● ● ●  in succeeding years he made her gifts of James Thomson’s The Seasons and Martin Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy.

In the spring of 1847 she paid a visit to his home at Hill, but in 1848 she disclaimed any intention of marrying him. To Martha Pilsbury she wrote, “I shall not marry anyone I know at present—the future however may do better by me in this respect.”⁶⁵ To Martha Rand she wrote that Bartlett had been visiting her home (not her personally), that he intended to go to Wisconsin after his graduation in August, and that she hoped people would then mind their business about the two of them “as I am getting a little mad at their lies.”⁶⁶

Despite this protest, the two evidently drew nearer an engagement, for Mrs. Baker wrote George Sullivan in September of the same year that “Mary . . . went to Cambridge and attended Commencement saw Mr Barttlett take his degree I think her mind is fully established.”⁶⁷ Apparently a secret engagement followed at some point, the secrecy perhaps reflecting Mrs. Glover’s continued uncertainty. The impelling motive for considering marriage may well have been to get a home and a father for young George, but Bartlett could not yet offer that sort of security. In 1847 he had written her, “Shall I despair and repine because poverty gazes at me with eyes as big as full moons?”⁶⁸ In 1849, after a short period of law practice, he headed for Sacramento, at that time booming with opportunities of every sort as the Gold Rush mounted to fever pitch. Presumably Mrs. Glover was to follow him there when he made good.

This was an age when a healthy realism between the sexes was hard to achieve. Artificiality, sentimentality, prudery—the nineteenth-century convention of “the lady”—affected not only manners, clothes, household furnishings, and literary style but almost every aspect of human  ● ● ●