A few days after that House of Commons tea with Dr. Farquharson I chanced to have tea at the House of Lords with Viscount Templetown. In this case, one drives up to the Peers’ Entrance, which is rather farther from Parliament Street, and alights beneath the fine portico, where officials in gorgeous uniform enquire one’s business, until the kindly peer, who is waiting in the hall, steps forward to claim his guest. Passing, as on my visit to the House of Commons, through sundry cheerless passages and more horrible stone staircases, we stepped out upon the Terrace, this time at the end furthest from the Speaker’s House. The only difference in the arrangements is that at the Lords’ teas, waitresses are superseded by waiters wearing gorgeous blue ribbons and gold badges, so grand, indeed, that an American is said to have innocently asked if that was the Order of the Garter. “Yes, my lud,” “No, my lud,” is the answer to every question. The tea is just the same, the fare is just as frugal, the cups and tray just as simple as for the House of Commons, but on every chair is painted “House of Lords.” What would not an American give to possess one of those chairs, iron-clamped and wooden-rimmed though they be? The less said about the Ladies’ Gallery the better. I have never gone there without a feeling of disgust. One might as well be shut up in a bathing-machine, so foul is the air; or behind the screen of a cathedral, so little can one see; or in a separate room, so little can one hear. For many months in 1910 women were forbidden even this gruesome chamber as a punishment for militant disturbances. When the rule of banishment was rescinded only relations of members were admitted. Thus some curious relationships were invented. A story runs that someone asked a prominent Irishman if he would pass a lady in as his cousin. “Certainly,” he replied—but when he saw her, she came from South Africa, and was black, and so he cooled off. “But the lady is official, and must get in.” “All right, I’ll manage it,” replied the genial member, so off he went to a fellow-Nationalist. “I say, there is an official’s wife from South Africa wants a seat. Will you pass her in as your cousin?” “By all means,” replied his colleague. Accordingly, the black lady took her seat complacently, and everyone wondered whose “cousin” she was. Let me, “in half joke and whole earnest,” as the Irish say, give an instance of myself as an ordinary woman with certain ideas on politics, and show how one incident changed my mind on the Tariff. Let us call the little tale “The Story of a Fur Coat”—only a little story about my very own fur coat, a Conservative garment which nearly became Socialistic atoms.