So far as Mrs. Glover was concerned Lynn was a battlefield as momentous as any in the Franco-Prussian War. “I have the front ranks of the battle field as yet,” she wrote Sarah Bagley in January during the terrible siege of Paris. “When I am gone some of you will step forward and bear the blows in your turn, as it is you all have enough to suffer.”⁴¹

Her generalship was at last coming to the fore, and she rallied her little ranks to face the coming onslaughts. She urged Putney Bancroft to take up the healing work full time; but when he replied, like the man in the parable, that he could not because he was about to take a wife, she wrote him with a certain iron realism, “I have no objection to your decision because I know experience is the best teacher.” To Bancroft’s half-apologetic statement that love had triumphed over wisdom her rejoinder was that it would be more correct to say that sense had temporarily overruled soul; then she added somberly, “I fear you will inherit this truth through the discipline of affliction.”⁴² Nevertheless she gave her blessing to the marriage, and after the wedding she wrote Sarah Bagley cheerfully that one of her students “has recently been married here in Lynn to a beautiful and worthy young lady.”⁴³

To some of the people around her she seemed austere, and to some autocratic, for her life was entirely dominated by the one purpose to which all else must be sacrificed. Miss Susie Magoun, who ran the nursery school downstairs, was highly critical of her, contrasting her intense single-mindedness with Kennedy’s sociability. At times Mrs. Glover would administer sharp rebukes to her students. “I think you ought to be ashamed of your language to your teacher,” she wrote Sarah Bagley on one occasion, “but then perhaps it does not appear  ● ● ●