Left alone, and once more penniless, after her husband's imprisonment, Mrs. Patterson again fell back upon her relatives. She wrote to Mrs. Tilton for assistance. Mrs. Tilton went to Rumney, settled Mrs. Patterson's affairs there, and took her back to Tilton.
It is this part of her career that Mrs. Eddy has sought to blot out of existence. She makes no reference to it in her autobiography, and in another place has said that no special account is to be made of the years between 1844 and 1866. These twenty-two lost years—between her twenty-third and forty-sixth birthdays—were, as has been shown, spent in fretful ill-health and discontent. It was a hard life, sordid in many of its experiences, petty in its details, and narrow in its limitations. Yet there is nothing to show that Mrs. Eddy made an effort to improve her hard situation, or to make herself useful to others; and at forty she was known only for her eccentricities.
