One day I found at the office of the Revolution an invitation to meet Mrs. Moulton in the Academy of Music, where she was to try her voice for the coming concert for the benefit of the Woman’s Medical College.  And what a voice for power, pathos, pliability!  I never heard the like.  Seated beside her mother, Mrs. W.H.  Greenough, I enjoyed alike the mother’s anxious pride and the daughter’s triumph.  I felt, as I listened, the truth of what Vieuxtemps said the first time he heard her, “That is the traditional voice for which the ages have waited and longed.”  When, on one occasion, Mrs. Moulton sang a song of Mozart’s to Auber’s accompaniment, someone present asked, “What could be added to make this more complete?” Auber looked up to heaven, and, with a sweet smile, said, “Nothing but that Mozart should have been here to listen.”  Looking and listening, “Here,” thought I, “is another jewel in the crown of womanhood, to radiate and glorify the lives of all.”  I have such an intense pride of sex that the triumphs of woman in art, literature, oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can.

Hungering, that day, for gifted women, I called on Alice and Phebe Cary and Mary Clemmer Ames, and together we gave the proud white male such a serving up as did our souls good and could not hurt him, intrenched, as he is, behind creeds, codes, customs, and constitutions, with vizor and breastplate of self-complacency and conceit.  In criticising Jessie Boucherett’s essay on “Superfluous Women,” in which she advises men in England to emigrate in order to leave room and occupation for women, the Tribune said:  “The idea of a home without a man in it!” In visiting the Carys one always felt that there was a home—­a very charming one, too—­without a man in it.

Once when Harriet Beecher Stowe was at Dr. Taylor’s, I had the opportunity to make her acquaintance.  In her sanctum, surrounded by books and papers, she was just finishing her second paper on the Byron family, and her sister Catherine was preparing papers on her educational work, preparatory to a coming meeting of the ladies of the school board.  The women of the Beecher family, though most of them wives and mothers, all had a definite life-work outside the family circle, and other objects of intense interest beside husbands, babies, cook stoves, and social conversations.  Catherine said she was opposed to woman suffrage, and if she thought there was the least danger of our getting it, she would write and talk against it vehemently.  But, as the nation was safe against such a calamity, she was willing to let the talk go on, because the agitation helped her work.  “It is rather paradoxical,” I said to her, “that the pressing of a false principle can help a true one; but when you get the women all thoroughly educated, they will step off to the polls and vote in spite of you.”