. With the cares of a
large family I might, in time, like too many women, have become wholly
absorbed in a narrow family selfishness, had not my friend been
continually exploring new fields for missionary labors. Her description
of a body of men on any platform, complacently deciding questions in
which woman had an equal interest, without an equal voice, readily
roused me to a determination to throw a firebrand into the midst of
their assembly.

Thus, whenever I saw that stately Quaker girl coming across my lawn, I
knew that some happy convocation of the sons of Adam was to be set by
the ears, by one of our appeals or resolutions. The little portmanteau,
stuffed with facts, was opened, and there we had what the Rev. John
Smith and Hon. Richard Roe had said: false interpretations of Bible
texts, the statistics of women robbed of their property, shut out of
some college, half paid for their work, the reports of some disgraceful
trial; injustice enough to turn any woman's thoughts from stockings and
puddings. Then we would get out our pens and write articles for papers,
or a petition to the legislature; indite letters to the faithful, here
and there; stir up the women in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts;
call on _The Lily, The Una, The Liberator, The Standard_ to remember our
wrongs as well as those of the slave. We never met without issuing a
pronunciamento on some question. In thought and sympathy we were one,
and in the division of labor we exactly complemented each other. In
writing we did better work than either could alone. While she is slow
and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better
writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I
the philosophy and rhetoric, and, together, we have made arguments that
have stood unshaken through the storms of long years; arguments that no
one has answered. Our speeches may be considered the united product of
our two brains.

So entirely one are we that, in all our associations, ever side by side
on the same platform, not one feeling of envy or jealousy has ever
shadowed our lives. We have indulged freely in criticism of each other
when alone, and hotly contended whenever we have differed, but in our
friendship of years there has never been the break of one hour. To the
world we always seem to agree and uniformly reflect each other. Like
husband and wife, each has the feeling that we must have no differences
in public. Thus u