● ● ●  there was little reason to believe that she would get far into it. And what if she did? What if she lingered on for a score more painful years? If she died in this obscure corner of the world, what would she leave behind her? A handful of verses in yellowing newspapers.

Yet she held on to her rooted conviction that life held more than this, that life was more than this. In her scrapbook she pasted a verse entitled “The Young Poet” by a Mrs. Abdy. Significantly she marked these undistinguished but highly relevant lines:

The poet sadly sighed,
                “Expect no song of pride,
        Lady, from me, no glad and bright revealings;
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
                “I occupy alone,
                An intellectual throne.
        My shrinking subjects will not let me love them:
                “Even my kindred, learn
                In trembling awe to turn
        From the kind gaze of him who towers above them.”²⁶

She must have known by this time that she would never be a great poet; yet some inner fountain of conviction, some unquenchable inspiration, assured her that she was in touch with realities that set her apart from her village friends and even from her family.

There is a hard realism in the dreams of a Joseph who sees his brother’s sheaves bow down before his. This is not egotism; it is facing a simple qualitative fact, intolerable though the fact may seem to the workaday brothers.²⁷ Nothing that could ever have happened would have made Abigail Tilton, for instance, the founder of a new world religion.

All this was well below the surface of the Groton years. Meanwhile, Mrs. Patterson kept up appearances. Despite her invalidism, her home was always immaculate and furnished attractively. “I thought it the most beautiful home in the world,” remembered one old lady who had often  ● ● ●