Elsie Inglis: The Woman with the Torch

merely in words, that brings home to other liv

. It is a fact of much interest in connection with the subject of this memoir that amongst the papers found after she had died is the MS. of a novel written by herself, entitled The Story of a Modern Woman, and one turns the pages with eager interest to see if they furnish a key to the path along which she travelled in solving her problems. The expectation is reali

t, a woman of thirty-seven, a High School teacher. During a boating accident, which might have resulted fatally, the fa

sudden flash that shows us ourselves makes us blush with shame at the sight we see. But very rarely, and for the most pa

rprise over her life, and remembered that the terror which as a child would seize her in a sudden emerg

s she sat there in the rocking boat. 'Why

tself to her then or not cannot be said, but she is known to have said to a friend after her retur

woman's feeling of loneliness-she has no link with the future. He affirms that woman because of her very nature has her ro

lonely woman," the problem that meets the unmarried and the childless woman. And the claims and the meaning of relig

thers are married-and she sees herself, at the age of thirty-seven, a forlorn figure with no great interest in the future, and her thoughts dwelling mostly on the joyous past. Two or three of Hildeguard's friends are conversin

re. Our thoughts are always turning to the past. There is not anything to link us on to the next generation. You see other women with their families-it is the future to which they look. However

future." But in her own case she does not wait for death to bring it to her; she faces her problems, and, refusing to be swamped by them, makes the currents carry her bark along to the free, open sea. She flings herself whole

r religion is no merely inherited thing-not hers at second-hand, this "link with God." It is a real thing to her, found for herself, made part of herself, and so her

tmas Eve she is described

Hildeguard turned to them from the portraits on the walls. She stood, her hands resting on the edge of the mantelpiece. Then suddenly it came to her that her whole attitude towards life and death had altered. For long these old photographs had st

nexplained way the loves of long ago seemed to be entwined with a future

ld along

t is ye

d among shallows. She felt that she was an old woman, and 'second bests' her lot in the coming years

leep and the "Celestial Surgeon" had come and 'stabbed her spirit broad awake.' Joy had done its work, and sorrow; responsibility had come with its stimulating spur, and the ardent delight of battle in a great crusade. New powers she had discovered in herself, new possibiliti

ealized, her eyes on the old pictures, that it would take ?ons to understand all it meant, to exhaust all the wonder of the idea. She could only bring to it her undeveloped powers of thought and of imagination, but she knew that stretching away, hid in an inexpressible light,

h ever new possibilities of growth and of achievement, ever greater battles to be fought for the right, and always new hopes of happiness. Doubtingly and hesitatingly she committed herself to the thought, conscious that it had been forming slowly and unregarded in the strenuous months that lay behind her, through the long years, ever si

erself. Surely she was able to weave around her heroine, from the depth of her own inner exp

ren, not only those in her own connection, on whom she lavished love and care, are the witnesses to-day of the complet