it
seems to me should be done by all women who want reforms in
legislation, is to appoint committees to confer with leading
Republicans asking them to make pledges in the direction of
suffrage and temperance, with the assurance of our support in case
of the insertion of the planks we ask in their platform. I fear,
however, you are already pledged to the Third party, come what may,
and if so it is of no use for me to advise.[34]

In May Miss Anthony again journeyed westward, though she says in her
diary: "It never was harder for me to start. A heavy nothingness is upon
head and heart." She went first to the State Suffrage Convention at
Indianapolis, where as usual she was a guest in the beautiful home of
Mr. and Mrs. Sewall. A reception was given her at the Bates House and
she was cordially greeted by several hundred ladies. She went to
meetings at Evansville, Richmond and Lafayette, and then to the Ohio
convention at Cleveland; here, as always, the guest of her loved friend,
Louisa Southworth.

She writes May 26: "Arrived home at 8 P. M. and found all well--the all
consisting of sister Mary, the only one left." She was invited to meet
with a large and conservative society of women who did not believe in
equal suffrage. All made nice little addresses and when Miss Anthony was
called on she said: "Ladies, you have been doing here today what I and
a few other women were denounced as 'unsexed' for doing thirty years
ago--speaking in public;" and then proceeded to point the moral. She
attended the commencement exercises of a young ladies' seminary, whose
principal would not acknowledge a handsome gift from her pupils by a few
remarks because she "considered it would look too strong-minded." Miss
Anthony comments on the graduates' essays: "They had as much originality
as Baedecker's Guide-book."

In July she went as the guest of her friend Adeline Thomson, of
Philadelphia, for two weeks at Cape May and here had her first
experience in sea-bathing, although she always had lived within a short
distance of the ocean. She says: "This is my first seaside dissipation.
It seems very odd to be one of the giddy summer resort people!" She took
Miss Thomson with her up into the Berkshire hills of northwestern
Massachusetts to Adams, her birthplace, and visited the home of her
grandfather. In the early days of her peregrinations she used to come
often to this picturesque spot, but it now had been tw