Mott and a number of Miss Anthony’s friends wrote her not to be discouraged at this insult, but it may be imagined that she took up the work again with a heart filled with resentment and indignation.  She had many peculiar experiences during her travels and had to listen to many a chapter of family history which was far from harmonious.  On one occasion a friend was pouring into her ears an account of the utter uncongeniality between herself and husband, largely because he was wholly unappreciative of her higher thoughts and feelings.  As an example she related that when they visited Niagara Falls and her soul was soaring into the seventh heaven of glory, majesty and sublimity, he exclaimed, “What a magnificent water power this would be, if utilized;” and that he did it on purpose to shock her sensibilities.  Miss Anthony finally said:  “Now, my dear, the trouble is you fail to recognize that your husband is so constituted that he sees the practical while you feel only the sentimental.  He does not jar your feelings any more by his matter-of-fact comments than you jar his by flying off into the realms of poetry on every slight provocation.”  She then recalled a number of similar instances which the wife had detailed as illustrating the husband’s cruelty, impressing upon her that they were born with different temperaments and neither had any right to condemn the other.  At the end of this conversation, the woman, weeping, put her arms around Miss Anthony and said:  “You have taught me to understand my husband better and love and respect him more than I had learned to do in all my long years of living with him.”

In March Garrison wrote, thanking her and her family for their generous hospitality, concluding, “Nowhere do I visit with more real satisfaction.”  He told her that he had had to give up his lecture engagements on account of the heavy snows, but she had gone straight through with hers.  She now closed her series of meetings and went home to arrange for Theodore Parker’s lecture.  Antoinette Brown Blackwell wrote her:  “I hear a certain bachelor making a number of inquiries about Susan B. Anthony.  This means that we shall look for another wedding in our sisternity before the year ends.  Get a good husband, that’s all, dear.”

On Miss Anthony’s return from the May anti-slavery meeting in New York, she received a reminder from the president of the State Teachers’ Association that she would be expected to read her paper on “Co-Education” before that body in August.  This recollection had been keeping her awake nights for some time.  It had been an easy thing to present a resolution or make a five-minute speech, but it was quite another to write an hour’s lecture to be delivered before a most critical audience.  As was always her custom in such a dilemma, she turned to Mrs. Stanton, who responded: