Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/474

416 and handed him three hundred dollars, telling him to offer the money to Clark, but adding grimly, "It will prove a curse to him if he takes it." Dr. Foster warned Clark to that effect, and Clark, rather reluctantly, refused the money. Mrs. Eddy had for some time been promising Dr. Foster a diamond ring for his little finger, and then had looked over jewellers' catalogues and discussed the sizes and prices of stones. In the end Mrs. Eddy had decided upon a smaller stone than the one Dr. Foster selected. He now took a hundred dollars of the money which had been offered to Clark in such a forbidding fashion, added it to the appropriation made for his ring, and got the diamond he wanted. The rest of the money Mrs. Eddy put into a stained-glass window for the "Mother Room" in the Boston church—the window which represents Mrs. Eddy sitting in the skylight room at Lynn and searching the Scriptures beneath the rays of a star.

Mrs. Eddy's retirement did, as she had anticipated, give her more time for literary pursuits. She was still busily writing and rewriting Science and Health, as she had been doing for twenty years. New editions of the book came out in 1891, 1894, and 1896. Loyal Scientists were then, as now, expected to purchase each new edition (at $3.18 a volume), although Mrs. Eddy refused to buy back their old editions at any price. Since her followers lived by one book, it behooved them to have the best edition of it, and Mrs. Eddy always pronounced the new one the best. Often a new edition contained important changes (such as permission to use morphia in cases of violent pain), and after the 1891 edition was out, a Christian Scientist who still regulated his life by the 1886 edition was living,