Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/222

182 repeating the request. Mrs. Glover now accepted the invitation, and was a member of the Wentworth household for about two years. This household was composed of father and mother, a son and daughter, and a married son who occasionally visited the house. The daughter, Lucy Wentworth, was a girl of fourteen; the brother Charles, a little older, was a high school boy, and the oldest son Horace, was a journeyman shoemaker, of a happy-go-lucky disposition, much averse to religious discussions.

In complying with Mrs. Wentworth’s earnest appeal that she should make her home with them and teach her Mind-science, Mary Baker did not entirely realize the conditions she was to encounter. Mrs. Wentworth was a domestic-minded woman, not over gifted with intellectuality, but of a receptive and teachable nature. She had been a practical nurse and had gone out to the sick of the neighborhood for years. But she was a Spiritualist, and believed in rubbing the limbs of her patients to give them comfort. She had eagerly drunk in all that Mary Baker had imparted to her of Mind-healing when she met her at the Crafts’, and thought she could combine this with her nursing and massage to make her a more practical healer.

From the very start Mary Baker had to disabuse her mind of such a hope. She talked to her of the fallacy of such a procedure, often illustrating by her experience with Phineas Quimby. In just what way this doctrine of rubbing and clairvoyantly reading the patients’ minds was inimicable to a cure in Mind-science Mary Baker did not herself at