In the meantime the expedition to St. Andrews was very successful,—Dr.
Day and Principal Tulloch were both warmly favourable, and it seems
quite probable that Miss Garrett would be admitted to the University
there,—only unfortunately you see there is no medical school there,
and so it would be but half a solution to the difficulties as she
couldn’t get ‘nice little subjects’[27] there....
I have only just come to anchor after some 36 hours’ incessant
trotting about, etc., so I daresay my intellects are ‘even weaker than
usual’ as C. A. would say.
I suppose I may now thank you again on paper for all your help, dear
Dora. You can’t cough me down so conveniently. You don’t know how much
you have helped me through.
Yours affectly,
S. L. J.-B.”
Footnote 27:
Talking of the difficulties in the way of Practical Anatomy, someone
had suggested that Miss Garrett should get ‘nice _little_ subjects.’
Previously to this decision, S. J.-B. had published sensible letters on
the subject in _The Scotsman_, _The Daily Review_ and other papers. She
also drafted an amusing letter in reply to her own, supposed to have
been written by one of the retrogressive “unco guid.”
“Well, it was grand fun,” she says in her diary, “and, if it had got
in, might have played very well; but the chief temptation was the
immense fun it would be. E. G. and I both thought we could command our
faces. Her sister opposed, but we agreed, ‘No harm. We don’t sign to
it,—and it’s what some might say; and, if the _Review_ puts it in,
it’s their look-out. It’s so weak, it can’t do harm that way.’ She
said, ‘Don’t let me know about it.’ I said she was very much like
‘Tom, steal the apple, and I’ll have half.’
Well, we agreed to send it and no harm done. I went to bed. I wasn’t
quite content, yet I didn’t see any exact wrong,—and it was _such_
fun!...
Then somehow those dear eyes fixed themselves on me and I felt their
sad grieved look. I can’t, I can’t,—they would grieve,—‘Oh, Sophy!’
For a minute I went back,—‘Nonsense, no harm,’—then—
‘Let all thy converse be sincere,
Thy conscience as the noonday clear,’
and those words ‘righteous altogether’ rang in my ears....
I went out to the sitting-room and sat down to write, and my first
words to E. G. were, ‘Oh, I’ve annihilated the Review paper; it’s not
righteous altogether.’ She said instantly, ‘No, I’ve been thinking in
the night. I was going to advise you not to send it.’
My darling would be glad. God _bless_ her!”
“‘Let all thy converse be sincere’: ‘and righteous altogether’.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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