As early as 1862 she had visibly withdrawn from the outside world, even humoring her moods until those she professed to love saw her less often when they came to the house. As one has said of the shortening afternoons of early autumn, "There was less of the Toreador spirit in her now"; though she was always the ecstatic, daredevil, shy paradox, supreme and incomparable, to those who found her. Once she seems puzzled by some slight coldness on the part of a friend—exclaiming, "Odd that I who run from so many cannot brook that one turn from me!" Yet she confessed that her ideal caller—like ideal cat—was always just going out of sight!
Her books and friends went together in her later life; books first, perhaps. But it was her own work done in secret and often at midnight—"Death's and Truth's Unlocking Time"—that "kept the awe away" and led her on. She confessed it to herself and hardly another. Most of her earliest friends remained her closest friends to the end; as she expressed it, "I never sowed a seed in childhood unless it was perennial—that is why my garden lasts." Those girls of her earliest choosing, Abby Wood, Eliza Coleman, Abiah Strong, Martha Gilbert, Emily Fowler, and Helen Fisk—all married and gone away from her—she cherished and was true to as the years gave her also Kate Anthon, Maria Whitney, Mrs. Bowles, and others drawn to her through her brother's family.
She had her own peculiar exclusive rights in the family friends also, the Hollands of Springfield, the Lords of Salem, her father's friend Mrs. Eastman, who lived abroad and wrote to them on thin paper with the letterhead of magical foreign places, sealed with enormous seals, and
