● ● ● when they met in Portland early in the year. Mrs. Patterson, on her part, described her to Quimby as “one of the precious few affinities with whom I meet.”146 Though their later relations were stormy, Mrs. Crosby in 1903 wrote a letter to Mrs. Eddy recalling the days of her 1864 visit:
In fancy I often go back to the old farmhouse in Albion as it was forty years ago with grandma Crosby the presiding spirit, ruling as with a rod, the rather too yielding nominal mistress of the household, the brood of noisy children frolicing from cellar to garret, the “hired girls” and “hired men” forming a little colony by themselves,
These form the background of a picture in which the central figures are two lone women. The one, fired with the pre[s]cience of a great mission, even in the depths of poverty, looking forth upon the world conscious of coming power;—the other, peering wistfully into a future that seemed full of shadows, yet with the aspirations of a young goddess.
Days and nights they sat in the little chamber of the one, of the nursery of the other, in such communion of soul as is seldom experienced by mortals; so full of tender love and sympathy for each other.
And then when the separation came, what loving letters came and went;—they would fill a volume, and I do not much wonder that Dr. Patterson declared it a pity that such epithets of affection should not be wasted between women.147
The “loving letters” have never come to light, and Mrs. Crosby undoubtedly exaggerated the degree of affinity, for in 1907 she wrote Lyman Powell, “One of the trying things to her, was my utter indifference upon the subject which was so vital with her.”148 Actually she inclined more toward spiritualism than toward Quimby, and this must evidently have distressed the friend who only a few months before had lectured against “Rochester-rapping spiritualism.”