“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.
In 1905 I was in Mexico. I had crossed the Atlantic in the warmth of summer, had travelled in tropical heat beneath banana trees in the South, and was to return to England in time for Christmas Day. I waited in Mexico City until the last minute, because I wanted to see General Diaz elected President for the seventh time. Then I remembered my big sledging coat was in London, and three thousand miles of the Atlantic had to be crossed in mid-winter, even after traversing as many more miles by land to reach New York.
I wired for the coat to meet me in New York.
Seven feet of snow lay piled along the sides of the streets of that city when I arrived, and chunks of ice floated down the Hudson, icicles hung from the sky-scrapers; everyone shivered out of doors, and baked, or rather stewed, inside the houses.
“Where is my fur coat?” I asked.