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Despite his fear of being burned again, Morse for a while pursued an eligible widow, identified in his correspondence only as “Mrs. Y.” They met at a dinner party in Sconondoa, an upstate village about twenty miles from Utica. Following his defeat in the New York mayoralty race, Morse had gone there to visit his mother’s family, the Breeses. He was enough interested in “Mrs. Y.” to give her his edition of the works of Lucretia Davidson, and write to her afterward to find out how she might be disposed toward him. He received no answer, however, and wrote to her again. Again she did not reply.

Uncertain how to interpret the “most perplexing silence,” Morse apparently returned to Sconondoa to see “Mrs. Y.”: “I do not give up until every effort has been made which I can make.” To younger members of the Breese family, their cousin’s “dismal courtship” seemed risible. “We tickle our sides well,” one of them wrote. They thought Morse pompous and hoped to see him fall on his face, “have his laurels a little bit ruffled, his plumes a little picked.” They got what they wanted. Returned to New York City he waited three months for a letter. None came, and he gave up. The rejection left him alone with “the blue gentlemen,” more solitary than ever, persuaded that he should stay single the rest of his life: “I feel in my despondency that no one cares for me.”

The Breese family had taken in Morse’s unfortunate son Finley, but Charles and Susan still had no home. Morse sent Charles longdistance bromides and instructions, identical with those he had once received from his own father: “You have a character to maintain…. Take care to deserve praise…. keep an accurate account of every cent you expend.” When his son entered Yale, Morse felt too preoccupied in New York to help the boy get settled in New Haven, “and must therefore,” he said, “leave him to be directed by the kindness of friends.” Charles was left scrounging for money to buy necessary books and winter coal, borrowing a quarter to pay postage, sending his father the same plaint as his sister Susan—“I wish you would come to see me some time.”

Susan shuffled among a pack of friends and relatives from one place to the other. Off and on she stayed with Lucrece’s sister in New Hampshire, with a family named Denison in New Haven, a Wickham family in New York City. The lifetime of vagabondage had its effect. Like her father, Susan had spells of deep depression. “I feel sometimes as if I had no desire whatever to live,” she wrote to him, “life seems without one cheering spot to me. I know, dear father, it is very wrong to indulge such feelings, and I pray that my Heavenly father will take such wicked thoughts of my heart, and make me a better Christian.”

Without meaning to, the prosperous Sidney became the medium for at last providing Susan with a home. When he married—for the first time, at the age of forty-seven—she fantasized that he and his bride might set up house in New York and take her in, so that “poor me will have some abiding place.” Instead, in the late fall of 1841, the couple took her along on a trip to Puerto Rico, where they planned to spend the winter. Now twenty-two years old, Susan had had a few suitors but rejected them, one because his religious faith was shallow, another because she thought him “countryfied.” While on the island, however, she gained a new beau, a young man named Edward Lind. She wrote about him to Morse, who approved what he read. Lind came from “one of the first families” in the West Indies, was partners in a flourishing firm in St. Thomas—and was not a Catholic. In the summer of 1842, Susan and Edward Lind were married in New Haven. “Why it was only yesterday I was married myself,” Morse reflected; “It must be a dream. I am growing old.”

Having not painted a picture for several years, Morse wondered whether he still could: “I presume that the mechanical skill I once possessed in the art has suffered by the unavoidable neglect.” A young artist who visited his studio at the