The path of the lobbyist is a path of white marble. And white marble, though beautiful, is hard. The House office building runs around four sides of a block, so that when you have walked around one floor, you have walked four blocks on white marble. When you have walked around each of the five floors you have walked a mile on white marble. When you have gone this morning and afternoon through several sessions of Congress you have walked more weary miles on white marble than a lobbyist has time to count. But the Woman’s Party lobbyists were not balked by the mere matter of white marble. In a week they were threading that interminable intricate maze of Congressional alleys with the light, swift step of familiarity and of determination. All day long, they drove from the Visitors’ Reception Room to Senatorial offices, and from Senatorial offices back to the Visitors’ Reception Room. They flew up and down in the elevators. They found unknown and secret stairways by which they made short cuts. They journeyed back and forth in the little underground subway which tries to mitigate these long distances. At first Congressmen frankly took to hiding, and the lobbyist discovered that the Capitol was a nest of _abris_, but in the end, even Congressmen could not elude the vigilance of youth and determination. As for the mental and spiritual difficulties of the task—at first, Senators and Congressmen were frankly uninterested, or, more concretely, irritated and enraged with the Suffrage lobbyists. It is not pleasant to have to talk to a man who does not want to hear you. The lobbyists had to learn to be quiet; deferential; to listen to long intervals of complaint and abuse; to seem not to notice rebuffs; to go back the next day as though the rebuff had not occurred. This is not easy to women of spirit. Perhaps it could not have been borne, if it had not been a labor of love. Many times these women had to bolster a smarting sense of humiliation by keeping the thought of victory in sight. In her _Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist_, Maud Younger tells interestingly and with a very arch touch some of these experiences: Mr. Huddleston, the thin, blonde type of Congressman, sat at his desk in his low-ceilinged, well-lighted office. “What is it?” he greeted me when I entered. His manner was very brusque, but I refused to be repelled by it. I began to speak. “There’s always some one hippodroming around here with some kind of propaganda,” he snapped, interrupting. “We’re very busy, we’ve got important things to do, we can’t be bothered with Woman Suffrage.” He made a jerky motion, rattling the papers on his desk, and turning his head to look through the window. I thought of several things to say to Mr. Huddleston, but this was obviously the time to say none of them. So I murmured, “Thank you,” and withdrew....