Your loving child, SOPHY.” [Illustration: _Emery Walker ph. sc._ _Thomas Jex-Blake_ _from a drawing in chalks by H. T. Wells, R.A. 1862_ ] “4th Feb. 1859. DEAREST SOPHY, Your letter has given me unmixed pleasure.... About the tutorship, you write very ably, but your logic and illustrations are not sound, as I hope to show you. I am sure you are fit for, as you are fond of, teaching, and the desire to raise the standard both of teaching and teachers is good, but your receiving or not receiving wages for the work, can neither help or hinder the matter. I agree to _all_ you say in favour of working,—it is very honourable, very right, and worthy of all praise, but what I object to is your taking money for it. It is beneath you, and you will be far happier to decline it, and let it flow into its proper channels, to fructify widely and do real good. The question is, as you say, one of right and wrong. In my deliberate judgment it is _wrong_, in your position to receive pay for what you do, to say nothing of the extent to which it would damage you. The cases you cite, darling, are not to the point. I will take each of them in the order you put them and then judge for yourself. I never received a salary of any kind in my life. I was of a liberal profession—a particularly honourable branch of it—and (chiefly) lived by it. This was ‘right’ beyond all doubt. T. W. is doing the same sort of thing. He feels bound as a _man_, with ability to do so, to support his wife and family, and his position is a high one, which can only be filled by a first-class man of character, and yielding him nearer two than one thousand a year. The third case—Mrs. Teed’s—like the others has no analogy whatever to my dear Sophy’s—Mrs. Teed had no _means_. She went out in early life as a governess to earn an honourable livelihood. She did earn it well and her talents, by God’s blessing, led to her after success, enabling her to lay by something to support herself and sister in their later years.