Moreover a real holiday was in store that Autumn, a holiday brightened
by a visit from Dr. Lucy Sewall. How much this meant to her one gathers
from the following letter, written about this date:
“MY DARLING,
I am so sorry for your loss of poor little Scamper,—I have got a
splendid big ‘Collie’ for you here,—the handsomest I ever saw,—if you
can take him back with you. If, that is, you _must_ go back; but, oh,
Lucy, I do _so_ wish you would stay with us here for a few years.
People are getting wild for women doctors here,—and you might make
almost any income, and do quite incalculable good by living here for
the next five years.
We have eleven women studying here now, and absolutely no one to give
them [adequate] uterine teaching!
This morning I had a quite spontaneous offer of £200 to help found a
Women’s Hospital here, and I believe that in a week I could get ten
times that amount promised.
You should organize everything exactly as you liked, and, republican
wretch as you are, you would be a sort of Queen among us,—and, what
you would care for much more, would do quite infinite good to
everybody concerned,—ladies, poor women, students, and all.
However, you shan’t be bothered or worried. I think the strongest
argument of all will be when you see for yourself how sorely we need
you.
I shall not make any definite plans for you till after you come. If
you like to stay quietly in Scotland all the time, we will do so, or I
will go with you to Zurich or Paris or anywhere you like.... Send me
early word of the steamer by which you expect to come, and, if at all
possible, I will meet you at Liverpool....
I send you another copy of my Suffrage speech, and hope you have
received the newspapers about the trial.
Your very aff.
S. L. J.-B.
Turk has put on mourning for Scamper,—crape round his left arm, as
they do in the army. He evidently quite understands, for he doesn’t
try to get it off....”
The reader will not need to be told that S. J.-B. went out on the tender
to meet her friend at Liverpool,—“after awful rush previous day with
Surgeons’ Hall, leader, etc.”
Dr. Sewall’s choice of a holiday, happily, was a quiet time, mainly in
Perthshire; but, straight from Liverpool, the two fellow-workers went to
Shipley to see Mrs. Unwin, whose health had been failing for some time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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