At the same time she reduced or even waived the fee altogether for many of her students, as her small account books show.33 Miss Dorcas Rawson, a shoe worker and “Holiness Methodist,” paid the full three hundred dollars when she entered the November class; but her sister Mrs. Miranda Rice, unable to obtain the money from her well-to-do husband, was admitted free. Young George Barry, whom Mrs. Glover was to heal of tuberculosis, could pay only half but she receipted him in full; later he insisted on giving her the rest. George Allen, a young man who subsequently became a prominent businessman in Lynn, paid the full amount. But all of them felt, in Georgine Milmine’s phrase, that what they got “was beyond equivalent in gold or silver.”34
Bancroft has left an interesting description of Mrs. Glover’s appearance at this time:
Her features were regular and finely moulded. The most noticeable were the eyes, large and deep-set, dark blue and piercing, sad, very sad, at times, yet kind and tender. Her figure was a trifle above the average height, and she carried herself very erect. . . . When in conversation, the animation she displayed added much to her attractiveness. It was the animation of conviction, not of excitement or agitation.35
She had, Bancroft wrote, “the ability to make her listeners forget the speaker in what she was saying.” She was often discovering “untrodden paths of wisdom,” and she “never failed to share with her students such additional wisdom as God revealed to her.” She showed them “the loving-kindness of a mother, or the faithful devotion of a sister.”36
Something of the atmosphere of the little group comes across in these comments and in Mrs. Glover’s own notes to her students. To Bancroft she wrote in December:
33 Mary Baker Glover, notebook, c. 1867–1880, EF109, p. 13, MBEL. In the class of four which included Daniel Spofford, in April 1875, Spofford paid nothing, two members paid one hundred dollars each, and the remaining member paid two hundred dollars.
34 [Milmine, Life, p. 156.]
35 Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her, p. 52.
36 Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her, pp. 8, 60, 127, 18.