Once, while attending a general conference of women in Berlin, she won the interest and real friendship of a certain Italian princess, who invited her to visit at her castle in Italy and also to go with her to her mother's castle in Austria. As Miss Shaw was firm in declining these distinguished honors, the princess begged an explanation.
"Because, my dear princess," Miss Shaw explained, "I am a working-woman."
"Nobody need know that," murmured the princess, calmly.
"On the contrary, it is the first thing I should explain," was the reply.
"But why?" demanded the princess.
"You are proud of your family, are you not?" asked Miss Shaw. "You are proud of your great line?"
"Assuredly," replied the princess.
"Very well," continued Miss Shaw. "I am proud, too. What I have done I have done unaided, and, to be frank with you, I rather approve of it. My work is my patent of nobility, and I am not willing to associate with those from whom it would have to be concealed or with those who would look down upon it."
Anna Howard Shaw's autobiography, which she calls "The Story of a Pioneer," is an absorbingly interesting and inspiring narrative. It gives with refreshing directness and wholesome appreciation the story of her struggles and her work, together with revealing glimpses of some of her comrades in the Cause; it is at once her own story and the story of the pioneer days of the movement to which she gave her rich gifts of mind and character. In conclusion she quotes a speech of a certain small niece, who was overheard trying to rouse her still smaller sister to noble indifference in the face of the ridicule of their playmates, who had laughed when they had bravely announced that they were suffragettes.
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself," she demanded, "to stop just because you are laughed at once? Look at Aunt Anna! She has been laughed at for hundreds of years!"