Two other happenings specially marked the holiday,—a visit from Mrs. Jenkinson (Mrs. Ballantyne), and a delightful _rapprochement_ between S. J.-B. and her Father.
Of Mrs. Jenkinson she writes in her diary:
“So good, so fascinating and dainty! I haven’t had so much wide and deep talk with anyone for three years at least....
The proposal of her driving them to church ending in my doing so. Somehow the service moved me greatly. ‘Gethsemane, can I forget,’ etc....
‘What is truth?’—no jesting Pilate,—yet _do_ I stay for an answer? Oh, dear, the certainties of p. [181], etc., and now! Yet I think the wheel is beginning to sway upwards again. Please God! Yes, surely the Ephesians stretched wise earnest hands (or may have done) to the Unknown God. ‘Strenuous souls ... to stand in the dark on the lowest stair.’”
“May 31st. Wonderful how content everyone is with my medical prospects. Daddy decides our residence (!) for Mount Street, Grosvenor Square. I say now pretty definitely,—in 4 more years England, three years study, and one of practice.
Meanwhile a _quiet_ satisfactory holiday _must_ have. No one can tell how many more with the old folks, and this _must_ be what will be good to remember.”
“June 20th. Maurice’s lecture. ‘Miss Jex-Blake’s investigations in America might help much to the solution of the problem’ [of mixed education, presumably]. And after the lecture he _thanked_ me for my book. _I_’m cock a hoop now!”
“June 24th. On the whole my resolve well kept till now,—one month’s success in no (or few and light) ‘cataracts and breaks.’ Somehow I have a solemn sort of feeling about it this year, as if it would be the last with one or other.”
“Ah, darling,” she writes to her Mother on the voyage, “it was _such_ hard work to say Goodbye last week! Do you know for one little minute I wondered whether after all the price wasn’t _too_ hard to pay, and whether after all I shouldn’t give up doctor, hospital, M.D. and all and just stay with the old Mother.”
“Sept. 29th. Boston. I am sorry to say that Harvard has refused me again, so I must go to New York!—Ah, well,—‘all things are less dreadful than they seem’!”
In that autumn of 1868 the Blackwells carried out their project of starting a medical school for women in New York.