ose to speak.

Somebody started to clap hands, and the rest joined in, as two or three
ladies entered the back part of the church and passed up the aisle. He
looked up as they went by him, and caught a glimpse of a stately head
of brown hair, modestly bent in acknowledgment of the applause, and he
caught a whiff of the delicate odor of violets. His eyes followed the
strong, firm steps of the young woman who walked between the two older
women. There was something fine and dignified in her walk, and the odor
of her dress as she passed lingered with him, but he did not feel that
this was the same woman, till she turned and faced him on the platform.

He sat impassively, but his pulse leaped when her clear brown eyes
running calmly over the audience seemed to fall upon him. She was the
same woman, his ideal and more. She was fuller of form and the poise of
her head was more womanly, but she was the same spirit that had come to
be such a power and inspiration in his life.

As a matter of fact she had grown also. If she had not, she would have
seemed girlish to him now; growing as he grew, she seemed the same
distance beyond him. Her self-possession in the face of the audience
appealed to him strongly. Something in her manner of dress pleased him,
it was so individual, so like her simple, dignified, beautiful self in
every line.

She spoke more quietly, more conversationally than when he heard her
before, but her voice made him shudder with associated emotions. Its
cadences reached deep, and the words she spoke opened long vistas in
his mind. She was defending the right of women to live as human beings,
to act as human beings, and to develop as freely as men.

"I claim the right to be an individual human being first and a woman
afterward. Why should the accident of my sex surround me with
conventional and arbitrary limitations? I claim the same right to find
out what I can do and can't do that a man has. Who is to determine what
my sphere is--men and men's laws or my own nature? These are vital
questions. I deny the right of any man to mark out the path in which I
shall walk. I claim the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness that men are demanding.

"It is not a question of suffrage merely--suffrage is the smaller part
of the woman-question--it is a question of equal rights. It is a
question of whether the law of liberty applies to humanity or to men
only. Absolute liberty bounded only by the equal l