A third letter, this time to Martha Rand, shows a certain listlessness behind a good deal of “literary” melancholy and indicates the young widow’s feeling of planlessness: “I have almost relinquished the hope of being at Concord this Summer to take lessons on the Piano; and shall wait at home for some breeze or billow to stir my future course. Oh Mathy, how I wish we could be together this ensuing summer, get a school together or in some way manage it.”⁶⁰

It was inevitable that Mrs. Glover should regard the village life that flowed around her—even before the Bakers in 1849 moved from their farm into the village itself—in an equivocal fashion.

In her copy of The Scarlet Letter (an 1883 edition) she later marked several passages of Hawthorne’s introductory essay on the Salem Custom House. These passages were of no intrinsic significance but were evidently of interest to her because of the parallels she could draw with her own feelings about Sanbornton Bridge. In one of the scored passages Hawthorne remarked that although he had dwelt much away from his native town, it “possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.” On the other hand he was weary of “the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres.”⁶¹

The Sanbornton atmosphere had its own chill. Mrs. Glover, as widow and mother, was still an extremely attractive young woman, and this inevitably caused a certain amount of small-town gossip. Sarah Clement, the niece of her girlhood friend Augusta Holmes Swazey, sixty years later described her as she was at this time: