You told me in a letter written to me on my last birthday that you hoped you were one of Christ’s little ones. O dear Sophy, you know better.... I do not say do not deceive yourself, but I say never seek to deceive others,” and so on. Those who have read with some sympathy the preceding pages may well be inclined to doubt whether Sophy was “seeking to deceive others,” or rather, perhaps, whether deception with her did not more readily take the form of concealing the depth and reality of her religious life. Christ’s lambs have not all been precisely of the type good Mrs. Teed had in mind. The real difficulty, however, is to fit the child into the categories of the pious people among whom she lived, or indeed, into any category at all. For better or for worse, she belonged to another plane of being. If one were compelled to adopt the system of classification current in those days, one could but fall back with thankfulness on the remembrance of that “hasty image” of the Good Shepherd in the Catacombs, “And, on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.” In any case the stormy chequered school career had now come to a close. “I can’t fancy you, Sophy, with long frocks,” an old school-friend writes, “taller than Hetty, a regular grown-up young lady. Are you transformed yet? Do let me see you first like your own old dear self!” “Your own old dear self!” One almost weeps to think of all the _unnecessary_ friction and waste of energy in those school days. Those of us who have been teachers know how often the troublesome pupil proves to be the pick of the basket,—the keen student and the loyal co-worker: and perhaps more than one headmistress who reads these pages will wish that she had been privileged to have the training of Sophia Jex-Blake. Many admirable women prayed and wept over her in those days, struggled to make her all they thought she ought to be; and, if their perseverance and devotion seemed to be inadequately rewarded, this was due to no fault of theirs. They were what the Society of that day demanded, what Society made them. They were wanting only in what just chanced to be almost the one thing needful,—_the modern spirit_. Rather behind their own day, their lot was to be the trainers of a girl, who—unconsciously to herself—was far in advance of her own day,—a girl who would have appreciated to the utmost the free boyish education of our High Schools for girls, and who—had it been her good fortune to have lived under such auspices—might have written a somewhat different page in the book of life. CHAPTER V LIFE AT HOME