and shoulders, to waltz in the arms of strange gentlemen. And as to the
press, I noticed you all reading, in this morning's papers, with evident
satisfaction, the personal compliments and full descriptions of your
dresses at the last ball. I presume that any one of you would have felt
slighted if your name had not been mentioned in the general description.
When my name is mentioned, it is in connection with some great reform
movement. Thus we all suffer or enjoy the same publicity--we are alike
ridiculed. Wise men pity and ridicule you, and fools pity and ridicule
me--you as the victims of folly and fashion, me as the representative of
many of the disagreeable 'isms' of the age, as they choose to style
liberal opinions. It is amusing, in analyzing prejudices, to see on what
slender foundation they rest." And the ladies around me were so
completely cornered that no one attempted an answer.

I remember being at a party at Secretary Seward's home, at Auburn, one
evening, when Mr. Burlingame, special ambassador from China to the
United States, with a Chinese delegation, were among the guests. As soon
as the dancing commenced, and young ladies and gentlemen, locked in each
other's arms, began to whirl in the giddy waltz, these Chinese gentlemen
were so shocked that they covered their faces with their fans,
occasionally peeping out each side and expressing their surprise to each
other. They thought us the most immodest women on the face of the earth.
Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education; the more
people know,--the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience,
and observation,--the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and
bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought
and action.

A few years after Judge Hurlbert had published his work on "Human
Rights," in which he advocated woman's right to the suffrage, and I had
addressed the legislature, we met at a dinner party in Albany. Senator
and Mrs. Seward were there. The Senator was very merry on that occasion
and made Judge Hurlbert and myself the target for all his ridicule on
the woman's rights question, in which the most of the company joined, so
that we stood quite alone. Sure that we had the right on our side and
the arguments clearly defined in our minds, and both being cool and
self-possessed, and in wit and sarcasm quite equal to any of them, we
fought the Senator, inch by inch, until he had a very narrow plat