| OCR Text |
Show WOMEN KNOWN TO FAME. IIow Susan Tt. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Record History. "If you want to know how mother and Susan B. Anthony act together," said Mrs. Lawrence, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter, "I'll give you a letter let-ter I wrote about them when they were writing their old history of woman's suffrage." suf-frage." The letter was written in ISSo, but Mrs. Lawrence asserts that things are much the same now as then. It was dated at Tenafly, N. J., where Mrs. Stanton was living. "Mother and Susan," wrote Mrs-Lawrence, "are busy all day and far into the night on volume 3 of 'The History of Woman Suffrage.' As our house faces I the south, the sunshine streams in all day. In the center of a large room, 20 by 22, with an immense bay window, hard wood floor and open fire, beside a substantial office desk with innumerable drawers and doors, there, vis-a-vis, Bit the historians, surrounded with manuscripts manu-scripts and letters from Maine to Louisiana. Louisi-ana. In the center of the desk are two inkstands and two bottles of mucilage, to Bay nothing of divers pens, pencils, scissors, knives and erasers. "As these famous women grow intense in-tense in working up some glowing sentence sen-tence or pasting some thrilling quotation from John Stuart Mill, Dumas or Secre-tan, Secre-tan, I have 6een them again and again dip their pens in the mucilage and their brushes in the ink. These blunders bring them back to the facts of history, where indeed they 6hould be if that blessed word finis is ever to be written. Sub rosa, it is as good as a comedy to watch these souls from dnv tnrlnv Th? start off pretty well in the morning. They are fresh and amiable. They write page after page with alacrity; they laugh and talk, poke the fire by turns and admire ad-mire the flowers I have placed on their desk. Everything is harmonious for a season. "But after straining their eyes over the most illegible, disorderly manuscripts manu-scripts I ever beheld suddenly the whole literary sky is overspread. From the adjoining room I hear a hot dispute. The dictionary, the encyclopedia, all the journals neatly piled in a corner, are overhauled and tossed about in the moid: emphatic manner. "Susan is punctilious on dates, mother moth-er on philosophy, but each contends as 6toutly in the other's domain as if it niiourauBiijnuuvuiuimJUJlCe, oomo- times these disputes run eo high that down go the pens, and one sails out of one door and one out of the other. And then, just as I have made up my mind that this beautiful friendship of 40 years has at last terminated, I see them, arm ia arm, walking down the hill to a seat where we often go to watch ..iLe sun set ' in all his glory. "When they rei'dra, they jo stralgnt to work where they left off a,s if nothing had happened. I never hear another word on that point. The one that was unquestionably right assumes it, and the other silently concedes the fact. Thev never explain, nor apologize, nor shed tears, nor make up, as other people do, but figuratively speaking jump over a stone wall at one bound and leave the past behind them." As Mrs. Lawrence said, things are much the same now with the two friends as they were eight years ago, when Mrs. Stanton was only threescore years and ten and Miss Anthony was not yet out of her sixties. They live in peace and har mony still. Miss Anthony is still the authority au-thority on dates, and Mrs. Stanton still writes the "state papers." They are still criticised and sometimes ridiculed, but they are too strong in their own convictions convic-tions and too broad minded in their tolerance tol-erance to do otherwise than laugh about it And they are still planning for greater work than ever. To the constitutional convention of next May is to be presented present-ed a petition signed by a million men and women over 21 years of age asking that the word male be expunged from the constitution. At any rate, that is the work planned by these two friends. New York Sun. |
