Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/513



GEORGE WASHINGTON GLOVER—MRS. EDDY'S SON BRINGS AN ACTION AGAINST LEADING CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS—WITHDRAWAL OF THE SUIT—MRS. EDDY MOVES FROM CONCORD, N. H., TO NEWTON, MASS.

the mistakes of Mrs. Eddy's early life must be accounted her indifference to her only child, George Washington Glover. Mrs. Eddy's first husband died six months after their marriage, and the son was not born until three months after his father's death. When he was a baby, living with Mrs. Glover in his aunt's house, his mother's indifference to him was such as to cause comment in her family and indignation on the part of her father, Mark Baker. The symptoms of serious nervous disorder so conspicuous in Mrs. Eddy's young womanhood—the exaggerated hysteria, the anæsthesia, the mania for being rocked and swung—are sometimes accompan i ed by a lack of maternal feeling, and the absence of it in Mrs. Eddy must be considered, like her lack of the sense of smell, a defect of constitution rather than a vice of character.

After he went West with the Cheneys in 1857, George Glover did not see his mother again until 1879. He was then living in Minnesota, a man of thirty-five, when he received a telegram from Mrs. Eddy, dated from Lynn, and asking him to meet