WOMAN IN ART
in. The greater part of the beaux here are men of college education...... Among the elder ladies there are some whose manners and conversation would dignify duchesses."
These are hints of the social side of life for the preceptress of twenty. She had an intense relish for agreeable society, attending balls and parties during the week, and four meetings on Sunday. She was full of the joys of youth and health, but her strong brain never became giddy. In August, 1809, Emma Hart was married to Dr. John Willard.
Dr. Willard was twenty-eight years the senior of his wife, but nowhere in the annals of biography can we find a married life more happy than theirs was from first to last. Dr. Willard was a public-spirited man in many ways, a director in the State Bank, and very well to do, as the saying is. But a heavy bank robbery embarrassed all the directors, who lost greatly. Mrs. Willard came to the rescue of her husband. She had not taught for many years, but her teaching days were not over. Through the years of her married life she had taken up one subject after another: The 'dry' medical and physiological books of her husband's, that she might be in intelligent sympathy with his work; another time it was the study of geometry. Dr. Willard had a nephew in college, just across the street, who had his home with them. On one of his vacations she took up his Euclid, and was fascinated with the propositions from cover to cover. On the return of the college student, she submitted to an examination in that study, and he pronounced her learning correct. In this way the thirsting mind was being educated. Again it was moral philosophy, and Locke's Essay on the Understanding, and Kames' Elements of Criticism. She acquired all the history within reach; she wrote poems and essays, and painted after the fine manner of water colors of her time; and having scant literature on which to exercise her recent study of Kames, she criticized sermons.
From the standpoint of today, she was unconsciously preparing for the great work of her future. Mrs. Willard opened her home as a boarding school for girls, and the first year had all she could accommodate. This was an encouragement toward the working out of a plan that had been growing in her mind since early girlhood.
Her home was just across the street from Middlebury College, and having one of the students in her family she was daily and hourly in the atmosphere of intellectuality and learning.
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