‘I have always tried to get my husband to share my feelings—so long as illness and death are mercifully spared us. Death is as to deeper wounds—only a grain.’ Julia Cameron was not a woman of to-day. She seemed to belong to some heroic past. She has told me how as a girl she and her sister, the dearest of them all, used to wander forth and kneel to pray on the country-roadsides.
Once when her eldest son went through a painful operation, which lasted some time, she had held his hand in hers through it all, and he said he could not have endured it if she had not been present. ‘As to my bearing it,’ she said simply, ‘what is there one cannot bear if one can give one grain of helpful support to any sufferer?’
Of a friend in great trouble she writes:
‘I am not sure that time with him will soften the calamity. God grant it may, but with some
“Time but the impression stronger makes,
As streams their channels deeper wear.”