“Miss de Dreux said my coming and work had given her a fresh impetus and help forward. Isn’t that nice?” On the whole these first months in Edinburgh though she talks afterwards of their “grey pain,” were perhaps the high-water mark of S. J.-B.’s life as regards sheer balance and beauty of living. She was having, it is true, no physical recreation, but, apart from that, her faculties were all called equally into play. She was working steadily and hard, chiefly at her beloved mathematics: her wider reading included _Jane Eyre_, _Le Juif Errant_ and _Aids to Faith_: she was profoundly interested in religious problems and conscientiously attended the churches of the best-known Edinburgh ministers: she was happy in her friendships, and still more in the passing beauty of her relation to her Mother: above all, the flame of her religious life—in which was almost merged at this time her devotion to Miss Octavia Hill—was burning with a clearness that made it easy to ignore the little jars and frictions. Even politics were not crowded out. “Daddy is here,” says Mrs. Jex-Blake in one of her letters, “and says, ‘Tell dearest Sophy I would not have the _Times_, which she makes such excellent use of, given up on any account.’” One cannot read the record of this period of her life without feeling that it was mainly here and now that her character was made,—that it was the resolute determination with which she took to work and stuck to it as the remedy for intolerable heartache—that enabled her in later years to bear the brunt of all she came through. It is interesting to hear what she herself has to say about the various elements in her life referred to above: “There never was such a book as _Jane Eyre_—of its kind. Talk of ‘finding’—that finds me through and through continually. How people _dare_ speak ill of such a book,—I suppose they simply can’t understand it. Its grand steadfastness and earnestness and purity, is something glorious. I read and re-read it as I never could another novel, and how it helps one!” Again: “_Aids to Faith_ put into my trunk by that dear old Mother who in her weaker moment entertains an uncomfortable kind of desire to proselytize me,—and yet can’t be quite dissatisfied.