And now she was near the fruition of her labor.

At the beginning of 1875 Mrs. Glover was living in the boardinghouse of the Amos Scribners on Broad Street, Lynn, but she engaged an agent to find her a house in Cambridge. It seemed to her that the intellectual atmosphere of that community would provide better soil for her teaching than Lynn.

At her urging, Putney Bancroft had opened an office in Cambridge and announced himself, with the extraordinary freedom of that day, as “S. P. Bancroft, Scientific Physician, Gives no Medicine.”¹⁵⁴ Circulars were sent to Harvard professors and prominent clergymen in the community, but none of them responded. Plans were made for Mrs. Glover to lecture there, but they fell through. The house agent, one Edward Hitchings of Lynn, failed to find her a Cambridge residence because, Bancroft explained, he wanted to marry Mrs. Glover and therefore was determined to keep her in Lynn.

By the end of January Bancroft abandoned his venture, discouraged by the poor response to his circulars. Mrs. Glover, who had sent him several patients and written him letters of encouragement and instruction during the two-month episode, learned from Richard Kennedy’s landlord that Kennedy had been going frequently to Cambridgeport of late, and she concluded that he had been undermining Bancroft’s work. She felt, too, that Putney should have located closer to Harvard.

Yet even if he had camped just outside the Harvard Yard, armed with formidable intellectual credentials, the atmosphere of the university under its new president, Charles W. Eliot, would hardly have been hospitable to a system which called in question the accepted philosophic assumptions of natural science. Lynn, provincial and self-absorbed, was destined to be Mrs. Glover’s headquarters for seven more years, but they were not to be years of continued wandering.