“When I lie awake nights and think of you wanting me to help you in Edinburgh, it seems to me as if I must break off from all my ties, and come back to you at once; but then my New England conscience wakes up and tells me that my life must be duty and not pleasure, and I try to be contented with doing the work that God gives me, and trust that when I am really at work it will be all right. I do hope that you are having a nice quiet time with Miss Du Pre, and getting rested.” “It is just a week now since I said Goodbye to you, but it seems almost like a month to me. Last night for the first time since I left, I dreamed of having patients instead of dreaming of you.” CHAPTER XI THE QUESTION OF PROFESSIONAL EXAMINATION Apart from the ghost—which was a pure joy, though a very exciting one—S. J.-B.’s holiday was broken in upon by very disturbing rumours. It was whispered by some of those who might have been supposed to know, that—notwithstanding the paragraphs that still stood in the _University Calendar_ (see p. 260)—an effort would be made to prevent any new women candidates from undergoing the Preliminary Examination, and from matriculating. Worse than this, it was hinted that a similar effort would be made to prevent the women who had been studying for that express purpose for two years, from presenting themselves for the First Professional Examination. There were positive difficulties apart from these vague rumours. In a previous chapter we saw that the President of the Royal College of Physicians and the President of the Royal College of Surgeons had refused to preside at the prize-giving “if lady students were to be present and to receive their prizes on that occasion.” This announcement was followed by a decision on the part of the lecturers at Surgeons’ Hall “to rescind the permission given last summer to those lecturers who desired to admit ladies to their classes,”—“it being, however, understood that the prohibition should not extend to the instructions by Dr. Keiller [in Midwifery] and others, of women who were not registered students of medicine.” It was still open to the women, of course, to get Extra-Mural lecturers to teach them elsewhere, if rooms could be found and the necessary arrangements made; but, as regarded the original students, an automatic deadlock arose at this point of which certain Professors unhappily elected to avail themselves: By the rules of the University only four classes might be taken from Extra-Mural (non-professorial) teachers, and the original students had already taken these four. Professor Christison’s class was one of those that came next in turn, and it would, perhaps, have been expecting too much of human nature that he should have chosen this moment in which to lay down his arms. In any case, he refused point blank.