A generous letter indeed, but in the face of such letters was it any wonder that S. J.-B. failed as of old to grasp the extent of the difficulty,—that she refused to accept the situation as final,—that she lived on in hope, and often all but intolerable suspense? “Did I want to learn constancy?” she says. If the lesson was needed, most assuredly it was learned. Till the close of her life the friendship on her side remained unbroken, although she ceased in time to speak of it even to her most intimate friends; in repeated wills she left the whole of her little property to Miss Hill,[21] and, although other friends came in time to fill the empty place—although she even wrote playfully in her diary some twenty years later of her “fanciful faithfulness”—until the eve of her last illness she would not extinguish the hope that “even in this life” the friendship might be renewed. Footnote 21: Until circumstances rendered Miss Hill independent of such aid. One might say more than this. From the time of the rupture, Octavia Hill became to S. J.-B. a pure ideal—something of what the subject of the _In Memoriam_ was to the author of that wonderful threnody. In any case the whole history of the friendship was destined to lie on higher levels because Octavia Hill had felt bound to break it off. CHAPTER VIII A STEP BEYOND It has never been customary among students of human nature to attach great importance to the outpourings of a romantic friendship, save in the rare cases where these have achieved consummate literary form. The religion of the adolescent, too, is a thing that we are apt to take a good deal for granted. In S. J.-B.’s case, however, the ideal—the vision—to which this brief friendship gave rise throws a light on potentialities of feeling and expression which we should otherwise never have had. The fact that so apparently transient a gleam should have given rise to a great and lasting inspiration lifts the passages that follow quite out of the category of the great mass of similar experiences. The effect of one personality upon another is a thing we can never predict and seldom explain. It is not a mere question of addition or even of multiplication. The process is a vital one which can never be mechanically reckoned out. We all see over and over again in life how the receiver may contribute as much as the giver—the pupil no less than the teacher. When the word of God went forth from Sinai, we are told, _each man heard it in the tongue in which he was born_. In any case that strange and new experience came with the force of a ferment to S. J.-B. “She was never the same again,” says a lifelong friend, looking back on the whole history after more than fifty years: “it cut her life in two.” But the cutting in two—like the division of the primordial cell—was the earnest, not of death, but of life on a larger scale.