● ● ● and a beauty, purity and force of language, rare in the most finished orators.”152
Later in the autumn Patterson apparently came to Albion, perhaps in penitence or with the assurance that he could now provide a real home for his wife, and she returned to Lynn with him. The sincerity of his protestations may be judged from the aftermath.
On December 14 Mrs. Crosby wrote her friend that she had received an amorous letter from the dentist, urging her to visit them in Lynn. Quoting various broad insinuations from his letter, she broke out, “Now Mary dear what . . . did he mean by saying ‘Mortal natures tend downward.’ was that me, he meant, O Mary I am alone”—with more of the same.153 The letter showed a curious insensitiveness to Mrs. Patterson’s own feelings, and Mrs. Crosby’s protestations of injured innocence are not altogether convincing.154
Still Mrs. Patterson struggled to keep things going. She wrote potboilers for the Lynn papers, which helped to augment her husband’s irregular income. As in earlier days when they had been together she tried to help him with his practice by coming to the aid and encouragement of fearful patients, especially children. One young girl accompanied a school friend to Patterson’s office one day. As she sat in the waiting room she heard her friend in the dentist’s chair suddenly exclaim, “Dr., I can’t.” Immediately a door on the opposite side of the waiting room opened, and “a little woman” flew across the room and disappeared into the dental office to comfort the frightened friend. Another woman in a letter to Mrs. Eddy in 1906 told her of a visit she had paid to Patterson’s office as a little girl and ● ● ●
152 [S. (David N. Sheldon), “The South and the North,” Waterville (ME) Mail, 9 September 1864, p. 2.] In a letter to Georgine Milmine describing the occasion, Mrs. Crosby asserted that she did not think the “S” who signed the newspaper account was Dr. Sheldon—he was too dignified!—but elsewhere in the letter she slipped up and remarked that the newspaper notice showed that Mrs. Patterson had given “Dr. Sheldon” (i.e., the writer of the article) the impression that she had lived in the south some thirty years. Sarah G. Crosby to Georgine Milmine, 23 January 1907, LSC004, MBEL.
↑154 The alternation between lavish sentimentality and sharp-tongued asperity in Mrs. Crosby’s letters in later years suggests that she may not have been a wholly reliable friend—or witness.
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