This was the American hope, but how was health to emerge? If experience taught anything, it was that evil could not be counted on to generate good. The origin of good must lie somewhere beyond the craft and guile of the temporal scene. Mrs. Glover, looking for it, gazed into a timeless and flawless universe.

To be sure, there were hints and flecks of her own flawed times in the book she was writing, but they were not of its essence and would disappear for the most part from later editions. When Charles Sumner died in March, 1874, her antislavery ardor was rekindled, and she wrote into her manuscript, “Charles Sumner was a great man, because of his unswerving adherence to right; he had, more than others, the true idea, and less than others, the beliefs of man.” The accents of Reconstruction sound in her references to “the martyrdom of John Brown” and “the crimes of Jefferson Davis.”¹²⁸ But in the perspective of years she would relate her discovery to the age in less ephemeral terms:

Though not particularly interested in woman’s suffrage at that time, she invited her friend Mrs. Ellis to attend with her a lecture on the subject by Mrs. Mary Livermore, and she entered into her manuscript her own protest against the disabilities fastened on women by law. It was during this period that she finally divorced Patterson. She was inseverably wedded to an idea, and even her marriage four years later to Asa Gilbert Eddy was first of all a means of carrying on more effectively the great task to which that idea committed her.

Back in 1871 George Glover, then twenty-seven years old, had moved from Minnesota to Dakota Territory, and a year later he became  ● ● ●