The contrast, the new element, was there, however, though not where people were looking for it. It was faint, almost imperceptible, fleeting as a thought: yet, to the mind of my philosophic informant, it stood for more than the previous old-fashioned ceremony. After her formal introduction, the new member passed round the division lobby to the door of the House opposite the Speaker. My parliamentary philosopher, coming down at this moment from the gallery, was met, all suddenly, by the new thing for which he had vainly looked five minutes earlier. The new element, or rather its symbol, was there in that lobby, but so attenuated that at first it eluded description; but the philosopher’s nose followed its clue as surely as the First Secretary’s in the last act of “Diplomacy.” It was the faintest breath of a perfume, just the thinnest ghost of a delicate scent, but a scent quite beyond the inspiration of a masculine barber. Thus the air of the division lobby, which, sucked as it is from the river, had borne many strange odours wafted from passing barges, knew an element to which, of all the lobbies, this innermost one had ever been a stranger. This was the symbol which truly represented the revolution, though on its actual physical essence he laid no stress: it may have been a sheer illusion. The ceremony of “taking her seat” was only an old formula applied without alteration to a new phenomenon: this elusive breath was the symbol of a new thing applied to an old institution. From this symbol I take my point of departure in this chapter. The newspapers spent at the time much space and ingenuity in commenting on chance incongruities which might arise if the old rules of parliamentary procedure were applied rigidly to a woman member: this was amusing matter enough for gossip, but of no importance. The only question of interest is in what really consists the novelty at Westminster and in all the political life of our country which has been begun by the presence of a woman on the green benches. It is not, in the narrow sense, a political novelty, but something far wider which affects, or may affect, all English men and women.