ut a colored man sitting in the meeting house,
and some left on account of it.... What a lack of Christianity is
this!"[18]

Her school term of fifteen weeks, for which she was paid $30, was over
early in September, just in time for her to be at home for Guelma's
wedding to Aaron McLean, and afterward she stayed on to teach the
village school in Center Falls. This made it possible for her to join
in the social life of the neighborhood. Often the young people drove
to nearby villages, twenty buggies in procession. On a drive to
Saratoga, her escort asked her to give up teaching to marry him. She
refused, as she did again a few years later when a Quaker elder tried
to entice her with his fine house, his many acres, and his sixty cows.
Although she had reached the age of twenty, when most girls felt they
should be married, she was still particular, and when a friend married
a man far inferior mentally, she wrote in her diary, "'Tis strange,
'tis passing strange that a girl possessed of common sense should be
willing to marry a lunatic--but so it is."[19]

During the next few years, both she and Hannah taught school almost
continuously, for $2 to $2.50 a week. Time and time again Susan
replaced a man who had been discharged for inefficiency. Although she
made a success of the school, she discovered that she was paid only a
fourth the salary he had received, and this rankled.

Almost everywhere except among Quakers, she encountered a false
estimate of women which she instinctively opposed. After spending
several months with relatives in Vermont, where she had the unexpected
opportunity of studying algebra, she stopped over for a visit with
Guelma and Aaron in Battenville, where Aaron was a successful
merchant. Eagerly she told them of her latest accomplishment. Aaron
was not impressed. Later at dinner when she offered him the delicious
cream biscuits which she had baked, he remarked with his most
tantalizing air of male superiority, "I'd rather see a woman make
biscuits like these than solve the knottiest problem in algebra."

"There is no reason," she retorted, "why she should not be able to do
both."[20]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Report of the International Council of Women_, 1888 (Washington,
1888), p. 163.

[2] Charles B. Waite, "Who Were the Voters in the Early History of
This Country?" _Chicago Law Times_, Oct., 1888.

[3] Janet Whitney, _Abigail Adams_ (Boston, 1947), p. 129. In 1776,
Abigail Adams wrote her husb