“I am sure all that driving and running about with me on Thursday made your eye and headache much worse,” writes Cousin Sarah, “but you are such a dear kind old pet,—would half kill yourself for anybody.”
A former school friend writes at the same date:
“I feel I ought not to trouble you, occupied as you are, but, whenever I have asked you for anything, your kindness and sympathy have been so readily given that I always think of you when I hear of _any wants_.”
“Mama sends her very best love,” writes Miss M. J. Evans, “and Papa too. Oddly enough, both like you. How can they?—such a trumpery _heartless_ girl!”
And one comes upon hundreds of tributes to the same effect.
Sometimes S. J.-B.’s willing assistance was of a kind that involved no small labour and anxiety. If a friend was shy and gifted and poor, capable of producing work not yet recognized as marketable, S. J.-B. was always ready to be the middleman. She would write round to well-to-do friends enlisting their interest, do up samples of the work for inspection, and (most serious of all!) undertake the responsibility of receiving the samples safe back again. “Put the responsibility on me,” she used to say cheerily in after life, “my shoulders are broad enough”; and there is no doubt she began to say this—if not in so many words— before the age of 20. People got into the way of trusting her to _see a thing through_, of assuming that it was her _métier_ to be competent and to organize, of leaving to her the heavy end of the stick: and no doubt she enjoyed it all and learned much from it, though, when taken in addition to her regular work, it was terribly hard on her hasty temper and “irritable brain.”
“You must be very thankful to be a medium of helping so many,” writes her Mother,—“a great honour, I consider it, pleasure without alloy.” But in the same letter she says, “Sad, sad weather for you to knock about in. Darling, don’t risk your health.”
“I would not and could not speak” (after parting from you), writes Ellie. “I wish I was not such a silly fool, but I could not help it and never can, if I have to leave you.... I wonder if you have wished for me, if it was only to scold and fight with; but what I wish most of all is that you would give up fighting. I would do anything for you if I could only make even a slight alteration.... I do with all my heart wish that you would try to keep in that temper of yours.”