CHAPTER XVI GOING HOME It was in the course of this summer of 1868 that S. J.-B. realized her earnest wish to welcome her friend Dr. Lucy Sewall in England. She had raised great expectations among her friends, but, notwithstanding this, the visitor’s sweetness and grace won all hearts. “That woman is fit to be the apostle of a great movement,” Dr. T. W. Jex-Blake had said when he first saw her photograph, “with a face at once so strong and so tender.” And a closer acquaintance only served to confirm this judgment. It is impossible to exaggerate the pride with which S. J.-B. took “the Doctor” everywhere, in a world that knew not the “sweet girl graduate” of the present day, and showed her off—for choice in a pretty pale-blue frock—with secret triumph to the friends who were expecting something very masculine and aggressive. Quite a number of sick people—Mrs. Unwin among the number—were eagerly waiting to consult her: and many were the requests that she would come and settle in England. What Mr. Jex-Blake thought of her may be gathered from the following most characteristic note written a month or two later to his daughter: “13 Sussex Square, Brighton. 2nd August 1868. DEAREST, It is so much in my head and heart, and in the dear Mother’s, to have the privilege of presenting your most valued friend with some memento of her visit, that I beg you to use all your influence, and entreat Dr. Lucy Sewall to accept a carriage, or any other thing that she would value, as a remembrance of your dear Mother and myself, when she has returned home. She can little imagine how much she would please us both by doing so. Your affectionate Father, T. JEX-BLAKE.” Two other happenings specially marked the holiday,—a visit from Mrs. Jenkinson (Mrs. Ballantyne), and a delightful _rapprochement_ between S. J.-B. and her Father. Of Mrs. Jenkinson she writes in her diary: “So good, so fascinating and dainty! I haven’t had so much wide and deep talk with anyone for three years at least.... The proposal of her driving them to church ending in my doing so. Somehow the service moved me greatly. ‘Gethsemane, can I forget,’ etc.... ‘What is truth?’—no jesting Pilate,—yet _do_ I stay for an answer? Oh, dear, the certainties of p. [181], etc., and now! Yet I think the wheel is beginning to sway upwards again. Please God! Yes, surely the Ephesians stretched wise earnest hands (or may have done) to the Unknown God. ‘Strenuous souls ... to stand in the dark on the lowest stair.’”