Читать книгу The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake - Graham Travers - Страница 15

“Oh, Sophy, how splendidly you and your Mother did act those last days that now seem so far away. … When I see how deep your forethought was, so loving as to have remembered the very slightest things that might be the least trouble to us when you were no longer near to take care of us, one feels as if an angel had (may I not say still is taking) care of us.”

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.

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.