From this time forward Mrs. Hutchinson was a person of great importance in Boston. Sir Harry Vane, then governor of the colony and the idol of the people, was pleased, with Mr. Cotton, to take much notice of the gifted newcomer, and their example was followed by the leading and influential people of the town, who treated her with much consideration and respect, and were quick to recognise her intellectuality as far superior to that of most members of her sex. Mrs. Hutchinson soon came, indeed, to be that very remarkable thing--a prophet honoured in her own community. Adopting an established custom of the town, she held in her own home two weekly meetings--one for men and women and one exclusively for women--at which she was the oracle. And all these meetings were very generously attended. Mrs. Hutchinson seems to have been New England's first clubwoman. Never before had women come together for independent thought and action. To be sure, nothing more lively than the sermon preached the Sunday before was ever discussed at these gatherings, but the talk was always pithy and bright, the leader's wit was always ready, and soon the house at the corner of what is now School Street came to be widely celebrated as the centre of an influence so strong and far-reaching as to make the very ministers jealous and fearful. At first, to be sure, the parsons themselves went to the meetings. Cotton, Vane, Wheelwright, and Coddington, completely embraced the leader's views, and the result upon Winthrop of attendance at these conferences was to send that official home to his closet, wrestling with himself, yet more than half persuaded. Hawthorne's genius has conjured up the scene at Boston's first "parlour talks," so that we too may attend and be one among the "crowd of hooded women and men in steeple hats and close-cropped hair ... assembled at the door and open windows of a house newly-built. An earnest expression glows in every face ... and some press inward as if the bread of life were to be dealt forth, and they feared to lose their share."