described in that lady's own words: "Walking home with the speakers,
who were my guests, we met Mrs. Bloomer with Miss Anthony on the corner
of the street waiting to greet us. There she stood with her good,
earnest face and genial smile, dressed in gray delaine, hat and all the
same color relieved with pale-blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness
and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly from the beginning." Both Mrs.
Stanton and Mrs. Bloomer on this occasion wore what is known as the
Bloomer costume. In the summer Miss Anthony went to Seneca Falls to a
meeting of those interested in founding the People's College. Horace
Greeley, Lucy Stone and herself were entertained by Mrs. Stanton. The
three women were determined it should be opened to girls as well as
boys. Mr. Greeley begged them not to agitate the question, assuring
them that he would have the constitution and by-laws so framed as to
admit women on the same terms as men, and he did as he promised, making
a spirited fight. Before the college was fairly started, however, it
was merged into Cornell University.
This was Miss Anthony's first meeting with Lucy Stone and may be called
the commencement of her life-long friendship with Mrs. Stanton. These
women who sat at the dinner-table that day were destined to be recorded
in history for all time as the three central figures in the great
movement for equal rights. There certainly was nothing formidable in
the appearance of the trio: Miss Anthony a quiet, dignified Quaker
girl; Mrs. Stanton a plump, jolly, youthful matron, scarcely five feet
high; and Lucy Stone a petite, soft-voiced young woman who seemed
better fitted for caresses than for the hard buffetings of the world.
Miss Anthony's public life may be said to have fairly begun in 1852.
The Sons of Temperance had announced a mass meeting of all the
divisions in the state, to be held at Albany, and had invited the
Daughters to send delegates. The Rochester union appointed Susan B.
Anthony. Her credentials, with those of the other women delegates, were
accepted and seats given them in the convention, but when Miss Anthony
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