● ● ● from my little library,” when she again wrote about the dental work he was doing for her.134
Patterson was a handsome, genial man, tall, dark, bearded, a bit of a rural dandy. He is reported to have dressed always in broadcloth and fine linen, kid gloves and boots, frock coat and top hat. Starting as a farm boy in Maine, he had achieved a precarious success as a dentist, riding on his horse through the countryside to do business with the farmers when there was not sufficient dental work to keep him busy in the small communities where he located at various times. A certain progressiveness is evident in the fact that he was very quick to make use of the new discovery of anesthesia in his work.
With all this, there was an underlying simplicity in the man which probably appealed to Mrs. Glover. He, on his part, was evidently captivated at once by what one critic has called her “valiantly gay bearing.”135 She must by this time have decided that desperate measures were necessary if she was ever to have a home of her own where she could once again have George with her. Patterson, full of confidence and good intentions, held out just this promise to her.
By March the two were engaged, but apparently not without some misgivings on her part. There was the matter of religion, for one thing. Patterson was a Baptist. After a sleepless night she wrote him, “I have a fixed feeling that to yield my religion to yours I could not, other things compared to this, are but a grain to the universe,” and then she added somewhat ominously, “Last night I conversed anew with my dear Father.” Mark would certainly have been adamant against her embracing the Baptist heresy. Her letter ended: “One thing I beg you to remember that we will be friends. . . . Farewell. May God bless and protect you.”136
A speedy reply from Patterson expressed the “shock which waked me from my dreams of happiness” and went on to say:
134 [Mary Baker Glover to Daniel Patterson, January 1853, L08901, MBEL.]
135 Actually two: Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore [Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 58]. As collaborators on a biography Bates-Dittemore may be considered a single critic. They write in the Milmine-Dakin tradition but with a sophistication which permits an occasional compliment to Mrs. Eddy despite their generally cynical portrait.
136 Mary Baker Glover to Daniel Patterson, March 1853 [Peel’s estimate: March 29, 1853], L08903, MBEL.