This anecdote was related the next day: "Miss Anthony's love of the beautiful leads her always to clothe herself in good style and fine materials, and she has an eye for the fitness of things as well as for the funny side. 'Girls,' she said yesterday, after returning from the Capitol, 'those statesmen eyed us very closely, but I will wager that it was impossible after we got mixed together to tell an anti from a suffragist by her clothes. There "might have been a difference, though, in the expression of the faces and the shape of the heads,' she added drily."
On Tuesday afternoon about two hundred members of the convention were received by President McKinley in the East Room of the White House. Miss Anthony stood at his right hand and, after the President had greeted the last guest, he invited her to accompany him upstairs to meet Mrs. McKinley, who was not well enough to receive all of the ladies. Giving her his arm he led her up the old historic staircase, "as tenderly as if he had been my own son," she said afterward. When she was leaving, after a pleasant call, Mrs. McKinley expressed a wish to send some message to the convention and she and the President together filled Miss Anthony's arms with white lilies, which graced the platform during the remainder of the meetings.
