Rounsevel’s wife added a comment which reveals all the pathos of a weak nature realizing too late what it has thrown away. In speaking of his wife, she said, Patterson would use the old expression that he “worshipped the ground she trod upon.”³⁹

Mrs. Patterson, for her part, was now stripped of everything that seemed to make life dear. She was forty-five years old, at the exact midpoint of her life. Fired with a vision that challenged the entrenched convictions of society, she had nothing outwardly to help her. Separated from her family, deprived of her son, estranged from her husband, she had nowhere to go but forward.

Her loneliness found expression in a melancholy little poem entitled “I’m Sitting Alone” which was published at this time.⁴⁰ Nowhere did there seem to be any place for her. After leaving the Clark boardinghouse she stopped with first one friend, then another, each stay ending with her being “evicted,” if the malicious gossip of Julia Russell Walcott is to be believed. With her personal troubles and with the vision in her crying out for expression, she may well have been a burdensome guest to people whose horizon ended at the new Temperance Hall.⁴¹ But sometime during the autumn she found an appreciative welcome in the more congenial home of the Ellises in Swampscott.

Fred Ellis was the village schoolmaster, a pleasant, cultivated young man, and his mother was a kindly soul whose heart went out in sympathy to Mrs. Patterson. Mother and son remained good friends to her through the trials of those early years, and in 1901 Fred Ellis wrote her: