We had a constant source of amusement and vexation in the students in my father’s office.  A succession of them was always coming fresh from college and full of conceit.  Aching to try their powers of debate on graduates from the Troy Seminary, they politely questioned all our theories and assertions.  However, with my brother-in-law’s training in analysis and logic, we were a match for any of them.  Nothing pleased me better than a long argument with them on woman’s equality, which I tried to prove by a diligent study of the books they read and the games they played.  I confess that I did not study so much for a love of the truth or my own development, in these days, as to make those young men recognize my equality.  I soon noticed that, after losing a few games of chess, my opponent talked less of masculine superiority.  Sister Madge would occasionally rush to the defense with an emphatic “Fudge for these laws, all made by men!  I’ll never obey one of them.  And as to the students with their impertinent talk of superiority, all they need is such a shaking up as I gave the most disagreeable one yesterday.  I invited him to take a ride on horseback.  He accepted promptly, and said he would be most happy to go.  Accordingly I told Peter to saddle the toughest-mouthed, hardest-trotting carriage horse in the stable.  Mounted on my swift pony, I took a ten-mile canter as fast as I could go, with that superior being at my heels calling, as he found breath, for me to stop, which I did at last and left him in the hands of Peter, half dead at his hotel, where he will be laid out, with all his marvelous masculine virtues, for a week at least.  Now do not waste your arguments on these prigs from Union College.  Take each, in turn, the ten-miles’ circuit on ‘Old Boney’ and they’ll have no breath left to prate of woman’s inferiority.  You might argue with them all day, and you could not make them feel so small as I made that popinjay feel in one hour.  I knew ‘Old Boney’ would keep up with me, if he died for it, and that my escort could neither stop nor dismount, except by throwing himself from the saddle.”

“Oh, Madge!” I exclaimed; “what will you say when he meets you again?”

“If he complains, I will say ’the next time you ride see that you have a curb bit before starting.’  Surely, a man ought to know what is necessary to manage a horse, and not expect a woman to tell him.”

Our lives were still further varied and intensified by the usual number of flirtations, so called, more or less lasting or evanescent, from all of which I emerged, as from my religious experiences, in a more rational frame of mind.  We had been too much in the society of boys and young gentlemen, and knew too well their real character, to idealize the sex in general.  In addition to our own observations, we had the advantage of our brother-in-law’s wisdom.  Wishing to save us as long as possible from all matrimonial entanglements, he was continually unveiling those with whom he associated, and so critically portraying their intellectual and moral condition that it was quite impossible, in our most worshipful moods, to make gods of any of the sons of Adam.