oundings recalled the many charming homes
made and maintained by unmarried women whom she had visited, and so in
the three weeks that she enjoyed Dr. Avery's hospitality, she wrote her
lecture, "Homes of Single Women." During this time she spoke at
Boulder; and also in the opera house at Denver under the auspices of a
committee, receiving $100.

She started, October 23, on a long lecture tour arranged for her
through Nebraska,[93] Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin, which
lasted the remainder of the year. She almost perished with cold and
fatigue before it was finished but found some compensation in the $30 a
night which the lectures yielded. At this time she received an urgent
request from a San Francisco lecture committee to come to that State,
but was unable to accept. "If I only could have sister Mary with me
over Sunday in these dull and lonely little towns, I could stand it the
rest of the week," she wrote; and to a friend who sent her an account
of a visit to her mother: "I am very glad you do go occasionally to see
dear mother, sitting there in her rocking-chair by the window as life
ebbs out and out. O, how I fear the final ebb will come when I am away,
but still I hope and trust it may not, and work and work on."

As Miss Anthony was still under contract with the lecture bureau, she
was once more compelled to forego the satisfaction of attending the
annual convention in Washington, January 8 and 9, 1878, but as in 1876
she sent $100 of the money she had worked so hard to earn. "It is not
quite just to myself to do it," she wrote a friend, "but if the women
of wealth and leisure will not help us, we must give both the labor and
the money." While this convention was a success as to numbers and
enthusiasm, several things occurred which the ladies thought might have
been avoided if Miss Anthony had been in command with her cool head and
firm hand. Especially was this true in regard to a prayer meeting which
some of the religious zealots, in spite of the most urgent appeals from
the other members, persisted in holding in the reception room of the
Capitol directly after a morning session of the convention. The affair
itself was most inopportune but, to make it still worse, the cranks and
bores who always are watching for an opportunity, gained control and
turned it into a farce.

In her disgust and wrath Mrs. Stanton wrote Miss Anthony: "Mrs. Sargent
and I did not attend the prayer meeting. As God has never take