'Your work on Father's book is done, Lanice. Surely Art will not take all your time. I wish you could give yourself, heart and soul, to some Cause. Perhaps the Cause of Women. The Society for the Promulgation of Belief in Women is to meet here as soon as Father goes to New York. I am sure that will point the way.'
'Perhaps it will, Cousin Pauline. But I cannot believe I will like live women as well as dead witches.'
The drawing-rooms were denuded of everything but chairs. Chairs brought up from the dining-room and down from the bedrooms, chairs hired from the undertaker. The meeting was to be addressed by a series of speakers who would represent various spheres of woman's success.
Mrs. Morgan would speak of their accomplishments in the cause of Temperance; Miss Cordelia Gatherall of their services to the Southern negro; Meminta Purse, author of two dozen novels, would represent literature; Mrs. Professor Channing was to explain woman's recent advancement in scholarship.
Miss Gatherall arrived first, and had to lie down to recover from her train journey. Then four or five Boston ladies in a group, and three or four from Cambridge, who came on the horse-car. More arrived in hackney coaches, in gigs, and on foot. It was really a stupendous gathering of shabby pelisses, bedraggled bonnets, spectacles, reticules bulging with papers
