I myself was then a student at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington, but I decided to absent myself in order to help my mother, who had come down from Manchester to "lobby," as it is called, on those few important days. The House met on Tuesday, February 13th, and during the eight days which intervened before the result of the Private Members' ballot was made known we spent the whole of our time in the Strangers' Lobby striving to induce every Member who had pledged himself to support Women's Suffrage to agree that his chance in the ballot should be given to a Women's Suffrage Bill. It was my first experience of Lobbying. I knew we had an uphill task before us, but I had no conception of how hard and discouraging it was to be. Members of Parliament all told us that they had pledged themselves to do "something for their constituents" or had some other measure in which they were interested, or had not been in Parliament long and preferred to wait until they had more experience before they would care to ballot for a Bill at all. Oh, yes, they were "in favour" of Women's Suffrage; they believed that "the ladies ought to have votes," but they really could not give their places in the ballot for the question; it was always "anything but that," and during the whole of the week we spent in the Lobby we did not succeed in adding one single promise to that which we had originally received from Mr. Keir Hardie. On the fateful Wednesday on which the result was declared, my mother and I were the only women in the Lobby. We sat there on the shiny black leather seats in the circular hall waiting for the result, and at last we saw with relief Mr. Keir Hardie's picturesque figure coming hurrying towards us from the Inner Lobby. He was so kind and helpful, the only kind and helpful person in the whole of Parliament, it seemed. At once he told us that his name had not been drawn in the ballot and explained that only the first twelve, or, at most, fourteen, places that had been drawn could be of any use to the Members who had secured them, and that, owing to the limited number of days upon which private Members' Bills could be discussed, only the first three or four had even a moderately good chance of becoming law.[3] Our next move must therefore be to get in touch with the successful fourteen Members and to endeavour to persuade one of them to devote his place in the ballot to a Women's Suffrage Bill. After considerable trouble we finally got into communication with all of them, and they all said "No," with the exception of Mr. Bamford Slack, who held the fourteenth place, and who at last agreed to introduce our Bill, largely because his wife was a Suffragist and helped us to urge our cause. Of course the fourteenth place was not by any means a good one, and the Bill was set down as the Second Order of the Day for Friday, May 12th.