keen business man--turned to me with his
eyes filled with tears, and said: 'I should have liked to kiss her like
my mother.' (We had never known our mother.)"

In the fourteenth century, in that wonderful and most lovable woman,
Catherine of Siena, we find the same union of strength and tenderness
which was so noticeable in Dr. Inglis. In the _Life_ of St. Catherine it
is said: "Everybody loves Catherine Benincasa because she was always and
everywhere a woman in every fibre of her being. By nature and
temperament she was fitted to be what she succeeded in remaining to the
end--a strong, noble woman, whose greatest strength lay in her
tenderness, and whose nobility sprung from her tender femininity."

In her political sagacity, her optimism, and cheerfulness also, she
reminds us of Elsie Inglis. During St. Catherine's Mission to Tuscany
the following story is told of her by her biographer: "The other case"
(of healing) "was that of Messer Matteo, her friend, the Rector of
Misericordia, who had been one of the most active of the heretic priests
in Siena. To this good man, lying _in extremis_ after terrible agony,
Catherine entered, crying cheerfully: 'Rise up, rise up, Ser Matteo!
This is not the time to be taking your ease in bed!' Immediately the
disease left him, and he, who could so ill be spared at such a time,
arose whole and sound to minister to others."[10]

We smile as we read of Catherine's "cheerful" entrance into this
sick-chamber, and those who knew Dr. Inglis can recall many such a
breezy entrance into the depressing atmosphere of some of her patients'
sickrooms.

FOOTNOTE:

[10] _Catherine of Siena_, by C. M. Antony.

CHAPTER V

THE SOLVED PROBLEMS

"_It is the solution worked out in the life, not merely in words,
that brings home to other lives the fact that the problem is not
insoluble_."

It may be truly said that special types of problems come before the
unmarried woman for solution--problems as to her connection with society
and with the race, which confront her as they do not others. Though few
signs of a mental struggle were visible on the surface, there is no
doubt that Elsie Inglis met these problems and settled them in the
silence of her heart. 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