Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/352

308 languidly up the steps to Mrs. Eddy’s door. I came away, as a little child friend of mine says, ‘skipping.’ I was at least a mile from my hotel and I walked home feeling as though I were treading on air. My sleep that night was the rest of Elysium. If I had been caught up into paradise, it could hardly have been a more wonderful renewal.” Miss Whiting continues as though loath to cease the description and, with many adjectives, dwells on her “exalted state,” the “marvelous elasticity of mind and body,” and “an utterly unprecedented buoyancy and energy which lasted days.” She then remembers to state that all this was the result of a half hour’s conversation on metaphysics with “the most famous mind-curer of the day.”

Such were some of Mrs. Eddy’s experiences with the sisterhood of writers who now rendered grave or excited appreciation and anon intellectual disparagement. But whether they were critical or effusive of praise, Mrs. Eddy never turned one of them away, or refused an audience to any inquirer. To doctors, clergymen, and philosophers she gave intellectual attention and while she lived in the world of affairs, she lived in it broadly, deeply, generously, acting her own part as a leader wisely, but yielding courteous consideration to all other leaders in whatever movement and without regard to sex.

The increasing number of her students, their teaching and healing in the wider field, now opening up for the establishment of the new church, created an ever-increasing demand for her text-book, “Science and Health.” The book had been through