Mrs. Pankhurst, Annie Kenney and others who spoke, were listened to with much earnestness and presently the news came that the King's speech, the Government's legislative programme for the session, had been read, and that it had contained no reference to the question of Women's Suffrage. My mother at once moved that the meeting should form itself into a "Lobbying" Committee and should at once proceed to the House of Commons in order to induce its members to ballot for a Women's Suffrage Bill. This resolution was carried with acclamation, and the whole meeting streamed out into the street and made its way to the House. It was bitterly cold and pouring with rain, but when we arrived at the Strangers' Entrance, we found that for the first time that anyone could remember, the door of the House of Commons was closed to women. Cards were sent in to several Private Members, some of whom came out and urged that we should be allowed to enter, but the Government had given its orders, and the police remained obdurate. All the women refused to go away, and permission was finally given for twenty women at a time to be admitted. Then hour after hour the women stood outside in the rain waiting for their turn to enter. Some of them never got into the House at all, and those who did so went away gloomy and disappointed for there was not one of them who had received any assurance that Parliament intended to give women the vote. Now, after a chance meeting with Mrs. Pankhurst and a second long talk with her and with Annie Kenney, a new recruit had entered our movement. This was Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, the daughter of Mr. Henry Pethick, of Weston-super-Mare, and a member of a Cornish family. As a child at school she had read the story of Hetty Sorrell in George Eliot's "Adam Bede," had seen "Faust," and Marguerite in her prison cell. Later she had learnt from Sir Walter Besant's _Children of Gideon_ of the cheerless struggle to eke out an existence upon starvation wages, which falls to the lot of working-girls. Then and there she had resolved to spend her life in striving to alter these conditions. She determined that as soon as she left school she would go to "the East End," and begin. When the time came she at once acted upon this decision. Without seeking help or advice from anyone, she wrote to Mrs. Hugh Price Hughes, of the West London Mission and asked that she might be received into her sisterhood. When her request had been granted she told her parents of what she had done, and they readily gave their full approval and sympathy.