putterings 110 < 111 > 112 index
a sort of angry impatience, a uniformity of change
Before we went home we called at the studio of Alice Stuart, whose water-color portraits of Colorado flowers are quite famous. I was amazed at the great variety she could show me, as well as at her steady improvement in the work. She had a class of ladies painting, and painting well; but I felt a sort of angry impatience that they were not sketching Pike’s Peak in oil, instead of puttering over pentstemmons [sic] and mentzelias. Then President Tenney came to take me to drive. He seems a good deal worn by the care of his sick friend and the pressure of committee meetings.
Colorado Springs is regularly laid out in squares.
ex Caroline H. Dall, My First Holiday: Or, Letters Home from Colorado, Utah, and California (Boston, 1881) : 64 (NYPL copy)
64 (same, at hathitrust)
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from “A Preface to Be Read” —
...nor did I find it easy to travel alone beyond the Rocky Mountains. On the contrary, for the first time, I found myself commanding neither attention nor respect on the ground of simple womanhood. It seemed to me that there might be invalids to whom many things that I went through would prove fatal, and that it was really desirable that travellers should know in advance that what is called the “uniform” climate of California is simply a uniformity of change; that each day gives variations greater than any Atlantic town can show,—and that this is true all along the coast.
pp 4-5
somewhat ill-tempered throughout. but see this, from “Note” (the title of the afterword) —
I have dwelt with emphasis on the discourtesy of railway officials and the discomforts of the much boasted railway travel because no one prepared me for them, and because the United States contributed so largely to the building of the overland railways that travellers have a right to expect what they do not find... I could not help seeing that the only persons whose comfort was considered by the railways were political powers, and that their eyes were persistently blinded. A woman without a vote, and not known as an influence in any other way, was not likely to be considered.
pp 424, 425
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Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912), “feminist writer, transcendentalist, and reformer”
wikipedia
see also her entry at HSL
and also at HSL, the entry for her husband, Universalist minister Charles Henry Appleton Dall (1816-1886). She did not accompany him to his mission in Madras (in 1855), where he remained (save for a few trips back) until his death.
(so many connections with Unitarianism, among these puttering figures!)