Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/277

Rh made a tentative effort to return to her good-will. But whether or no that was a serious intention will be presently shown.

Mrs. Eddy’s next troubles were with Spofford. She was preparing the manuscript for her second edition. In the midst of this labor Mr. Spofford began to evince a renewal of his dissatisfied frame of mind. He balked at all of her advice and continually declared that the book could not be financed. While striving to make the way plain for him, her business agent, and continuing her literary labors, her doors were thronged with perplexed students who wished her help in healing patients. The students pressed upon her so with their varying needs that she was finally driven to leave her home for a time with her husband and keep her whereabouts unknown, for they interrupted her work and the book lay waiting.

She gave Mr. Spofford a Boston address and from there wrote him several letters urging him to speak to certain of the students and patients for her. Among them were two young women of Ipswich, the wife of the mayor of Newburyport, and a manufacturer of Boston, all of whom had pressed her for attention and healing. She wished them to be instructed in the necessity of doing their own mental work and thus to cease interfering with the more important work which lay upon her. Concerning these matters she wrote him: “If the students still continue to think of me and to call on me I shall at last defend myself and this will be to cut them off from me utterly in a spiritual sense by a bridge they