At Miss Anthony’s earnest desire, Mrs. Wright was elected president of the association and this proved to be her last appearance on that platform which she had graced for many years.  An interesting feature of the meeting was the presence of the veteran worker, Ernestine L. Rose, who was back from England on a visit.  During this May meeting a telegram was sent over the country stating:  “Miss Anthony stalked down the aisle with faded alpaca dress to the top of her boots, blue cotton umbrella and white cotton gloves, perched herself on the platform, crossed her legs, pulled out her snuff-box and passed it around.  On the platform were Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Gage, Mrs. Rose and other noted women, all dressed in unmentionables cut bias, and smoking penny drab cigars.  Susan was quite drunk.”  The New York Herald, which rarely had a good word for the suffrage conventions, in a long and respectful account of this same meeting, said: 

There was a perfume of Fifth Avenue about the audience.  Carriages in livery rolled up to the door.  The striking contrast of this audience with that of other years, in the almost perfect conformity of the manner and dress of the women to those of other women who rule in the fashionable world and are supposed to look down upon these knights-errant of the sex, was not greater than that between the treatment of Miss Anthony now and in other times.  In former years they came to scoff at this wiry and resolute champion of her sex.  Now every word she utters is received with almost reverent rapture.  Yesterday brought together as intelligent and perhaps as refined an audience of ladies as might he gathered in the city.  Miss Anthony was dressed with her usual simplicity in black silk.  She read the call for the convention and made thereon one of her characteristic addresses, full of fire and prophecy.

During the summer of 1874 Miss Anthony lectured in many places in Massachusetts and New York, striving to pay the interest and reduce by a little her pressing debts, and slipping home occasionally to see her mother who was carefully tended by the devoted sister Mary.  At one of these times she writes in her diary:  “It is always so good to get into my own humble bed.”  August 22 she sent a letter of congratulation on his fiftieth birthday to her brother Daniel R. After referring to the $50 he sent to her at the close of her half century, she says: 

Though I can not return my love and wishes in the same kind, they are none the less for your joy and peace in the future, neither is my rejoicing less over the success of your first half of life.  From your many experiences, whether they have been such as you would have chosen or not, strength, growth, discipline have resulted, and sometimes I think all the adverse winds of life are needed to check our ever-rising vain-glory in our own power and success....  Whatever comes to those closely united by marriage or by blood,