The President's
DAUGHTER by Nan Britton

Publisher’s Note

The engraving of the illustrations and the printing of this entire book
were done by the Polygraphic Company of America, Inc., New York, who
employed the Contrasto process of printing.

By Nan Britton

Reprinted by permission from
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Nan Britton

[Pg vi]

The author desires to express gratitude to the many public-spirited men and women who have shared her earnest in the cause sponsored by this book; also to those friends whose knowledge and review of the facts herein recorded have contributed to their chronological correctness.

The author early sought legal counsel regarding the use of the letters from which she has quoted in this book, and others unmentioned by her. She was advised that the copyright of these letters remains with those who wrote them and she has therefore been obliged by law to paraphrase them or quote only partially. The originals of all these letters from President Harding, Mrs. Ralph T. Lewis (Abigail Harding), Mr. Heber Herbert Votaw, Mrs. Heber Herbert Votaw (Carolyn Harding), Tim Slade (as he is called in this book), Hon. James M. Cox, Democratic nominee for President in 1920, Mr. C. E. Witt of the Picture Publicity Bureau of the Republican National Committee during the Harding Campaign, and others, are in the possession of her publishers and may be read by any persons whose request appears justified.

[Pg 1]

I was born in Claridon, Ohio, a very small village about ten miles east of Marion, Ohio, on November 9th, 1896. My father, a physician, was at that time practising under the supervision of his cousin, an older physician who had an established practice of long standing. My mother, who had received some of her high school training in Marion, where she had come from New Philadelphia, Ohio, to live with her maternal grandmother, was teaching a country school in Claridon when father met her. I was still a baby and my older sister Elizabeth about three when we moved to Marion, where we settled permanently.

Inasmuch as this book has much to do with President Harding and myself, I may sketch briefly the friendly relations which existed early between our families:

While my father was working up a practice in Claridon, Mr. Harding, then in his twenties, was struggling with Marion’s now well-known newspaper, The Marion Daily Star. Father, being himself somewhat of a writer, often wrote humorously to Mr. Harding of his experiences among the country-folk, and these letters were edited by Mr. Harding and published in his paper; I remember Mr. Harding’s telling me how delighted he always was to receive them.

My father always spoke of Mr. Harding with warmest affection, and, later on, was one of Mr. Harding’s strongest advocates despite the fact that my father was a Democrat. It is [Pg 2]very likely that they developed mutual regard and affection for each other back in those days of ambitious editor and country doctor. Certainly no finer tributes could be paid any man than those which I have myself heard from Mr. Harding concerning my father.

Mr. Harding’s father was a physician also, and this fact may have strengthened the bond of friendship which early grew to warm regard. As far back as I can remember Dr. Harding had his office in the old Star Building, right across the hall from his editor-son. I believe it is only recently that he has discontinued active practice. I know he has passed his eighty-second birthday.

My mother’s attitude in the matter of my relationship to Mr. Harding has not been conducive to discussion with her about her own early acquaintance with the Harding family, but this I know: she must have been attending high school at the same time that some of the Hardings were, because she is only a few years Abigail Harding’s senior.

There were, as Miss Abigail Harding has often told me, three “sets” of Harding children: first came Warren, the eldest, then Charity, these two forming the first set; then came “Deac” (Dr. George Tryon Harding III, only brother of Warren) and presumably Mary, the sister who was almost blind and who died about 1910, I think, soon after Warren Harding’s mother passed on; then came Abigail, known to everyone as “Daisy” Harding, and lastly Carolyn, the “baby” of the family. It seems to me there was a child who died very early, though I am not sure about this.

My mother had a sister Della who also lived a good part of the time with mother’s and her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Mary Richards, in Marion, and, I believe, went to school there also. Della Williams married a missionary to Burma, India, Howard E. Dudley. Some time after, Carolyn Harding also married a missionary to Burma, Heber Herbert Votaw. Up to that time “Carrie” and “Dell” had been friends, if not intimate at least upon the friendliest kind of terms.

[Pg 3]

However, their husbands were missionaries of decidedly different denominations. Carrie Harding married a Seventh Day Adventist and my Aunt Dell married a Baptist. So from then on their paths diverged. Diverged indeed so widely that my first recollection of hearing the Hardings discussed at any great length is identified with a heated argument between Aunt Dell and my older sister Elizabeth. I remember that Aunt Dell was almost ferocious in her condemnation of the Seventh Day Adventists and their religion which, to her certain knowledge, she said, was a detrimental influence upon the natives wherever it was promulgated.

At that time Mrs. Carrie Harding Votaw’s cause was warmly espoused by my older sister who, then in high school and in the English class of Miss Abigail Harding, had met and had developed a girlish “crush” upon her sister, the missionary. I cannot forget that argument, which resulted in more or less of a family quarrel (for even my parents’ loyalty was divided) and was responsible for my aunt’s sudden departure. She took occasion to denounce the Seventh Day Adventist religion before a group of her own denomination at a camp meeting and almost immediately flounced out of the city with her very picturesque family.

This must have been about 1908 or 1909. The following year, 1910, I entered high school and my English teacher was Miss Abigail Victoria Harding. Curiously enough, I thought that I could see in this sister of the missionary mannerisms which were decidedly peculiar to my Aunt Dell, whom I had quite adored in spite of the family incident recited above. Up to this time I had remained neutral.

[Pg 4]

However, seeing Miss Harding day after day, and agreeing heartily with the general dictum that she was a very beautiful woman, I came to idolize her. And thereafter my respect for her sister’s religion was a matter of course. English became my favorite study—a study for which I would neglect if needs be all other assignments. As a matter of fact, Miss Harding inspired me with such pride in my ability to excel that during [Pg 5]that year I was made exempt from all final examinations, having kept my grade standing 90 or above.

Nineteen-ten was an epochal year in my life. Ohio was electing a Governor, and the Republican candidate of that famous gubernatorial election was no other than the brother of my adored English teacher! I have often tried to remember how this knowledge was first conveyed to me; whether I had actually known that there was a Warren Gamaliel Harding from hearing conversations about him at home, whether I had been first introduced to his existence through talks with Miss Harding on one of the many “walks home” we used to have; whether I had heard of him through one whom I will call Mrs. Sinclair, whose husband, a judge and a prominent Democrat in Ohio, played cards with Mr. Harding very often; or whether I beheld his picture, ubiquitously displayed in almost every store window on Main and Center Streets, as I walked to and from high school. My early recollections are not so much concerned with actually seeing him as with the unforgettable sensations I experienced after I had once seen him and knew that he was for me my “ideal American.”

If I had ever childishly allied myself with my father’s political party, the Democrats, I withdrew instantly in favor of the party advocated by my mother’s family, and from then on I was a full-fledged Republican.

It must have kept me pretty busy to maintain a high average in school and at the same time become the self-appointed spokesman into which I developed during those stirring pre-election days. Warren Harding and Warren Harding’s future formed my life’s background, and whether or not anyone else credited me with the capacity for such a cumulative emotion as love, I knew that I was in love with Warren Harding.

[Pg 6]

Certain people, including Abigail and Carolyn Harding, speaking truthfully, could tell you of the spectacle I made of myself those months, and indeed in years that followed, for I talked about their brother incessantly; no, I did not talk, I raved. I was fourteen years old, or going on fourteen, an age when one would think a wife of a man Warren Harding’s age (he must have been about forty-five then and Mrs. Harding six or seven years his senior) would be entirely free from any feeling of jealousy regarding a mere child. But I remember well when Mrs. Sinclair telephoned my mother, and with friendly solicitude advised her to curb my girlish enthusiasm, or at least try to quiet me vocally, for my own sake! She said that at the most recent meeting of the Twigs (the most fashionable older ladies’ club in Marion), to which Mrs. Harding also belonged but who was absent on that occasion, “Nan Britton” had been almost the sole topic of conversation, and furthermore the ladies thought it quite scandalous that I should be so freely declaring my adoration for a married man. Of course mother did also, but apparently I didn’t!

My mother used to try to inspire me with antipathy for Mr. Harding and the thing she cited more than anything else was his fondness for tobacco. She would come home from downtown and say, “I saw Mr. Harding standing such-and-such a place, chewing tobacco!” But neither this information nor the withering disdain of mother’s grimace affected me in the least. I think he must have given up this habit later on; I know I never saw him in later years use tobacco in any form except cigars and cigarettes.

In order for my adoration to appear more “in form” I conceived the idea of affecting a crush on Mrs. Harding. She was not my “type” of heroine at all, but I used to pretend I was a great admirer of her anyway. I remember how I used to telephone the Harding residence when I thought Mr. Harding might be there and might answer the phone. I would shut myself up in our “back bedroom” which was away from the rest of the house and where the telephone hung on the wall, [Pg 7]and then softly give central the number. I was always afraid mother might hear me. Often the maid answered the telephone. When this occurred I would ask for Mrs. Harding. Sometimes she herself would answer. Once, I remember, mother came in while I was calling and demanded to know to whom I was talking. When I said “Mrs. Harding,” she took the receiver and talked with her herself. It may have been that very time when Mrs. Harding informed mother that she could tell Nan that so far as “Warren” was concerned, “distance lends enchantment.” But there were those rare times when he himself answered the telephone, when he would say upon my telling him it was “Nan Britton,” “Well, how-do-you-do, Miss Britton; and how are you?” in that silvery voice I so loved, and I would immediately become so confused and tremble so I thought he must sense it all from the other end of the wire.

I knew the number of the Harding car by heart and could spot it blocks away. One time I had occasion to go to the Union Station to meet someone and when I reached there I saw the Harding Stevens-Duryea parked outside. The Harding dog then was a bull, rather a fearsome looking animal, and he was always in the car whenever it was out. I was so full of love for Mr. Harding that it extended to any possession of his, and when I observed that dignified creature sitting alert in the front seat alone, I walked over to the car to pet him. But he was “on his job” and snapped at me so fiercely that I backed off with all possible speed. Thereafter I confined my manifestations of affection to the Hardings themselves.

About this time we were asked in school by Miss Harding to write an essay on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, the particular chapter we had to cover being “The Combat with the Templar.” I think we were given something like a [Pg 8]week to complete the writing. I worked upon little else during that time—dreaming over it and sitting up with it into the “wee sma’ hours of the morning.” I prefaced my composition with “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall,” a quotation I had heard my mother repeat. The fatal day arrived, and I handed in my composition with fear and trembling—albeit with sufficient confidence in its worth to make me wish I had kept a copy of it to read over to myself. I was not conscious that I was being discussed by the pupils in Miss Harding’s other classes until someone informed me that she had read my essay to all of her classes. And then she even read it before my own class! But what was most gloriously compensating for my labor was her statement to me in private that she had taken my essay over to “brother Warren’s” and had read it aloud to him and to Mrs. Harding as a sample of what her better pupils could do. Then my happiness knew no bounds.

Upon the sloping walls of my modest little bedroom hung three or four pictures of Mr. Harding, cut from the election posters and all the same except that I had varied the style of the frames in which they were set, which frames I had purchased with careful reference to size and suitability from Marion’s one and only five-and-ten-cent store! One of these pictures hung directly in front of my bed so that when I awoke in the morning I looked into the handsome face of him whom I loved, and saw his likeness the last thing before turning off my light.

One day father came home and said he had ridden some distance on the street car with Mr. Harding. I was immediately all aflutter and demanded to know just what had been said. Father said he had outlined for Mr. Harding my advancing campaign in his behalf—in short, they had discussed “this foolish talk” of mine. But evidently Mr. Harding’s verdict as to what should be done with me was not strictly condemnatory for his words were, “Bring her into my office sometime! Perhaps if she sees me——”

[Pg 9]

[Pg 10]

If I saw him! Unknown to a living soul, I had been for many weeks shadowing the Republican candidate for Governor. His desk, in the newspaper office, which looked down upon East Center Street, was very near the window, and one of my hero’s favorite positions seemed to be to sit in his easy swivel chair with his feet on the windowsill. Across from the Star Building was Vail’s, the photographer’s, studio. Many were the times I stood in Vail’s doorway, sometimes an hour at a stretch, watching those feet from across the street, knowing that when the owner removed them from my sight he would likely use them to carry him home. Then I would follow him to his home on Mt. Vernon Avenue, about a block behind, in a state of high rapture, until he turned into the grounds of the big green house and disappeared. This was an indulgence I did not dare boast about—partly because I was becoming growingly sensitive to the ridicule such confessions usually brought down upon me at home (and my love was too sacred to be made the subject of ridicule), and partly because my tardiness in reaching home from school could not be explained thus to an oftentimes impatient mother who could have found many chores for me had I come directly home.

There was in Marion a very attractive and extravagant woman whose name, let us say, was Mrs. Henry Arnold. Gossip had it that Mrs. Arnold and Warren Harding were very friendly, and gossip-mongers wondered how Mrs. Harding could be so blind to such a mutual infatuation.

These things reached my ears from the girls at school whose parents kept in close touch with anything smacking of scandal, and very likely discussed these things around the family table. I know I never heard them from my father or mother.

But this knowledge of what was currently thought concerning Marion’s leading citizen and one of Marion’s most [Pg 11]beautiful women did not move me to condemnation of either Mr. Harding or Mrs. Arnold. Rather did I sympathize with her in her regard for him, for I could conceive of nothing save a very high-minded friendship existing between him and anybody. And wasn’t it quite possible that she too thrilled to her very finger-tips under his smile? The only thing I regretted was that I was not her age, and that I had not travelled in Europe, and that I was not “in society” or in any kind of position to attract his notice.

Mrs. Arnold had a lovely daughter, Angela, I will call her, about my own age, with golden curls, who had every indulgence loving parents could bestow, and my jealousy was directed solely toward her.

Very often the Harding car would whiz by our house, which was then on East Center Street, on Sunday afternoon, and I knew the occupants were headed for Bucyrus, a town some miles north-east of Marion which distance constituted a “nice drive” from Marion. Once, I remember, there were in the car Mr. and Mrs. Harding, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold, and their daughter Angela, as well as Frank the chauffeur, and of course the bulldog. I was sitting on our front porch. Mrs. Harding waved and blew me kisses and Mr. Harding doffed his hat and bowed. How I envied Angela! I would retire on such nights a most unhappy little girl. But I knew they would be coming back later on in the evening and so I would stay awake. My bed was alongside the window and the window screen opened on hinges like a door. I would swing wide open the screen and hang out of the window. I could see about fifty or sixty feet of street from that window and that part of the street was lighted by the corner street light. But even though it had not been lighted I would have recognized the smooth buzzing of those wheels as the great car sped swiftly past the house on its return from Bucyrus. Many a time I have waited until I knew he was safely back in our town.

Angela Arnold, knowing of my adoration for Mr. Harding, one time stopped my sister Elizabeth on the street and told her [Pg 12]to “tell Nan” that her hero had been up to call upon them and had sat the bottom out of one of her mother’s favorite chairs! The truth of it was that it was probably a frail chair and Mr. Harding’s weight had broken it.

When my youngest brother, John, was born there was much discussion about what he should be called. I immediately attempted to solve the problem by announcing, “Why, he’s going to be named ‘Warren,’ of course!” Father, in cahoots with “his girl,” said we could call him “Warren Le Grand” the latter name for father’s only brother, Le Grand Britton. But Mrs. Sinclair, the judge’s wife, my mother’s friend, seemed to have quite a bit to say in our household and now stepped into the picture. “He’s going to be plain John Britton, isn’t he, Mrs. Britton?” I think she had in mind John the Baptist, much less deserving of a namesake in my opinion than my beloved Mr. Harding. It took a long time for me to recover from this defeat.

In Marion the livery stables rented by the hour one-seated phaetons, drawn by dependable, equine “plugs,” as my father called the drooping animals that jogged about the town pulling the occupants of these pleasure-providing equipages.

Before my doctor-father acquired the small red motor runabout which served to carry him about on his professional calls, he was a good customer at these livery stables, and we children often accompanied him. Often he gave the reins into my small hands and I experienced the thrill of a real charioteer as I called “Giddap!” to the horse and whisked imaginary flies off his back with the reins, even as I had seen my father do.

I have marvelled at what must have been an effort at resigned suspension of parental watchfulness which was responsible for the few memorable afternoons my sister Elizabeth and I [Pg 13]enjoyed, unchaperoned, and with fine airs, the use of one of these coveted livery conveyances. One such “drive” in particular stands out in my memory because it is coupled with the memory of the only real “call” I ever made upon the Warren Hardings at their Mt. Vernon Avenue home. This occurred the Sunday following the birth of my baby brother.

I always looked up to Elizabeth with great sisterly reverence for her poise and superior judgment. When she privately voiced to me her resentment that mother and father had not consulted us before adding a baby to the family just when she and I were enjoying associations in high school which demanded dignity in our family circle, I followed suit willingly enough and maintained with her an injured air toward mother and father. I was vaguely confident that divine Providence, in the form of the proverbial stork, could have been appealed to to bestow its infantile goods elsewhere had my sister Elizabeth been allowed to take the situation in hand early enough. Here we were now, Elizabeth seventeen and I fourteen, compelled to admit that we had a tiny, squawking, red-faced youngster in our home. How shamefacedly we responded to congratulations! I might say that within a week or so after the baby’s arrival, both Elizabeth and I were won over to the tiny bundle and became his willing slaves, and, as time went on, yielded him to mother only when he demanded to be fed, spoiling him with attentions which mother deplored with shaking head and futile admonitions. Just so, in our more extreme youth, we were told, had we spoiled Janet, our baby sister.

In our chagrin at having been precipitately thrust into a position of such embarrassment, Elizabeth and I charged an afternoon’s entertainment to father’s livery account, endeavoring to assuage our injured pride by driving about the town. I retain a very vivid picture of my sister, sitting erect, holding the reins, her arms begloved with white kid above the elbows. She wore a black hat which turned up on the left, dropping on the right to accommodate the great red rose which hung heavy with “style” on that side. She wore what seemed to [Pg 14]me a stunning blue and white dress. High-heeled slippers encased the small shapely feet which were always my despair. How insignificant and positively ugly I felt, sitting beside her in my gingham dress, occasionally patting my taffy-colored hair which was pulled tightly away from my face and tied with the stiffest ribbons procurable those days.

Mt. Vernon Avenue afforded quite a lengthy drive before one reached the end of the paved road. When we drove past the Harding residence I observed with rapid heart beats my hero sitting on the front porch. Mrs. Harding was with him. Would I dare to suggest to Elizabeth? ... no, I’d better not divulge my thoughts to her ... she didn’t care anything about Mr. Harding and probably wouldn’t want to waste the time to call upon them. We were passing the house. Mr. and Mrs. Harding smiled and waved to us. My heart pounded madly and I felt the heat in my cheeks. A block later I relaxed and breathed deeply. Elizabeth turned to me suddenly. “Say, why don’t we go back and call on the Hardings?” Oh, the blessed intuition of elder sisters! I trembled, but replied enthusiastically, “Oh, yes, let’s!” She turned the horse’s head in the direction of the Harding home.

In front of the house stood the Stevens-Duryea, the big car which sped about town sometimes carrying my hero. It was parked right in front of the hitching-post, and when Mr. Harding observed our intention of stopping he came lightly down the steps and called to us, saying he would tie our horse; he greeted us with smiles and said we should go on up on the porch. With what seemed to me superhuman strength he pushed his car out of the way and hitched our livery nag.

There was a long hanging swing at the end of the porch. Mr. Harding reseated himself there after Elizabeth and I had taken chairs.

The new-baby topic so painful to us was mercifully avoided. I doubt whether Mr. and Mrs. Harding had even read the announcement of our little brother’s birth in their own Marion Daily Star, but if they had they showed excellent restraint!

[Pg 15]

Being so engrossed in trying to realize that I was sitting next to the man I so adored naturally left me quite speechless, but my sister Elizabeth did not suffer from this affliction. In fact, she and Mrs. Harding carried on a most animated conversation, the thing I remember most vividly about it being that Mr. Harding’s oft-interposed opinions invariably met with vigorous protests from his wife who seemed to me to be very sure that her information about so-and-so was the last word in authority upon the subject and whose remark to her husband, I remember distinctly, usually was either, “Now, Warren, you don’t know anything about it!” or, “Well, Warren, I know better!” The topics did not concern me but I did question any piece of information which could inspire such disputatious quality in the tone of Mrs. Harding’s voice.

When we left, Mr. and Mrs. Harding accompanied us on the short walk to our carriage. Elizabeth, with vast grown-upness, turned to Mr. Harding. “You know, Mr. Harding, Nan talks of nothing but you! She has little campaign poster pictures of you all over the walls of her room!” Secretly elated that he should actually be told of my adoration in my presence, though outwardly greatly perturbed, I furtively watched the effect it would have upon him. I confess I momentarily forgot all about Mrs. Harding in my eager gaze at her husband’s face. I was used to seeing this information amuse the hearer, when dispensed by my parents, and I wondered just a little apprehensively whether Mr. Harding would treat it lightly. But he smiled understandingly, kindly, comfortingly. I ventured to look at Mrs. Harding then. She did not smile.

“Well, Miss Britton,” my hero said, looking down at me, “I move that you have a real photograph of me for your wall!” This met with no seconding from his wife however, and somehow I wished in the silence which followed his remark that Elizabeth had not brought up the subject of my admiration for him. Now Mrs. Harding would know it was not she whom I admired, as I had tried to pretend, but her husband only. [Pg 16]I stole another glance at him. Oh, dear, what was the use of trying to pretend anyway! I just loved him and that was all there was about it. He was like a giant Adonis as he stood there petting the horse before unhitching him for us. I felt so diminutive, so pitifully young! How I adored him!

Memories and revisualizations happily filled my days following this visit ... but, though I waited long and patiently, the weeks passed by and I failed to receive the expected photograph. Oh, it was cruel to be young!

Our neighbors, the Sinclairs, lived in a large brick house on the outskirts of town, which was surrounded by a spacious lawn dotted with rose bushes of all varieties. Tall trees lined the drives and walks and shaded the grounds throughout.

Mrs. Sinclair often sent her hired man to our house with a basket of lovely green vegetables, fresh from her own garden. Oftener, she would telephone mother to send one of the children with a pail and she would have Emma the cook send back some of the creamy milk of which they had had an over-supply that evening. It often fell to me to “fetch the milk.”

In spite of Mrs. Sinclair’s solicitude concerning the gossip about my frank declarations of love for her husband’s friend, she often suggested to me, with a twinkle in her eye, “Why don’t you stay a little while, Nan? Your hero is coming home with the judge to play cards!” But instead of wanting to linger, I would pick up my heels and fly out the door.

One evening about sunset I swung my pail of milk back and forth as I sauntered leisurely toward home. My eyes were fixed on the grass along the sidewalk where sometimes wild flowers raised their dainty faces and seemed to ask to be gathered. I had just stooped to pick a particularly pretty wild poppy when I looked up—to see Warren Harding approaching! [Pg 17]It was too late to retreat, so I walked bravely toward him, one hand literally seeming full of buckets, the other clutching the stem of my pretty wild flower. I wished fervently, in my visible nervousness and hidden delight, that the ground would open and swallow me, bucket, flower and all. My knowledge of father’s talk with Mr. Harding, coupled with the more intimate knowledge of the adoration I had been so publicly boasting, intensified my confusion a thousandfold, and my face burned pitifully.

I did not seem to be advancing, though he seemed to be steadily drawing nearer, and I knew that he recognized me for he began to smile and take off his hat. Then, with a bow that could not have been more gallant had I been a titled lady, and the same smile which has won even the hearts of his enemies, he bade me, “Good evening!” To this day I have not the slightest idea whether I found my voice to answer, but I remember I momentarily recovered sufficiently to look up at him, while all the way home I exulted, “Isn’t he wonderful! Isn’t he wonderful!”

(Years later, in May of 1917, when Warren Harding made his first trip to New York in my behalf, he himself asked me if I remembered the incident and confided that the desire to possess me had been born in his heart upon that occasion—the occasion which had so long been enshrined in my own heart as a wonderful memory.)

Election Eve in 1910 was a memorable occasion for me. I shall never forget the mass meeting in the old Opera House on State Street. Shortly afterward, this theatre burned to the ground, but I cherish still the memory of the hall in which the last meeting I attended was a town rally for my beloved editor, Ohio’s Republican candidate for Governor!

[Pg 18]

I do not remember that I told anybody where I was going that night. I only know I went along, in all haste, after the dinner dishes had been cleared away, out the back door and down to the Opera House. The theatre was comparatively small, accommodating perhaps seven or eight hundred people, but fully twice as many it seemed to me had crowded in, jamming the narrow aisles and standing wherever there was an available spot for a human being to balance himself. I pushed my way up through the stuffy crowds to the balcony and managed to find a seat onto which I climbed. I took a deep breath. From my post I could see every corner of the stage. The whole theatre was decorated, and even the boxes were beflagged. Two or three dozen people stood or sat in a semi-circle at the back of the stage—the more favored few.

The multitude—it seemed a multitude to me—cheered and whistled and suddenly the applause grew to a deafening roar as the audience rose as in a body to greet the hero of the hour. I bent eagerly forward, my heart in my throat, as he advanced to the edge of the platform and bowed. How dear he was! After comparative quiet was regained, he began his address, in his deep silvery voice, the voice I loved years afterward to listen to across the dinner-table or in more intimate surroundings....

Out on the street great flags floated in the cool breeze and telephone posts and store windows were draped effectively in the American colors. The throngs of people stood about expectantly. I wondered if my father had attended the meeting and whether I had been missed at home ... then down the street in an open carriage with seats facing each other rode the Republican candidate, his wife and a couple of intimate friends. The entire carriage was a mass of red, white and blue; even the horses seemed to sense the importance and enthusiasm of the occasion, and lifted high their beflagged heads as they stepped mincingly along through the cheering lines of people.

Still smiling and bowing and occasionally raising a hand to wave to the people, the editor stood throughout the entire [Pg 19]procession, head bared, acknowledging this tribute of the home folks who loved him....

Loved him? Yes. But who of men can essay an explanation of that instinct of the American voter who can hypocritically hail a candidate one day and the following day betray him at the polls?

As I look back upon that election, a state-wide land-slide for the Democrats, putting Judson Harmon in the Governor’s chair, I do not feel as I felt then, saddened beyond words, for events have been witness to the fact that nothing can prevent those who are predestined from “coming into their own.”

(These two episodes, the one of the meeting with Mr. Harding when I carried the pail of milk, and the political mass meeting, I have quoted in substance from an autobiography which I wrote in 1921 at Columbia as one of our class assignments. I took this manuscript down to the White House at that time and Mr. Harding read it, expressing in a letter to me his interest and praising me for having received an “A” on it at Columbia, however cautioning me as usual very lovingly against treading compositionally upon what he thought seemed to be “dangerous ground.” The whimsical expression in his face when we used to discuss his earlier political activities often led me to feel that he had felt far from the hero I had pictured him, and perhaps more like the disillusioned candidate his friends reported him to be after that election, driven by ambitious admirers into a field he would fain have avoided.)

In June of 1913, when I was a Junior in high school, my father passed on. We had very little money, but my mother managed to keep us together for a year and a half or so. She went back to teaching and was given a position in the Marion Public Schools. My baby brother John was about eighteen months old. My older sister Elizabeth was the pianist [Pg 20]in a local theatre, a moving picture house. However, we girls continued to chum with the “best people” up to the time we left Marion, which was in 1915.

My mother had often thought she would like to do Chautauqua work, and it was in this connection that after father’s passing she took occasion to consult Mr. Harding. He had had some experience in this line for I remember my mother took me one Sunday afternoon to hear him, and afterward allowed me to go up and shake hands with him and tell him how much I enjoyed his speech, for which hesitating utterance I received one of his loveliest smiles and a courtly “Thank you kindly, thank you kindly!”

It was upon the occasion of my mother’s visit to Mr. Harding’s office that Mr. Harding, inquiring how “Nan” was, and being assured of my continued admiration of him and any cause he sponsored, said ruminatively, “Mrs. Britton, maybe I can do something sometime for Nan.” I walked for days in the clouds after mother had repeated this to me.

Before we broke up our housekeeping and left Marion, the people had elected Warren G. Harding United States Senator from Ohio. Even in the face of my own difficulties—being thrown upon the world with absolutely no equipment except a high school education and possibly some innate common sense—I felt an ecstatic elation over this victory for my beloved hero, and when Miss Abigail Harding “dared” me to go out to his house and congratulate him, it took less urging than courage to do so. Mrs. Harding came to the door in a pink linen dress. I braved her all right and asked if I might be permitted to speak to her husband. It was late afternoon and he was playing cards with his regular “bunch.” He came out, and I shall never forget his smile—I do not think now it would be too much to say it was a smile of genuine appreciation, for so he assured me in later years—and I thrilled unspeakably under the touch of his hand. Mrs. Harding stood pat; it even seemed to me she curtailed any lengthy remarks Mr. Harding might have been tempted to make just to please me by drawing [Pg 21]his attention to the gentlemen in the other room who were waiting for him. But she could have nothing to do with the pressure of a hand-shake which was Mr. Harding’s seal of sincere cordiality to me.

Sometime during the summer of 1915 I went to Cleveland, Ohio, where, through the influence of friends, I was given a position in the George H. Bowman Company, a china store on Euclid Avenue. I lived at the Y. W. C. A. where I obtained board and room for the nominal sum of $3.50 a week.

My mother was then teaching school in Martel, Ohio, a small village east of Marion, and it seems to me she had one of the younger children with her, though I don’t remember which one. I think my baby brother John was being taken care of by my Aunt Anna in Canton, Ohio. I went from Cleveland a couple of times to Martel, I know, to see my mother.

My position in Cleveland paid me $6 a week, and I was so delighted when my salary was raised a dollar and a half that I sent for my brother Howard whom we called “Doc,” then about sixteen years of age, to come to Cleveland where, through my own influence and good standing at Bowman’s I was able to secure a position for him also. He lived at the Y. M. C. A. down the street from me. I very early assumed responsibilities toward my family.

However, my sister Elizabeth, working her way through music school in Chicago, persuaded me that we two could live more comfortably and happily together there, and after having been in Cleveland about eight months I went to Chicago to join her.

I remember how my brother Doc helped me to gather together the $11 or so carfare to Chicago, and when I boarded the train it was with just thirty cents “over” in my pocket-book. [Pg 22]I became very hungry near noontime and the slender lunch I had brought did not satisfy my healthy appetite, so I went into the diner in search of something “cheap.” Apple pie was 15 cents without cheese; with cheese, 25 cents. I dispensed with the cheese because I thought I must tip the waiter 10 cents, and I must have a nickel to phone Elizabeth in Chicago in case she failed to meet me.

I presented my letter of recommendation from the George H. Bowman Company, which read, “We are glad to recommend Miss Nan Britton, who has been in our employ for about a year, as a girl of ability and good character,” and was given a position in Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, in the china department, soon after my arrival in Chicago. Elizabeth did wonders with her needle to “fix me up” and make me a little more presentable than I had been able to do on my $6 a week. Moreover, in my new job I received $9 a week wages!

The Brittons were never “good managers.” While my father lived we children had everything we needed and more; but father was far too generous for his income, and never denied where it was possible to give. With so little idea of the value of a dollar, mother, Elizabeth and I were all having a pretty hard time.

I had carried on correspondence while in Cleveland with Miss Abigail Harding, “Daisy,” as she was more commonly called at home, but the dissatisfaction I was experiencing because of my seeming inability to get on more quickly had inclined me to less letter-writing. In other words, I knew my ability and I was ashamed of my small-waged position.

Finally, without saying anything to Elizabeth, I wrote to my father’s favorite college classmate, whom I will call Grover Carter, at that time Vice-President of a coal company in New York, asking his advice concerning the possibilities of my working my way through school. I received an immediate reply in which he assured me of his genuine interest and told me he had written to another Kenyon College classmate of my father, in the offices of the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. In [Pg 23]due time I received from him a cordial note in which he invited me to dine with him and his family.

In short, I was given a choice of attending a business school in Chicago at the expense of my father’s two college friends or of coming on to New York City to attend school. It was up to me. The latter plan appealed to me, and I remember I felt the very trip East would in itself be an education to me whose travelling experiences had been necessarily limited.

The remainder of the summer of 1916 was then devoted to preparations for my trip East, my Chicago benefactors taking me to Marshall Fields’ where I was outfitted properly from head to toe. I thought my fairy existence had actually begun.

During the summer of 1916, while I was still working at Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, the Republican National Convention was being held in the Coliseum, not far from my place of business. United States Senator Warren G. Harding, former Lieutenant-Governor of Ohio, was nominating Charles E. Hughes for the Presidency of the United States. Morning after morning I bought the papers, watching the progress of the proceedings with avid interest, most particularly, of course, any mention of my beloved Warren Harding.

In the spring of 1917 when Mr. Harding came over to New York to help me find a position (or rather to place me in one) I told him of how I had followed the convention items in the Chicago papers. He expressed his regret that I had not at that time gotten in touch with him for it would have been a pleasure, he said, to see that I had a “front seat” during the convention at the Coliseum.

In the fall of 1916 my Chicago benefactors put me on the train for New York and at the Pennsylvania Station in the Big City I was met by Mr. Carter. I was put immediately in school; the school selected was the Ballard Secretarial School [Pg 24]for Girls which is an endowed school housed in the Y. W. C. A. Building, which building, Central Branch, was at that time down on 16th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

I entered six weeks late but through the out-of-school-hours’ tutoring of my dear teacher and friend, to whom I will give the name of Miss Helen Anderson, I was enabled to catch up with the class very quickly. I studied hard. The Carter family was an intellectual one and Mr. Carter early began to dictate to me in the evenings, which was a great help. I received A’s in everything when the spring came and I was graduated.

In early spring, in April I believe, there was a request made to the Y. W. C. A. Employment Bureau for a stenographer for one whom I shall call Mrs. Emma Laird Phelps, publicity manager for Ignacy Paderewski, the famous pianist, and I went to be interviewed. I had several hours in the afternoons which I knew I could devote to this work and in that way make some extra expense money. Mrs. Phelps hired me after giving me some trial dictation, and I was launched upon my first stenographic position! During this employment I had occasion to do some special work with Mme. Paderewski and in this connection I met her famous husband.

Inasmuch as I had, when in high school, not been allowed much freedom where boys were concerned, I knew comparatively little about them. I had had my ideal American in my heart for years and all others paled into insignificance beside him. True, I had endeavored to weave romance several times into friendships with boys I had known in Marion, after I became almost seventeen years of age and was a junior in high school, when mother permitted a few “dates”—few and far between. But somehow these fellows, as well as those I met after I left Marion—in Cleveland and in Chicago—all seemed to have things “wrong with them.”

However, I was beginning to receive attentions from men whom I would meet even casually, and the fact that I was able to hold a secretarial position, and had been the only one in my [Pg 25]class at Ballard to attempt such a thing before graduation, strengthened my faith in myself and tended to dignify me in my own estimation.

When spring came, and graduation day was drawing near, I decided I might now safely appeal to Warren Harding to help me to a position in the business world. I felt sure I could do myself credit and he would not have to be ashamed to recommend me for a position. I could, of course, have depended upon many other sources for situations, and in fact Mrs. Phelps kindly intimated that the Paderewskis might wish to take me to California with them, Mme. Paderewski having evinced a certain fondness for me. But I had other plans. Mr. Harding’s words to my mother back in Marion in 1914, “Maybe I can do something sometime for Nan,” recurred to me again and again. So one afternoon I stayed at school and wrote, after many revisions, and after destroying dozens of sheets of perfectly good Y. W. C. A. paper, and without saying a word to a soul, the following letter, a carbon copy of which I retained:

Three days later, toward evening, when I came home from school, I spied a large envelope on the hall table. It was addressed to me in a man’s handwriting and bore the United States Senate return. I tore it open. At first my eyes swept the pages unseeingly, noting only the signature, “W. G. Harding.”

Mrs. Carter was in the living-room on that floor and I joined her there. She was an extremely conventional woman and I knew she would not understand or sympathize if I were to confess my intense admiration for a married man. So, with a supreme effort at nonchalance, I told her that I had some days before written to Senator Harding inquiring about a position, and that this was his reply. With forced calm I read aloud to her his letter to me.

The opening sentence was an assurance that he did indeed remember me. He added, “... you may be sure of that, and I remember you most agreeably, too.” Compared with the warmth of these first sentences the following cordially expressed desire to be of assistance in furthering my ambition to become a secretary held only secondary interest for me.

He said frankly that if he had a position open in his own office he would “gladly tender it to me.” The next best thing he said, would be to help me to a government position provided I were secretarially equipped for it. To this end he inquired specifically what I had been trained to do. He suggested that I accompany my next letter with a note of recommendation, parenthetically emphasizing that this note was not for his own satisfaction but for that of the department chief. After this was in his hands he would “go personally to the war or navy department and urge my appointment.” He thought that “the [Pg 28]fact that my esteemed father had belonged to the party now in power” would help.

He mentioned the maximum departmental salary of $100 per month, but warned me that I would probably have to be satisfied with an initial salary of $60. Such positions as were available might last only during the period of the war, he said, and added, “which we all hope will not be long—however, it may be very long.”

The latter paragraphs thrilled me. He wrote that there was “every probability” of his being in New York the following week! If he could reach me by phone or “becomingly look me up,” he would do so, and “take pleasure in doing it.”

The whole tone of the letter was one of utmost cordiality. I could scarcely refrain from uttering exclamations of delight. I took my things and went upstairs to my room where I could reread the letter alone.

My bedroom on the third floor of the Carter home was a joy to me. The house itself stood almost in the shadow of Queensboro Bridge, which spans the North River at 59th Street. My windows faced the southeast and afforded a gorgeous view of the river. On a clear evening the lights of the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges looked like arches of stars hung low and twinkling against the sky.

Outside my windows trees were freshly green. Sparrows perched there and chirped joyously. For weeks children had been playing out-of-doors, mingling their cries with a hundred other street noises. And, from the background of these sounds, arose momently the varied shrilling of the river-boat whistles....

It all fascinated me. It was so different from any atmosphere I had ever known. At first these very things had made me homesick, but I was growing now to love New York! I liked to watch the barges glide smoothly and with scarce perceptible progress up or down the river.... I could even see from my bed in the morning the sparkling water surface dancing in the sun!...

[Pg 29]

Now I closed my door and seated myself on the sill of an open window.... All I had dared to hope for from Mr. Harding was a possible letter of introduction from him to someone, either in Washington or New York, to whom I might apply direct for a position.... But he himself seemed genuinely interested in helping me!... And was coming over to New York, and would see me!... Warren Gamaliel Harding!

As the evening deepened, and even as I crept in between cool white sheets that night, the impression grew upon me that under the cordial phraseology of his letter there was more than the mere desire to be of assistance to me. It was almost a sweet ingratiation.... “You see I do remember you ...” was his concluding sentence....

Well indeed had I perceived this hidden warmth! When, upon his visit, I quoted to him those lines which had moved me to feel an underlying sweetness beyond the evident friendliness, he smiled and nodded and confessed to an overwhelming desire to see me after these years. To see me, he said, had been the sole motive for his trip to New York at that particular time!

And so an inexpressible happiness reigned in my heart, even though my impressions had not yet been grounded in fact by his assurances. Therefore I did not allow secret delight to vent itself in written words, but on May 11th wrote the following formal letter:

I did not comply with Mr. Harding’s request for a letter of recommendation, not immediately securing it and not wishing to hold up my reply to him. I really felt I might likely be able to secure it and send it to him in advance of his answer to my letter of the 11th.

But May the 15th brought, to my surprise, a reply to my second letter sent the 11th. This letter too was written in longhand and was somewhat longer than the first one. In the corner of the stationery this time were the words, “Senate Chamber.”

If the first letter contained what I chose to regard as statements of rather more than conventional import, the second letter only served to confirm my belief.

He wrote that he had every confidence I would succeed—“... an ambitious young woman of your character and talents must succeed.” He spoke of having to break down the civil service bars to secure a place for me, adding, “I must ask it as a very personal favor, with the advantage of your good father having been a loyal supporter of the party in power.” However, he immediately assured me that he did not hesitate “to apply the purely personal appeal” and was glad to do it for me. He merely wished to be satisfied on one point—could I take dictation?

[Pg 31]

“You write a fine letter, your intelligence is of the high Britton standard.... I will have no doubt you will make good from the very start.”

It pleased me immensely to read, “I like your spirit and determination. It is like I have always imagined you to be.” Like he had always imagined me to be. Then he had thought about me! Even speculated as to what I was like! “... I shall rejoice to note your success,” he wrote.

“I knew you had gone out to contest with the world and win your way, but I had no detailed knowledge....” Why, there was the implication that he had wondered, had perhaps even wanted detailed knowledge and of course hadn’t dared to betray his interest! Wonderful that he had thought about me!

He expected to be in New York within the next ten days and, he said, might definitely advise me in advance of his coming, and again he assured me, “It will be a pleasure to look you up.”

I liked the last line of his letter. “... always know of ... my very genuine personal interest in your good fortune.”

A skylark amid the clouds could not have been happier than I during the intervening days between my receipt of this letter and the arrival of its author. I would often speak sharply to myself when occasionally I touched earth long enough to realize the source of my joy and light-heartedness, “Don’t make a perfect fool of yourself, now, Nan. He hasn’t said anything which actually means much ... and naturally he would take a fatherly interest in any girl who might seek help from him....” But my spirits would not be downed! I talked to the birds. I arose earlier than usual to stand and gaze out of my window and dream. I examined my face carefully in the mirror. I planned exactly what I should wear. My Chicago benefactor had recently sent me $50 with which I had purchased a new gray tailored suit, and I would wear a dark blue sailor hat, the crown covered with grey veiling.

Before I had an opportunity to get another letter to him, Mr. Harding came over to New York. He telephoned me at school and made an appointment for me to meet him at the Manhattan Hotel, at Madison Avenue and 42nd Street. What a sweet shock to hear his voice!...

He was standing on the steps of the hotel when I reached there.

It must be remembered that I was but sixteen years of age when I had last seen Mr. Harding (the time I called at his house to congratulate him upon his election to the Senate) and, although I looked very young when I met him at the Manhattan Hotel, still I had had the advantage of the intervening two years, and the added advantage of having lived with the Carters from whom I had learned a great deal, and I am sure Mr. Harding’s agreeable surprise was genuine. Certainly he could not have been more cordial.

He invited me to come back to the reception room near 43rd Street. It was about 10:30 in the morning. We sat down upon a settee and it was not difficult for me to talk to him for he invited confidence. We became immediately reminiscent of my childhood and my adoration of him, and he seemed immensely pleased that I still retained such feelings. I could not help being perfectly frank.

Some kind of convention in New York at that time had made hotel accommodations very scarce, and Mr. Harding confessed that he was obliged to take the one room available in the Manhattan Hotel—the bridal chamber! He asked me to come up there with him so that we might continue our conversation without interruptions or annoyances.

The bridal chamber of the Manhattan Hotel was, to me, a very lovely room, and, in view of the fact that we had scarcely closed the door behind us when we shared our first kiss, it [Pg 33]seemed sweetly appropriate. The bed, which we did not disturb, stood upon a dais, and the furnishings were in keeping with the general refinement of atmosphere. I shall never, never forget how Mr. Harding kept saying, after each kiss, “God!... God, Nan!” in high diminuendo, nor how he pleaded in tense voice, “Oh, dearie, tell me it isn’t hateful to you to have me kiss you!” And as I kissed him back I thought that he surpassed even my gladdest dreams of him.

Between kisses we found time to discuss my immediate need for a position and I found Mr. Harding less inclined to recommend me in Washington. In fact, he frankly confessed to me, he preferred to have me in New York where he could come over to see me and where he would feel more at liberty to be with me. There were no intimacies in that bridal chamber beyond our very ardent kisses, and, Mr. Harding, having been acquainted with my plans for going to Chicago after graduation to visit my sister, tucked $30 in my brand new silk stocking and was “sorry he had no more that time to give me.” Inasmuch as I received my carfare and small spending money from Mrs. Carter in amounts of $1.00, $.75, $1.25 or whatever change she happened to have on hand, to have $30 all at one time to “spend as I chose” seemed to me almost too good to be true! I had always been very grateful to the Carters for the way in which they took me into their home as one of them, but of course I would not have been my natural self had I not thought wistfully over Mr. Harding’s statement to me, “Why didn’t you ask me to send you to school, Nan?” and his emphatic “You bet!” after I had inquired with wide eyes, “Oh, would you have done that?”

The first letter I received from Senator Harding I had shown to Mrs. Emma Laird Phelps with whom I was working in the Paderewski connection, and she read it with what I thought seemed avidity.

“A typical letter, my dear,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

“Typical of what?” I inquired.

[Pg 34]

“Why, that man has an object—can’t you see that?” she said easily.

“What kind of object do you mean?” I queried wonderingly.

Her explanation must have been very vague for I can’t remember it at all, but I suppose the affectional things that actually did transpire upon our first visit together were things which she would have said proved such ‘object’ on Mr. Harding’s part. But they were all too spontaneous, too sincere to have been premeditated.

Mrs. Phelps afterward asked me one time to give her a letter that she might use to gain a conference with Mr. Harding and I am sure, while I never gave her such a letter, that she changed her mind completely about Mr. Harding’s possible purposes toward me so graciously did she voice her admiration of him to me many times.

Upon this first visit, Mr. Harding and I had luncheon at the Manhattan Hotel, in the dining-room on the 43rd Street side. Then we took a taxi uptown to see Mrs. Phelps—to her apartment on 116th Street.

The entrance hall to Mrs. Phelps’ apartment was dimly lighted, and when we emerged into the living-room which is on 116th Street Mr. Harding turned to Mrs. Phelps. Except for their acknowledgments of introductions nothing had been said by any of us, and now Mr. Harding remarked pleasantly, “Well, Mrs. Phelps, we people with big noses always seem to get along, don’t we?” I had not been long enough in New York and was still too unsuspecting to realize the significance of that remark, though I am confident Mr. Harding meant it all good-naturedly, and I am not at all sure even now that Mrs. Phelps is a Jewess. Within the past year and a half I have been in Mrs. Phelps’ apartment and she asked me if I remembered when President Harding, then Senator, had sat in “that chair,” indicating an easy rocker.

From Mrs. Phelps Mr. Harding obtained the information that I was rather more than a good stenographer.

[Pg 35]

On the way back downtown in the taxi to the Y. W. C. A. where Mr. Harding next talked with Miss Anderson about my school work, he put his arm around me.

“Nan,” he queried kindly, “just how fast do you think you could take dictation?”

“Oh, I don’t know, not so very fast,” I answered frankly.

“Well, look here, I’ll dictate a letter to you and you tell me whether you ‘get’ all of it.” The “letter” as it was dictated verbatim I do not recall, but the trend of it is easy rememberable:

“My darling Nan: I love you more than the world, and I want you to belong to me. Could you belong to me, dearie? I want you ... and I need you so....”

I remember the letter did not run into length because I silenced him with the kisses he pleaded for. He would tremble so just to sit close to me, and I adored every evidence of his enthusiasm.

“Do people address you as ‘Judge’ or ‘Senator’?” asked Miss Anderson after I had presented Mr. Harding to her.

“No, I have never been a judge,” he answered, “I guess I’m just plain Mr. Harding.” He smiled. Miss Anderson suggested that we sit in one of the little waiting-rooms.

It will be remembered that this visit was in late May of 1917 and our whole United States was full of “the war.” It was entirely logical that the general trend of conversation should bear upon the various aspects of the war. But how it drifted into a discussion of babies I do not recall. Mr. Harding vouchsafed the information he had recently acquired in Washington, that the Germans were actually attempting to create children by injecting male serum, taken at the proper temperature, into the female without the usual medium of sexual contact. He denounced this method of propagation as “German madness” and affirmed that in his belief children should come only through mutual love-desire. I shall never forget the expressions of his face and Helen Anderson’s. Surely she must have thought he was talking strangely to speak of these things [Pg 36]so frankly and upon such short acquaintance. But I, though I confess it did not occur to me then, understand these processes of his mind to have been the direct result of contemplations concerning me, and it is not unlikely that even as early as that very first visit Warren Harding was entertaining the possibility of becoming the father of a real love-child. Certainly his face was a study.

Miss Anderson assured him of my readiness for a position and we went from the Y. W. C. A. to Judge Elbert H. Gary’s office at 71 Broadway, Empire Building. I remember we stood quite a few minutes waiting for a Broadway street car, and it must have taken us about forty-five minutes to go from 14th Street to Rector Street. I remember how Mr. Harding suddenly seemed to come to himself somewhere in lower Broadway and exclaim, as we were getting off the car, “Why, Nan, why didn’t we take a taxi!” and his surprise was so genuine that I knew he had not realized where he had been during that ride downtown.

Mr. Harding had told me that he thought the very place for me was in the United States Steel Corporation. I had never even heard of Judge Gary, strange to say, and he explained that he was the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the largest industrial corporation in the world.

Mr. Harding handed his card to the secretary in Judge Gary’s outer office. The judge came out immediately. After introducing me to Judge Gary, Mr. Harding inquired casually of him whether his senatorial services in a certain matter had been satisfactory. The judge replied that they had indeed and thanked Mr. Harding. We were then taken into the office of the Comptroller, Mr. Filbert, and Judge Gary made this statement to Mr. Filbert: “Mr. Filbert, I want to help Senator Harding to help this young lady.” Then Judge Gary retired.

[Pg 37]

Our interview with Mr. Filbert was rather a lengthy one and I thought there were infused in it the elements of a battle of wits between the two men. Mr. Filbert seemed to resent Mr. Harding’s assurance that “Miss Britton can write all of your letters for you!” But, as usual, when we left it was Mr. Filbert who had been won over and I was asked to await a letter from him telling in which branch of service in the Steel Corporation I would be placed.

Going down in the elevator, Mr. Harding whispered to me, “Now, do you believe that I love you?”

We took a taxi back to the Manhattan Hotel. We stopped at the 43rd Street entrance. The taxi had not drawn close enough to the curb and there was a space of perhaps ten inches between the running-board and the sidewalk. Mr. Harding caught his foot and tripped, falling in a very awkward position. His face became red and he arose the most embarrassed man imaginable. I remember how it immediately reminded me of a story mother used to tell about my doctor-father, accompanied also by a young lady, when he was making calls in his shiny “buggy”, being suddenly seized with cramps which bore him to the ground when he alighted in front of the patient’s house; he had been obliged to remain in a squatting position for several moments. Mr. Harding’s blush of confusion after his fall remained a good many minutes and was explained by him, “You see, dearie, I’m so crazy about you that I don’t know where I’m stepping!”

The bridal chamber at the Manhattan seemed almost to be our home when we returned to it for the second time, and the manner in which we threw off our wraps and settled ourselves together comfortably in the big arm-chair the most natural thing in the world. And the fact that Mr. Harding told me dozens of times the thing I had always longed to hear from him, “I love you, dearie,” seemed no less the perfectly natural and normal thing. “We were made for each other, Nan,” he said.

[Pg 38]

Especially did it all seem so right when Mr. Harding repeated to me many times, “I’d like to make you my bride, Nan darling.”

Mr. Harding came over once more before I left for Chicago on my vacation trip, for which my Chicago friends had sent me my railroad ticket. It was upon this occasion that he took me to his room in the Manhattan and talked over with me my prospective position in the United States Steel Corporation. He expressed his desire to have me dignified in the eyes of the officials there who would hear of me through Mr. Filbert, and about fifteen or twenty minutes before it was time for him to catch his train, he sat down at the desk and wrote out in longhand a letter which he said would be suitable for me to send to Mr. Filbert when that gentleman should send me a note to report for further interview at the Steel Corporation. Mr. Harding seemed very sure that I would be the recipient of such a letter and I watched over his shoulder while he wrote a hasty draft of “my reply.” It was the first time I had seen him slam his Oxford glasses upon his classic nose and I marvelled aloud at this feat.

I have always been quite averse to deception such as claiming authorship for something written by another, and I could not sincerely enthuse over the letter Mr. Harding had tried to couch in terms such as I might employ. However, I accepted it with thanks and he needed only to glance at his watch to see that he had barely time to catch his train. He kissed me and rushed away.

In due time I received the letter from Mr. Filbert, in which he asked me to see Miss Blanche Sawyer, in the legal department, who would tell me about my position in the Corporation. But the letter received from Mr. Filbert seemed not to call for the kind of reply Mr. Harding had pencilled and so I wrote one of my own. I sent Mr. Harding a carbon copy, however, which he approved in his next letter to me.

In early June I left for Chicago to visit my sister Elizabeth before taking up my work with the Steel Corporation in New York, in a stenographic position at $16 per week.

Up to that time I had made no one my confidante—in truth, I was finding it difficult to realize that my hero, Warren G. Harding, loved me, Nan Britton. Naturally I told no one. But my sister, Elizabeth, knowing me as she did, sought a reason for the unusual glow of my cheeks and the happiness written so visibly in my eyes, and when I received my first forty-page love-letter from Mr. Harding, I told Elizabeth the truth. She was unmarried then and living at the Colonial Hotel where I visited her, but she was in love herself with the man she finally married, and, having known so well my childhood adoration for Mr. Harding, sympathized with me though she did not encourage me to continue my friendship with him.

My finances were rather low at that time, I disliked to ask my Chicago benefactors for more money, so I wrote to Mr. Harding about it, as he had instructed me to do. The first money he sent me was in the form of a money order—it seems to me on the American Express Company—for $42, which amount, he told me by letter, was odd enough to make it appear that it was in payment of some possible work I had done for him. Elizabeth went with me when I had it cashed.

A week or so after that I received a letter from Mr. Harding saying he had been asked to speak in Indianapolis, and inviting me to come there to meet him. So I packed my suitcase and the following day Mr. Harding met me at the station in Indianapolis. I was, curiously enough, quite free from nervousness as I walked through the iron gate where he stood waiting, and wondered why he seemed so nervous. His hand shook [Pg 40]terribly as he took mine after we were in the taxi. Even his voice shook. For me it was a great moment. I was so happy to be with him.

We went immediately to the Claypool Hotel where he registered me as his niece, Miss Harding. During my stay there (we left late that afternoon), I had several phone calls from newspaper men and Republicans who were endeavoring to get hold of Senator Harding. A great deal of the time he was in my room with me and instructed me to tell them to try him at the Republican Club. It was such fun to have him cut them all for me!

There were no climactic intimacies in Indianapolis. When I came to unpack my things I found a note pinned to my nightie on which Elizabeth had written these words, “I trust you, Nan dear.” Elizabeth knew I loved Mr. Harding very dearly.

Mr. Harding had to leave me after luncheon—which, I believe, we had together, though I do not remember for sure—and I wandered about until the hour set for me to meet him with my bag at the interurban station. I bought a postcard of the Claypool Hotel to keep as a souvenir. I remember the clerk at the desk had occasion to say something to me and it sounded so good to be addressed as “Miss Harding.”

Late that afternoon we took the interurban car to Connersville, Indiana. Mr. Harding was scheduled to speak that evening at Rushville, Indiana, which is near Connersville. That trip on the interurban train was wonderful to me. I wore a black satin dress which my sister Elizabeth had “made over” from one of her own for me. I explained to Mr. Harding that I had a “better one” in my suitcase. “This one suits me, Nan!” he said gaily.

He spent quite some time explaining to me the layout of the City of Washington. He seemed to take much pride in Washington, and I thought to myself that he just looked as though he belonged there rather than in the small city of Marion, Ohio, our home town; he looked eminently the part of a United States Senator. Yet, as I write this, I remember I used [Pg 41]to find myself cherishing the nice things he said about our home town.

“What would your sister, Daisy Harding, say if she could see us together?” I exclaimed to him.

He laughed whimsically, evidently thinking rather of his wife.

“What would Florence Harding say, I want to know!” he answered.

At Mr. Harding’s suggestion I registered in Connersville at the McFarlan Hotel, where he also stopped, as “Miss E. N. Christian,” or “Elizabeth N. Christian.” Christian was Mr. Harding’s secretary’s name—George B. Christian—and Mr. Harding said he thought it would be “a good joke” to use his secretary’s name. My father and mother must have known the Christians in Marion, and when in high school I knew the older gentleman, George Christian’s father, “Colonel” as he was called, because he used to take us girls to the drug store and buy us sodas.

Mr. Harding intended to take me to Rushville that evening, but when he knocked on my door I was in the bathroom down the hall, and as his car was waiting for him he could not wait for me. So I was left to roam around the little village and wait for his return. There, too, I bought a postcard picture of the McFarlan Hotel “for remembrance.”

He returned about ten-thirty or eleven. I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, one of the typical lobbies of a small town hotel, with the chairs lined up before the front window. As he came in he ignored me altogether and I smiled to myself. We had planned to take the midnight train into Chicago, and he had told me that afternoon on the interurban that we would get a berth together if I agreed. But it had really been left undecided.

A taxi was announced about eleven-forty-five and I picked up my bag and went out. Mr. Harding was at my side in a moment. The several politicians who escorted Mr. Harding to the cab did not know of course that we were known to each other, and ostensibly we were not. He spoke up, “I am catching [Pg 42]the midnight train into Chicago. Is that your train, young lady?” I replied that it was and he said, “Well, I guess we can both ride down in the same taxi.” Inasmuch as I doubt whether Connersville boasted more than one, it was a wise suggestion! I was afraid the taxi man would surely hear Mr. Harding’s whispered remarks to me on the way down, especially when he said over and over again, “Dearie, ’r y’ going t’ sleep with me? Look at me, Nan: goin’ to sleep with me, dearie?” How I loved to hear him say “dearie”!

We secured a section to Chicago. The remembrance of that trip from Connersville to Chicago is very beautiful although it, too, was free from complete embraces. We were both dressed the next morning before we reached the Englewood Station, about nine minutes from the downtown station, and I remarked to Mr. Harding that he looked a bit tired.

“God, sweetheart! what do you expect? I’m a man, you know.”

In Chicago, we went to a downtown hotel. Here Mr. Harding registered us as man and wife, although I stood apart and do not know the name he used. However, if I were to see that register as well as all of the others wherein we were registered, I am sure I could identify his writing, for he did not disguise it well no matter how hard he tried.

I noticed he was conversing with the clerk and when he joined me he said, in a low voice, on the way to the elevator, “The clerk said if I could prove that you were my wife he would give us the room for nothing!” I asked him laughingly what he had replied to that and he said, “I told him I was not in the habit of proving my wife’s identity and that I had no objection at all to paying for accommodations!” Nevertheless, we were very circumspect while there that morning and our love-making was, as it had been up until then, restricted. We had breakfast served in our room. I remember that it was the first time that season I had had strawberries.

Mr. Harding took the noon train back—I think going direct to Washington.

During the remainder of my visit with my sister Elizabeth at the Colonial Hotel in Chicago, I analysed my feelings as best I could. What a maze of emotions! I knew I loved Warren Harding more than anything in all the world. However, up to this time I had kept my virginity, despite his very moving appeals to become his completely. Mr. Harding had explained to me that were we to be found on the train coming from Connersville to Chicago, sleeping together in one section, we would invite as severe censure as though we had shared love’s sweetest intimacy; and the trip itself would be sufficient to incriminate us.

But in my own eyes, I was safe so long as my virginity was sustained. It seems to me unbelievable now when I think back on my ignorance about certain things. I had early reached this conclusion: people got married and undressed and slept together; therefore, one must be undressed in order for any harm to come to them. I remember that this belief was so strong in my mind that when, during our ride together from Connersville to Chicago, I experienced sweet thrills from just having Mr. Harding’s hands upon the outside of my nightdress, I became panic-stricken. I inquired tearfully whether he really thought I would have a child right away. Of course this absurdity amused him greatly, but the fact that I was so ignorant seemed to add to his cherishment of me for some reason. And I loved him so dearly.

I had never had, as most girls do have I suppose, a single talk with or from my mother on sex. As a matter of fact, I did not know how babies came into the world, and I frankly told Mr. Harding so. I remember once during one of our “kissing tours”, as he jocularly called them, I asked him what under the sun people were given navels for! I shall never forget how it amused, and then saddened him, nor his face as he told me [Pg 44]that that was where I had been attached to my mother. It was all so wonderful and beautiful when he told me. It was he who told me of course what my body functions would be if I were to yield myself to him. He said, “You ask me whatever you want to know; I’ll tell you.”

In my father’s medical library were many books on women and women’s diseases. My sister Elizabeth and I had girl friends who were enormously interested in coming up to my father’s office and poring over these books in his absence, studying with inconceivable interest the lurid pictures portraying various intimate parts of woman’s anatomy, all of course highly colored, but it was to me no less than repulsive to even glance at those medical pictures. I never spent one solitary second looking at them. When I came to the age when all girls experience that normal function which makes of them potential mothers, I was most painfully embarrassed and told my sister Elizabeth, who in turn communicated it to my mother, and even she dwelt very briefly upon it, merely cautioning me not to get my feet unnecessarily wet when I was ill each month.

I told Mr. Harding that I was aware that there was a lovely mystery connected with life itself, but I had early decided that it was a mystery for one’s husband to reveal, and I had been perfectly content not to pry into it. I accepted my puberty as a necessity, even as a sacred necessity to a cause which should later reveal itself. Mr. Harding confessed to me that he had never possessed a woman who had hitherto been possessed of no man, and perhaps that fact concerning me made me the more desirable to him, in addition to his love for me. He told me about his early amours, and he confessed that it had been many years since his home situation had been satisfying.

Mr. Harding told me that he knew of no man except his brother “Deac” who married, having had no previous experience with women. “Brother Deac” was a male virgin, he said, before he married.

[Pg 45]

The fact that at home we girls were held down, even to not being allowed to attend parties where boys were until we were quite seventeen—at least that applied to me—indicates the measures that my mother and father had taken to guard us. “And no young man is going to visit my girls after ten o’clock at night,” my father used to say. If we expressed sentiments concerning boys—and my sister Elizabeth was early a “man hater” so this refers to me mainly—we were told that they were joshing us, “making fun of us.” So the outlets for my inclinations in this direction were confined to raving about Mr. Harding, and about moving picture actors to whom there was not quite so much parental objection inasmuch as they were only on the screen and in the flesh safely distanced from me.

Of course there was the perfectly logical plea from Mr. Harding that if I loved him so deeply I would consent to belong to him, not merely to be with him, trying him by continued denial. I think I made up to Warren Harding everything I ever denied him—and I was afterward so glad I had not plunged headlong into a relationship which was of such vastness and which I can now look back upon with absolutely no regrets. In the history of lovers, there was, I am sure, none to compare with Warren Gamaliel Harding. And to him I was, or so he has often said, “the sweetheart incomparable.”

Through my sister I had met, while in Chicago, a young man, whom I shall call Dean Renwick, who was a pianist of considerable talent, and a rather nice-looking boy. He seemed to like me and “after a fashion” asked me to marry him—perhaps he wanted merely to “be engaged” to me. I have often thought since that the poor boy was just lonesome, for I don’t see how I could have appealed to him particularly; our interests were not the same. In any event, I rather seized the idea of annexing a beau—one who was free to marry me [Pg 46]if I wanted and he wanted. You see, I tried hard to convince myself that it was wrong to love Mr. Harding as I loved him, that it would mean ultimate surrender, and perhaps sorrow for us and for our families.

My sister Elizabeth was amazed at the letters I would receive from Mr. Harding when I shared their contents with her. I remember among the first of them that came to me while I was in Chicago that month, was one which particularly took me off my feet. It contained in sweet phrasing a picture of his desire for me, summed up in the final parenthetical exclamation, “God! what an anticipation!” He used to tell me that just to visualize me as he loved to see me brought pangs that seemed virginal in their intensity and surpassed any longing he had ever experienced in his life.

I returned to New York the latter part of June, not having committed myself to Dean Renwick beyond verbal gratitude for his regard and an attempt at a show of affection for him which fell flat in my heart.

The first of July, 1917, I went to work in the United States Steel Corporation. I was interviewed by Miss Blanche Sawyer in the legal department. She informed me that although I had had a splendid introduction I would of course have to prove my worth. She took me in and introduced me to Mr. C. L. Close, Manager of the Bureau of Safety, Sanitation and Welfare, in whose office I was employed for the two years that followed. Mr. Close came from Shelby, Ohio, and his wife, formerly Edna Kennedy, had been a Marion girl. Mr. Close knew George Christian pretty well, having known Mr. Christian’s wife who also came from Shelby, Ohio. This was, in a way, a sort of social grounding for me, as George Christian’s boss, Senator Harding, had been instrumental in placing me with his secretary’s friend in the United States Steel Corporation.

I left the Carter home in Sutton Place, preferring for obvious reasons to live by myself, or rather with a strange family where my movements would not be restricted. The first room I rented [Pg 47]was with Mr. and Mrs. Daniels who lived at 607 West 136th Street. I had heard of Mrs. Daniels through Helen Anderson who in turn had met her at the Y. M. C. A. where she had filed her notice of “rooms to rent.” I lived there from July to November, 1917.

Of course I was proud of my friendship with Mr. Harding, and, inasmuch as up to this time it had been free from deepest intimacies, I felt freer to discuss him, although as a matter of fact I had always talked about him so much at home and elsewhere that it was much a matter of course.

The Daniels were wise enough to appreciate that their roomer was rather more than “in” with a United States Senator. Moreover, mention was made from time to time in the papers of senate activities in which Mr. Harding took a prominent part, and on August 12, 1917, The New York Times carried in its magazine section a front-page article entitled, “Need of Dictator Urged by Harding.” I wondered at the time whether the publication of this article had been arranged for in a series of telephone calls made to the Times, the Sun and newspaper friends of Mr. Harding upon the occasion of one of his visits here when I was with him. The Daniels immediately said that I ought to try to persuade the senator to dine at their home. It would, obviously, have been a feather in their joint social headgear! As a matter of fact, he did not do so, though I had his assurance that he would if it would please me.

It was mid-July when Mr. Harding came over from Washington. We went to a moderate-priced hotel on Seventh Avenue. He told me that that hotel had once been a very nice place, and he knew George and Dan Frank (dry-goods merchants from Marion) used to stop there when in New York.

[Pg 48]

We were not questioned when he registered, and we were made very comfortable in a room on the sixth floor, if I remember rightly, looking down upon Broadway. Although I was deliriously happy to lie in close embrace with my darling, I just could not even yet permit the intimacies which would mean severance forever from a moral code which, while never identified to me by my parents as the one virtue to hold intact, was intuitively guarded by me as such. Mr. Harding has many times said to me that if people were to know that we had been together intimately without indulging in closest embrace they would not credit the story. In fact, he said to me with something like chagrin that the men would say, “there certainly must have been something wrong with Harding!” But somehow it is characteristic of me to be sure of myself, and when once committed to a cause there is seldom a turning-back. And, as much as I loved Mr. Harding, the traditional frailty men are wont to attribute to women as the weaker sex did not dominate me. This sureness on my part accounted later on for the total lack of “recriminations,” a word Mr. Harding very frequently employed. “Remember, dearie, no recriminations!” he used to say.

On July 30th, 1917, Mr. Harding came again to New York. He decided we could safely go to a hotel where friends of his in Washington had intimated to him that they had stopped under similar unconventional circumstances with no unpleasant consequences.

This was on Broadway in the thirties. I remember so well I wore a pink linen dress which was rather short and enhanced the little-girl look which was often my despair. I waited in the waiting-room while Mr. Harding registered. I have been in that hotel once since that time and I have noted that they have changed the first floor entirely. I think Mr. Harding said he registered under the name of “Hardwick” or maybe “Warwick.” There were no words going up in the elevator.

The day was exceedingly warm and we were glad to see that the room which had been assigned to us had two large windows. [Pg 49]The boy threw them open for us and left. The room faced Broadway, but we were high enough not to be bothered by street noises. We were quite alone.

I became Mr. Harding’s bride—as he called me—on that day.

The telephone startled us. Mr. Harding jumped up to answer it. He said, “You’ve got the wrong party.” Almost simultaneously, however, there was a rap at the door. Then it was unlocked from without and two men came in. I could hear them speaking to each other before they entered. One man asked my name. I whispered to Mr. Harding, “What shall I say to them?” curiously enough not feeling much fear in the distress of the situation. I never could explain this to myself except that I loved Warren Harding so much that if he were with me it didn’t matter what happened. “Tell them the truth!” he said. “They’ve got us!” He seemed so pitifully distressed. So I told the man my name, where I lived, where I worked, in answer to queries put to me gruffly. All this information he wrote down on a pad. Mr. Harding sat disconsolately on the edge of the bed, pleading for them to allow me to go. He seemed to base his plea on the argument that we had not disturbed any of their guests, and for this reason we should be allowed to depart in peace. “I’ll answer for both, won’t I?” he entreated them. “Let this poor little girl go!” They told him he should have thought of that before, and other things I thought were very unkind considering he had not bound and dragged me there; I had come of my own free will. I remember he told them I was twenty-two years old, and I, not realizing that he wanted to make me as old as he safely could, interrupted him and stated truthfully that I was only twenty.

To almost every argument he advanced in my behalf they answered, “You’ll have to tell that to the judge.” They intimated that they were sending for a police-patrol. I did become frightened then. About that time one of the men picked up Mr. Harding’s hat. Inside was his name, “W. G. Harding,” [Pg 50]in gold lettering, and upon seeing that name they became calm immediately. Not only calm but strangely respectful, withdrawing very soon. We completed our dressing.

We packed our things immediately and the men conducted us to the side entrance. On the way out Mr. Harding handed one of them a $20 bill. When we were in the taxi, he remarked explosively, “Gee, Nan, I thought I wouldn’t get out of that under $1000!”

We went to Churchill’s for dinner and he returned to Washington on the midnight train.

Some time later, upon the occasion of one of his visits, Mr. Harding told me that he had found out something he had not then known: namely, that a member of the House of Representatives or of the United States Senate cannot be detained for any reason whatsoever when he is enroute to Washington to serve the people. At the time of our almost tragic adventure Mr. Harding had been “enroute,” for he had stopped to be with me in New York on his way back to Washington from some city where he had delivered an address.

Shortly after that, a week or ten days probably, he came over again. We took a taxi ride. Mr. Harding asked the taxi man where we could find a nice, quiet place where we could feel assured of not being disturbed. I shall never forget how much fun we had over this drive. The taxi driver nodded and turned the car into Riverside Drive. On and on we sped, and we both wondered where under the sun the place was to which he was driving us. When we reached Riverside Drive and One Hundred and something (this was before the Drive was cut through to Dyckman Street), the driver stopped the car beside a lonely wood, jumped out and disappeared into the wood. I shall never forget how funny it seemed to us. “Well,” laughed Mr. Harding, “he is an accommodating driver anyway!” In about ten or fifteen minutes the driver returned. “Say, George,” Mr. Harding said, “we want a hotel.” “Yes, sir,” the driver replied, without glancing around, and with every indication that he understood all along but was just carrying out a little [Pg 51]program of his own. Back down the Drive we went and into 60th Street. He stopped in front of a hotel of his own selection, hopped out and went in and almost immediately returned. “This is all right, sir,” he said.

It was a rather shabby place but we felt fairly safe. However, in hotels of that character there was always the fear of being raided. We never had any trouble, however, and we went there several times, probably six or seven in all.

On August 11th, 1917, I received from Mr. Harding my first gift. It was a wrist-watch—a birthday present, given in advance of my twenty-first birthday because I was so in need of a time piece. With it, or rather in the same mail, came a letter from Mr. Harding. The Daniels had been informed that “Dean Renwick,” the young man I had met in Chicago and with whom I was still carrying on a desultory correspondence, had been sent to Washington on war-work (though he had not), and I named him as the donor of the wrist-watch. However, they always accused me of having received it from Mr. Harding, I suppose because the letter accompanying its receipt was obviously from him, bearing the United States Senate return. Mrs. Daniels always inspected the mail carefully.

The letter I received was written merely for me to show because I had told Mr. Harding that I wished he would write something I could show to Mr. Close. He therefore wrote this, and sometime later another, which formal letters, in view of the many love-letters I was receiving, were jokes to us.

The above-mentioned letter stated that he had seen Mr. Filbert of the United States Steel Corporation when the latter was in Washington, and had been told by him that I was doing nicely in the Welfare Department and “promised to become a most valuable addition to their force.” Mr. Harding also [Pg 52]wrote, “I hope you like the place as much as he reports liking you, and ... find it a desirable avenue to an agreeable career.... Making good counts with them.” Then he assured me of his very best wishes for my success and, which made me smile affectionately, “the happiness which goes with it.” He knew that our love for each other provided the abundance of that happiness.

I received a good many letters from Mr. Harding at the Steel Corporation. He usually sent them in plain envelopes. He used blue envelopes very frequently; these were of very tough fibre but not weighty. His letters varied in length from one to sixty pages. He wrote me a great deal, he said, sitting within hearing distance of the Senate proceedings. And I received a special delivery letter almost every Sunday morning, for which my landlady usually signed. What glorious awakenings those Sunday morning letters used to bring!

In the fall—in November of 1917—I moved next door to 611 West 136th Street, and from then until the spring of 1919 I lived with Mr. and Mrs. P. J. Johnson, as I shall call them. I am sure Mrs. Johnson often wondered who my “man of mystery” was. The one and only picture on my dresser was the photograph of Mr. Harding which he had sent me while I was still living with the Carters. Naturally I stayed out all night with him and I am sure Marie Johnson never believed I was staying with “one of the girls” as I used to tell her.

One evening I walked into my rather exclusive boarding-place, which was at 136th Street and Riverside Drive in a private apartment. About twenty people ate there, among them the former wife of Carlyle Blackwell, the moving-picture actor, and several girl friends of mine. One of the girls called out to me, “Oh, Nan, I saw you at the Grand Central Station this afternoon with a stunning iron-gray haired man. How you were hanging on his arm! What I know about you! I knew who he was, all right!” I probably blushed, but there was nothing left for me to do but admit it. Afterward I doubted her statement for I don’t think Mr. Harding was very well-known [Pg 53]then in New York. Mr. Harding had been obliged to return to Washington at four that afternoon, which accounted for the fact that I was dining at my boarding-place that evening.

I always loved my room at the Johnson’s. The room I occupied at Daniels’ next door had been one right off the kitchen, the maid’s room really, and the one I secured at Johnson’s was larger, far better furnished, and lighted by electricity instead of gas as the former room had been. The Johnsons were young, very attractive, and heartily in sympathy with my love-affair, though in the two years I lived with them I could not introduce them to my “mysterious sweetheart.”

Next to my bed stood a good-sized table on which I wrote to my beloved. There was a reading lamp with a shade of yellow and green. Above the table hung a large oval mirror. My letter-writing oftentimes extended into the early morning hours and there was something companionable about sitting there with my reflection. Not only was it companionable but it was satisfying to glance more than occasionally into the mirror and smile at the girl who smiled back at me knowing, as I knew, that she was the sweetheart of the man who was to me easily the most desirable man in all the world. I studied the features of this girl in the mirror, studied them interestedly, minutely, to discover for myself just why he had chosen to love her! Sometimes, after I had been talking most intimately to my lover on the small ruled pad before me, I would glance up and catch the soft lights in the eyes of the girl in the mirror which were the tell-tale lights of worshipping love or languishing passion. And with flushed cheeks and fast-beating heart I would bring my letter to a close, exchange exultant smiles with the girl in the mirror, and jump into bed.

It was during my visit to my mother in New Philadelphia, Ohio, her old home town where she was teaching in 1918, that I, desiring to see my mother settled in a larger city, wrote Mr. Harding for a suitable letter to use as an introduction to the Superintendent of the Cleveland Public Schools. I had talked this whole situation over with Mr. Harding in person, and the letter which I sent him from New Philadelphia was merely to advise him that I was now ready for his proffered letter of introduction in behalf of my mother. Of course I told my mother nothing about the previous talk with him.

Mr. Harding always gave me very explicit instructions, whether it was where to meet him and the hour, or, as in this case, how to proceed in a given situation, and the letter received from him, which I have before me now, clearly indicates this characteristic. With the letter to me he enclosed one to Dr. Frank T. Spaulding, then Superintendent of Public Schools in Cleveland, and one to Mr. Mark Thomson, then President of the Board of Education. The letter to Mr. Thomson has been mislaid or lost but I have retained the one addressed to Dr. Spaulding.

To me, Mr. Harding wrote more than a full-page, single-space, letter. He suggested that I apply in behalf of my mother, going to Cleveland enroute East after my vacation. He wrote that I should “speak frankly” to the Cleveland officials concerning my mother’s age. “... there may be a limitation of age in the beginning of employment of teachers under the Cleveland system,” he explained.

“I am sure you will have the tact and understanding to go into these matters quite fully in Cleveland ... if I had the opportunity of going to Ohio, I should be delighted to make a personal inquiry at Cleveland in your mother’s behalf. I do not think there is a possibility of my going to the home state [Pg 55]until some time in July and this matter, of course, must be settled at a very early time....”

Then, in an informal, chatty tone, he wrote, “I was interested to note of your visit to Marion and hope you had an enjoyable visit there. I have not been in the old town myself since early in last February....” What fun to read these things and to know that he had only the week before received from me a letter in fullest detail about my visit to Marion, my time having been divided among his sister’s, Mrs. Sinclair’s and my chums’ homes!

I was quite accustomed to receiving lengthy letters from Mr. Harding where there were instructions to be given me, and I am afraid I paid less heed to his counsel in this case than it warranted. I always felt so confident when I attempted to gain admittance anywhere and was privileged to use his name, because I knew he would “back me up strong,” as he so often assured me. Therefore, fortified with two letters and these addressed to the principal officials in the Cleveland schools, I made ready to take my mother there immediately instead of abiding by his advice to stop there myself enroute East and make preliminary inquiry.

This matter of changing positions was entirely my own idea and not at all instigated by my mother. Mr. Harding had smiled when I explained to him, “If mother were in Cleveland she would be on a direct line from New York. New Philadelphia is so inaccessible when I take my vacations!” Considering that I made all of one or two trips a year to Ohio (!) this argument could hardly have been expected to work substantially in behalf of the desired change, but Mr. Harding always accepted tolerantly even my flimsiest reasoning. Naturally I hastened in this instance to build up my case.

When mother saw how earnestly I had sought to make possible an interview with the Superintendent of Public Schools in Cleveland, she consented reluctantly to accompany me to Cleveland. She read very carefully Mr. Harding’s letter to [Pg 56]Dr. Spaulding. Mr. Harding had written all that was necessary, I was sure, to obtain an excellent position for mother, possibly an immediate principalship! I couldn’t quite understand my mother’s persistent skepticism. In fact, she didn’t even seem enthusiastic about making the trip.... “I have known Mrs. Britton for as much as twenty years and know her to be a woman of sterling character and very notable intellectual capacity.... I have known the family for a great many years and have known of Mrs. Britton’s attainments during all of that time.... If you have a vacancy in your schools I am confident you will find her a very desirable member of your teaching staff, who is well able to give quite as satisfactory account of herself as the numerous teachers which Cleveland has taken from my home town of Marion....”

With characteristic assurance I handed this note to the gentleman into whose presence mother and I were ushered with due ceremony. He read it, I thought, with indifferent interest. When he had finished he shrugged his shoulders slightly, lifted his eyebrows, and looked from mother to me. Mother seemed embarrassed. I was not. I showed plainly that I wished to represent my mother in this matter when the gentleman before us inquired frankly why mother had not applied direct. I was not used to this kind of reception! I stated for my mother that she was not particularly interested in changing positions but that I wanted her to teach in the Cleveland schools. And Mr. Harding, as United States Senator from Ohio, was also interested in having her placed there.

The gentleman and my mother exchanged glances. The gentleman’s eyes lighted as though with sudden comprehension. “Um.... I see!...” He turned to me. All at once, as I returned his look, I wilted inside. How well I knew the meaning of that look! It was the inevitable result of my oft-lamented little-girl appearance. I had encountered it too many times. In this instance, as in dozens of others before it, it provoked the tone of voice I deplored—the patient, explanatory, slow tone, the unmistakable talk of an elder to a child....

[Pg 57]

But, although the letter on which I had banked 100% had failed in its mission, I was entirely unwilling to recognize that the Cleveland age limit had anything whatever to do with it. I immediately fixed in my mind a descriptive noun which was sufficient to me to explain the whole situation. “Democrat!” I whispered to mother with a curl of my lips as we went down in the elevator. Poor mother! How often has she suffered in silence for her children’s whims!

And it was a long time, try as he would, that even Mr. Harding could persuade me that the fact that mother was beyond the age limit of thirty-five years disqualified her immediately for consideration as a beginning teacher in the Cleveland Public Schools.

During the years I was Mr. Harding’s sweetheart, I always, even from the first, helped my mother financially. Mr. Harding used to say, “Let’s take a taxi to such-and-such a place,” but I would say, “Let’s walk,” and he very often accused me affectionately of wanting to save that money so that I could send it to my mother. Of course it would not have been possible for me to send her anything had it not been for his generosity, and he was glad, more than glad, as he told me repeatedly, to make it possible so long as no comment was made or no wonder excited. When I started to work in the United States Steel Corporation my salary was $16, and my room rent $4 per week, and it was obviously impossible for me to do much on the balance. Mr. Harding was always interested, and very sympathetic toward the position in which my mother had suddenly found herself upon father’s death. He has often said to me, “Nan, dearest, you know how much I would like to help you to make it easier for your mother, don’t you?” I surely did. Often also he expressed the feeling that Howard, my younger brother, should be bearing the heavy load of responsibility. “He should be the bread-winner, Nan,” Mr. Harding would say to me. But “Doc,” as we called him, was scarcely more than a child, with far less sense of responsibility toward the family than had Elizabeth and I, both his seniors.

Mr. Harding’s attitude about my taking on any possible confidantes was a very decided one. From the first he begged me to keep our secret and tell it to no one. It seemed to me that he most of all warned me against my mother’s knowing. It has many times occurred to me that this solicitude on his part came from his keener wisdom about mothers in general as well as, in my particular case, his knowledge of my mother’s conventionality.

It was during our first sweetheart days, although it seems to me it was before my complete surrender to Mr. Harding, that I visited in Marion, and, with the longing to talk with someone I really loved and respected besides my beloved Mr. Harding, I put my case hypothetically to his sister “Daisy.” She recalled that I had done this when I first talked with her about the whole matter in June of 1925, and she also recalled her answer which I had in the meantime, immediately after my visit with her, repeated to her brother Warren. She had said, when I asked her what she would do if she were in love with a man whom she could not marry, but who might want her to belong to him anyway, “Don’t do it, Nan; the world is against you; no matter how much you love each other, don’t!” I had repeated this to Mr. Harding. I remember he said, as he has often said about Daisy, “Dais’ is a good girl, Nan, but, dearie, anyone would tell you that! Anyone would advise you against it who didn’t know how much I love you!” This intimation of his loving protection strengthened my decision that ours was an exceptional case.

And he did love me too! With the first forty-page love-letter of which I have spoken and which came to me at the Colonial Hotel in Chicago in June of 1917, came also from Washington a snapshot which I have preserved, though the corners are frayed from much kissing and handling. I wrote him that I [Pg 60]had kissed it many many times. He wrote, “Don’t waste any more kisses on a likeness, Nan, when the original yearns for your kisses.” The only thing I did not like about that cherished likeness was that he told me a woman had snapped it!

In this connection an incident occurs to me which he related to me upon one of our earlier visits. He told it to me at dinner, with reference to annoying requests from petty office seekers who employ all kinds of bribery to gain their ends.

One such individual, a man, had an even more ambitious wife, who desired to see her husband lifted to a certain post and chose Senator Harding as the intercessor. Mr. Harding said that the lady called him on the phone and requested that he stop in on his way home one evening—she wished to see him “on business.” He said he thought nothing about it and accordingly stopped at her apartment, naturally expecting to find her husband home also. The lady herself answered his ring, however, and Mr. Harding said when he followed her into the living-room he observed with bewilderment and embarrassment that she was becomingly en negligee, and the way in which she dropped down upon the comfortable couch and spread the flimsy folds of her negligee gracefully about her could mean but one thing. He told me with such adorable embarrassment of her frankness and of his own confusion. I can imagine well all of this because I know his innate sense of delicacy and refinement. It was probably with difficulty that he excused himself, for I am sure women of that type do not let their prey go easily. The thing of course that pleased me about the story was his assurance that he couldn’t ever “fall for” anybody but me.

I think it was late fall of 1918 when Mr. and Mrs. Harding went to Texas to visit their friends, Mr. Fred Scobey and his wife. Mr. Scobey, Mr. Harding told me, had a large warehouse in San Antonio and was rather wealthy.

I failed to hear from Mr. Harding upon the occasion of that trip South as soon as I felt I should, and so I wired him at Scobey’s, in care of the warehouse. I received a wire in return, [Pg 61]though I have forgotten the contents, except for the love allusion. It was sent to me either at the Steel Corporation or at 611 West 136th Street. He told me later in New York how they had all gone off on an island somewhere and he just didn’t seem to have a minute to himself to write me.

Earlier that fall, on August 17, 1918, to be exact, Mr. Harding had an engagement in Plattsburg, New York, to address an audience. He wrote inviting me to come up there for the day, enclosing ample funds, and told me with his usual explicitness the exact train to take out of New York at night which would land me in Plattsburg in the morning. He stopped at a hotel which I recognized recently in a post card picture as the New Witherell. I arrived about 8.00 o’clock in the morning and went to the same hotel, registering, I believe, under the usual fictitious name of Christian.

I shall never forget how the sun was streaming in at the windows of that room in the hotel when Mr. Harding opened the door in his pajamas in answer to my rather timid knock. His face was all smiles as he closed the door and took me in his arms.

“Gee, Nan, I’m s’ glad t’ see you!” he exclaimed. I just loved the way he lapsed into the vernacular when we were alone together. My room was not far from his and I had deposited my bag before going to him. He asked all about these things—when I arrived, how I had registered, and where my room was located.

Then we planned our day. He was to speak that afternoon and gave me the direction and location of the training-ground where his address would be delivered, and explained that he would not be able to see me after the luncheon hour for the people in charge would take possession of him. But we could, [Pg 62]he said with adorable enthusiasm, have the whole blessed morning together.

Oh, how happy that made me! There were really so few times when we could be together with a feeling of utter safety, and the sunshine, the occasion and the beauty of the place itself all pointed propitiously to a red letter day in our calendar of happiness.

I met him about half an hour later, by arrangement, in a grove near the hotel, and together we strolled toward the main street of Plattsburg and out into the country. But first Mr. Harding stopped at a corner store and bought some smokes. I was proud of the new dress I was wearing and thought Mr. Harding’s smile betrayed approval as he joined me outside the store, cigarettes in hand, and surveyed me with beaming countenance.

I accused him affectionately of having made a reconnaissance of the outskirts of the village prior to my arrival, for certainly it seemed to me he could have chosen no lovelier spot than the sunny meadow where we spent the morning. It sloped gently down to a winding stream, and on one side there was a thick wood. The ground was soft and the grass high. It was sweet to hold his head on my lap and have him just lie there looking up at the blue sky.

We were both full of loving reminiscences and future plans, and Mr. Harding included in his musings certain things bearing upon his position as senator. I realize the paucity of political allusions in this manuscript, but the reader is to remember that while he was moving in the most active governmental circles at that stressful period in the history of our country, when I was with Mr. Harding alone our conversation was not principally political but warmly personal. However, when he chose to confide his problems and little worries to me it made me very proud and I took them very seriously. Right then he was up against a problem which was causing him considerable anxiety: the folks back home had scheduled him for a speech in December, I think he said, and he was supposed to call upon [Pg 63]some fellow senator to accompany him to Marion and make an address also.

“La Follette would be fine,” he mused with emphasis as he chewed thoughtfully on a stalk of timothy, “but he doesn’t want to do it.”

“Why?” I inquired.

“Oh, principally because he is small of stature compared with me and a bit sensitive on that score; I can understand that perfectly, although he is a convincing speaker and I think would make a sensation in Marion....”

How well I could appreciate just how keen Mr. Harding was to give our home town one of the best speakers the United States Senate could boast! I suggested with some timidity Hiram Johnson, or Borah of Idaho, both of whom I judged from my morning perusals of the New York papers were picturesque enough certainly, and seemed to make the Senate sit up and take notice. He discussed various senators ruminatively and explained patiently why he could not ask this one or that one. When I interposed certain remarks or suggestions he would smile appreciatively; I suppose there was an element of naivete about my suggestions of which I was blissfully unaware. He was quite talkative that day, telling me something of the friendship which existed between him and Mrs. Harding and the Frelinghuysens. The circumstances of our companionship that day were highly conducive to deliberate and confidential meditation, though these things interested me far less than our intimate personal discussions.

“Do you like my dress, sweetheart?” I could not help asking.

“You bet!” he replied, with admiration, sitting up to examine it more closely.

“Guess how much I—you—paid for it?” I challenged.

“Oh, I couldn’t guess, dearie. How much?”

“Thirty-five dollars!”

“Honestly, Nan?”

I nodded, with pride. That was, for war-time, quite inexpensive.

[Pg 64]

“Why, Nan,” he said, “it looks a great deal more. And it is in very excellent taste—so are the shoes and hat.”

“The hat and shoes are good ones,” I informed him, “and I thought the dress such a bargain.”

“Gee, yes, Nan—why, Florence pays——”

But I was never interested to know how much Mrs. Harding paid for anything, even though I knew she must pay a great deal more for everything than I did. I was happier, I’m sure, than she ever was, and though I did not care to speak of her except to inquire casually of Mr. Harding how she was, it was from no dislike of her; for I merely felt sorry for her. For one to lose the affection of this man beside me was, to me, a loss so colossal that surely she could never find anything to take its place. I was so happy in his love.

Mr. Harding himself was never extravagant. I remember distinctly that on one occasion when I told him I had sent my “kid brother Doc” some money and confided to him that “It costs Doc $8 for a pair of shoes!” he turned to me and said, “Nan, do you know how much I pay for shoes?” I said, “No, how much?” and he answered, “I pay $5 and I have had this particular pair of shoes for two years. That is all any fellow should pay for shoes.” And that was during war-time when things were high.

I have witnessed many instances illustrative of Warren Harding’s thrift so far as he himself was concerned. He preached economy when he was President and he honestly practised economy and applied his preachments to his own daily life. Only where those dearer to him than his own life were concerned did he allow extravagance, and even then he used to chide me in a loving way for not putting away some money. It was for this reason that I began to buy steel stock, having put but $60 into it however when an urgent need of my mother caused me to draw out the money and send it to her.

I might give another incident of Mr. Harding’s ideas of fair prices. We were dining at Churchill’s. Our dinner was simple enough—chicken, I remember. It seems to me we did have [Pg 65]one cocktail apiece before dinner. The bill was something over $15. Mr. Harding tipped the waiter $1.50. I watched his face as he counted out the money for the waiter. After the waiter had gone, he looked across at me and shrugged his shoulders. “You know, Nan, I am not penurious, but a bill like that is really ridiculous.” Then quickly the look of impatience was gone and the incident closed.

I used to love these dinners with Mr. Harding. They were so sweetly intimate, and it was a joy just to sit and look at him. The way he used his hands, the adorable way he used to put choice bits of meat from his own plate onto mine, the way he would say with a sort of tense seriousness, “That’s a very becoming hat, Nan,” or, “God, Nan, you’re pretty!” used to go to my head like wine and make food seem for the moment the least needful thing in the world.

But there was nothing whatever the matter with my appetite. Perhaps I was still adding stature at twenty, which has been known to give zest to one’s appetite. Whatever the reason, it would not be exaggerating greatly to admit that I was, at least in my own opinion, quite a young gormandizer. I remember writing to Mr. Harding, “You’re not in love with a girl—she’s a hungry little animal!”

Mr. Harding himself was, I thought, quite an epicure, despite the fact that he could enjoy plain, substantial food. Eggs were my breakfast stand-by, but invariably Mr. Harding’s query when we breakfasted together would be, “Will you have codfish cakes with me this morning, dearie?” In fact, I do not remember that he seemed to care for eggs at all. He seemed fond of honey-dew melon, I remember. He would look across the table (which seemed to me always to be at least half a mile wide!) and inquire smilingly, “How about a little [Pg 66]orange marmalade this morning, Nan?” I never could make up my mind whether he ordered this for me because he knew I had a sweet tooth, or whether he really liked it himself; I’m inclined to the latter opinion.

But it was at dinner that Mr. Harding could play the host to great advantage so far as I was concerned. I have been introduced to many delicious dishes through Mr. Harding. Often these things, ordered by him after a side consultation with the waiter to which I hugely enjoyed listening, were served by Mr. Harding instead of by the waiter. How he seemed to love to hear me exclaim over a dish that was new to me!

The dessert course usually inclined me to an enthusiastic inspection of the menu. Mr. Harding knew this and his query, “What kind of sweets tonight, Nan?” was accompanied by a smile and the adjustment of his Oxford glasses. Then he himself would suggest, and his smile deepen as I would childishly exclaim, “Oh, yes, I just adore biscuit tortoni!” I early observed that he himself was inclined to skip this course of the dinner, and grew glad, because then he could plan our evening aloud while I acquainted myself fully with the contents of the little cup in front of me.

I remember that Mr. Harding never seemed to care for the ice-water served in hotels. I can just hear him, either at dinner, or after we had retired to the privacy of our room, instructing the attendant, “Bring me a bottle of White Rock, George.”

Mr. Harding’s table manner charmed me. I say “manner” because the plural would be taken for granted once one had seen him. With what grace he ate and talked! With his eyes upon me, it was impossible for me to concentrate upon two things at one time, impossible to give the necessary heed for enjoyment to the most delicately served viands-under-glass when it was expected that I should look up and make ardent reply to an affectional question. Therefore, when I was wont to sit absorbed, I would suddenly be reminded in gentle tones that my food must be getting cold! But I have known this [Pg 67]absorption to work mutually, when we were lost to ourselves and our surroundings in the depths of each other’s eyes.

So potent was this spell which we had for each other that for whole evenings we were its willing prisoners, living as in a dream, neither of us coming out from the intoxication of each other’s presence until long after separation. Often then we wrote to each other about it. If we were in a taxi, we would become so oblivious to the entire world we would both be amazed when we reached our destination.

I was so proud of Mr. Harding, too, for he never entered a room that all eyes were not turned in his direction. I used to think of Florence Harding, his wife, in this connection, for I knew well his fascination and could readily understand how she, or any other woman, might “run after him” as Marionites say she pursued Warren Harding before they were married, when she was Florence Kling DeWolfe, and years older than Warren Harding. I understood, for hadn’t I followed him around when I was but a child back in our home town?

One time Mr. Harding visited Senator Weeks at his place in the White Mountains along with some of the “other fellows,” as he called them, and came down to New York on his way to Washington after a season of “chopping wood.” I met him at the Grand Central Station and we dined at the Belmont Hotel, downstairs in the grill. He had had a speaking engagement which he had filled enroute to New York, and had spoken in a tent, he said. It had been dark when he made his way in through the rear entrance of the tent and he had fallen over one of the cables supporting the tent and scratched his hand terribly. He used to tell me things like this with a sort of embarrassment, as though he were ashamed of admitting them, and the very manner of telling increased my sympathy a thousandfold.

[Pg 68]

I think it was during this particular visit at Senator Weeks’ that he had become ill. He had a particularly sensitive stomach, and he had eaten too much lobster. He said they had had lobster for luncheon, and were all gathered together when the chef came in and asked Senator Weeks what it should be for dinner. Mr. Harding spoke up and said laughingly, “Lobster!” and he had been taken seriously and they had dined on lobster that night. And he had overeaten. He said he was so ill and his fears about whether or not he would recover were so great that he almost confessed his relationship with me to someone up there, in order that they might carry out his plans for a suitable settlement upon me. I never liked the idea of even talking about “settlements”; it made things seem so final.

Once I met Mr. Harding in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he delivered an address at the local armory. I arrived there to find he had already gone on the platform. So I wrote a note and despatched it to him by messenger. He left immediately and came out to meet me in the lobby of the armory, where we stood and talked until it was time for him to go back to the platform. I remember how he instructed me to return immediately to New York after he had finished speaking, because they were taking him to the local Elks’ Club and he could not see me anyway. He used to remind me of my father in his solicitude for my getting home safely. But I waited, and after he had had time to reach the Club I phoned him and asked if I couldn’t go on over to Washington with him that night. I said I could come back the following day. “Why, dearie, they’re stopping a special train for me—a through train—and I couldn’t explain having you with me. Now you take the first train back to New York and I’ll be over soon, I promise you!” Which I did of course. And he kept his promise.

There were memorable visits to Washington. The first time I went over I went to the New Ebbitt Hotel, following Mr. Harding’s instructions, where I registered as Miss Elizabeth N. Christian. Mr. Harding came to see me and came up to my room. He took me for a long ride that afternoon in a beautiful hired touring car about the city and out along the Potomac. I well remember that car; it was grey and very beautifully upholstered and glided so smoothly along the streets while Mr. Harding pointed out places of interest to me. His boyish enthusiasm in playing host was delightful, and I am sure I was a most appreciative guest. That evening we went to his office in the Senate Building, which was then Room 314; later on he moved to Room 341, I think it was. I was in both offices I know.

On our way to the Senate Office Building, we cut through the Capitol grounds.

“Some day you will be President,” I said to him.

“Say, you darling,” he replied, “I’ve got the best job in the United States right now!” I think Mr. Harding did like being Senator.

I remember once when I was in Washington, going over Saturday and returning Sunday night, he took me on Saturday night to the theatre to see the play, “Good Morning, Judge!” That is, he took me to the door of the theatre! I remember how disappointed I was when he turned to leave me after telling me to take a taxi after the performance and “get back to the hotel and into bed.” I had not asked him, but had taken it for granted he was going to the show with me. I must have forgotten I was in Washington and not in New York, where he could go around with me without so much fear of being recognized.

[Pg 70]

[Pg 71]

In New York we did go to the theatre together. Sometimes he would come over, take me to the theatre and return to Washington at midnight. Mrs. Harding was ill a good deal of the time and he found it difficult to be away as much as he would have liked. Perhaps the reader may recall Woodrow Wilson’s saying to a New York theatre audience one evening, “You think you are seeing a President of the United States, but you are just seeing a tired man having a good time.” This was when he attended a performance of “Jack O’Lantern,” starring Fred Stone, at the Globe Theatre. One week later, Mr. Harding and I dined at the Biltmore and he bought tickets there for “Jack O’Lantern.” As we walked over to the theatre from the hotel, Mr. Harding said, “Guess how much these tickets cost, Nan?” and told me he had paid $5.50 apiece for them. Another instance of what he termed war-time graft. But these prices still stay!

Behind us in the theatre sat a man who seemed to recognize Mr. Harding, for I heard him speak Mr. Harding’s name and turned after awhile to look at him. Mr. Harding turned too later on, but said he did not know the man. I suggested that some day everybody would be turning to look at him—when he was President! In this connection I repeated to Mr. Harding what Woodrow Wilson had been quoted as having said the previous Friday night. “Well, I’ve got one over him!” Mr. Harding whispered to me, as the curtain rose, “I’m not tired and I am having a grand time!”

One night we went to see Al Jolson in “Sinbad, the Sailor,” at the Winter Garden. I was not particularly taken with the show and evidenced my impatience to leave during the finale. I pulled my wrap about my shoulders, picked up my gloves and paid no attention to the performance. “Where are you going, Nan?” Mr. Harding asked in gentle rebuke. If ever there was anyone thoughtful of others it was Warren Harding, and it is likely that, being a speaker himself, he wished to extend all possible courtesy and attentiveness to others who held the stage.

[Pg 72]

[Pg 73]

I am reminded in connection with these gay evenings of the many times Mr. Harding told me how proud he was as a youth to play in the local band in his very small home town of Caledonia, Ohio. He said he played the bass horn, and would chuckle over recollections of his vociferous contribution to the ensemble.

Despite the fact that I cut out and preserved pictures of him in his band uniform, I have always been unable to visualize a youthful Warren Harding in any capacity. He always seemed to me too dignified to have ever been less than the statesman I first beheld; yet he said that he felt far more eminently important and dignified as a member of the Caledonia Band than as United States Senator from Ohio!

Shortly after this, Mr. Harding invited me to Washington. He met me at the station and announced zestfully that he had secured the apartment of a friend of his with whom he sometimes played cards. I registered at the New Ebbitt Hotel, and he called for me there. The apartment to which he took me was not far from the New Ebbitt and we walked. He told me on the way over that it was quite a “cute little apartment” and he guessed it was all right for him to borrow it, although he knew the fellow to whom it belonged would undoubtedly come after him for some political favor as a result. When we entered the apartment, a walk-up, on the second or third floor, it seemed so dark, and when we found the room untidy and things in quite a mess, poor Mr. Harding was more than embarrassed. “Really, Nan, it is quite a nice place when it is fixed up,” he apologized, and I felt so sorry for him in his embarrassment. He never borrowed it again.

In January of 1919 Theodore Roosevelt died. Mr. Harding came over with many other notables to attend the funeral. I met him at the Biltmore Hotel. A good many of his friends and colleagues were standing about the lobby, looking very dignified and important in their formal clothes and top-hats. How stunning Mr. Harding looked! That time and once in the White House on Sunday morning were the only occasions [Pg 74]on which I ever saw him “dressed up.” We dined at the Biltmore that evening, and as we passed through the aisle of tables in a dining-room which sparkled with atmosphere under glittering candelabra, I heard a woman say, “There goes Harding!” I told him this and he identified her as a friend with whom he sometimes played billiards in Washington.

Mr. Harding and I had often talked of how wonderful it would be to have a child, and Mr. Harding told me frankly he had often wanted to adopt one, but “Florence” would not hear of it. He told me this in connection with his recital of his domestic unhappiness, and his usual final exclamation was, “She makes life hell for me, Nan!” And I, knowing this, did all within my power to make up to the man I loved all his legal wife failed to do. There was a time in 1918 when Mrs. Harding was very ill but Mr. Harding came over to New York to see me just the same. I remember once he said they had a trained nurse there constantly for a period. I felt sorry for Mrs. Harding, but I must confess I doubted very much Mr. Harding’s love for his wife at any time in his life.

I used to think Mr. Harding might have liked to adopt me, though he never said so to me. However, he spoke very freely to me about what he would do if Mrs. Harding were to pass on—he wanted to buy a place for us and live in the country, and often during those days Mr. Harding said to me, “Wouldn’t that be grand, Nan? You’d make such a darling wife!”

This reminds me: It was Warren Harding who told me for the first time of Angela Arnold’s engagement. But he did not use the word “engagement.” “I understand Angela Arnold is announcing her betrothment,” he said to me one evening at dinner. He chose to use words which, though sometimes archaic, were somehow substantially good and seemed especially [Pg 75]congruous coming from the lips of Warren Harding. But this bit of gossip interested me far less than his hushed exclamation across the table, “Gee, Nan, you’d make a lovely bride!” Once in a while, as on this occasion, I answered him, “Would I, darling Warren?” I called him Warren very rarely. He used to tease me to say to him, “Warren, darling, I love you,” and it seemed to delight him to hear me say his name. But I was so much younger than he—exactly thirty years his junior—that somehow it seemed out of tune for me to address him by his first name. I just resorted to endearments, usually calling him “sweetheart.” He called me “Nan” from the first and his letters usually began, “Nan darling.” I remember the salutation very often seemed as though it might have been put in after the body of the letter had been written, and when I asked him about it he said that was the case, for he so often wrote his letters to me on memo paper during legislative discussions in the Senate Chamber.

The first part of January, 1919, I went over to Washington. I think I stopped at the Raleigh Hotel. Mr. Harding sometimes found it difficult to be with me all of the afternoon and of course I understood this. He himself would in that case plan my afternoon for me, sending me on a bus trip to Arlington Heights, or suggesting some other form of entertainment. That particular afternoon and evening, however, he did spend with me up until ten-thirty or eleven o’clock. We went over to the Senate Office in the evening. We stayed quite a while there that evening, longer, he said, than was wise for us to do, because the rules governing guests in the Senate Offices were rather strict. It was here, we both decided afterward, that our baby girl was conceived. Mr. Harding told me he liked to have me be with him in his office, for then the place held precious memories and he could visualize me there during the hours he worked alone. Mr. Harding was more or less careless of consequences, feeling sure he was not now going to become a father. “No such luck!” he said. But he was mistaken, [Pg 76]and of course the Senate Offices do not provide preventive facilities for use in such emergencies.

“That’s a very stunning cape you have Nan,” were his words as he helped me slip into its brown woolly softness. That was the first time he had seen the cape which Marie Johnson had helped me to select in New York and for which I had paid $75, buying it of course on the instalment plan. I adored the casual intimacy of tone he used.

In mid-January Mr. Harding came over to New York. He telephoned me at the Steel Corporation and I shall never forget how thrilled I was because I hadn’t known he was coming and he had surprised me. “Ask Mr. Close if you can have the rest of the afternoon off,” he said. Also, he suggested that I borrow the apartment of a friend of mine, a girl of whom I had spoken to him many times.

I told Mr. Close that my sweetheart was here unexpectedly and he gave me permission to leave for the rest of the afternoon. Mr. Close as well as everybody else in the office knew, of course, that I had a sweetheart who lived in Washington. I usually referred to him as “my man”—seldom calling him by name and when I did using the name “Dean.”

Then I got my friend’s permission to go up to her apartment, at 120th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Mr. Harding got off on the floor below and walked up one flight to prevent any suspicion on the part of the elevator man.

For a second time in less than two weeks, having none of the usual paraphernalia which we always took to hotels, and somehow not particularly concerned about possible consequences, we spent a most intimate afternoon. How indelible my memory of Mr. Harding sitting on the day-bed, his back against the wall, holding me in his arms and looking down at me with a smile that was so sweet that it made me want to cry from sheer contentment! “Happy, dearie?” he asked.

He thought my friend’s apartment very attractive and wished that I were earning enough to make it appear possible for me to have just such a place for myself, for he would love to give [Pg 77]it to me. He picked up my Christmas mesh-bag, his gift, which I carried back and forth with me to work until the newness of its possession wore off. “Do you like this sort of thing. Nan?” Mr. Harding asked me as he examined the bag. The mesh in the bag is so soft that it seems almost like silver cloth. “Oh, yes!” I answered quickly and he smiled understandingly at my fervor. Sometimes I was almost ashamed because I was so passionately fond of frivolous things like that.

Through mutual recognition of the trouble we might cause each other and the ensuing unhappiness that might befall, we early decided to destroy all love-letters. It goes without saying that this was a difficult thing for us to do, and we both clung to each other’s most recent letters as long as possible. Mr. Harding had a drawer in his desk in the Senate Office which he always kept locked and George Christian, his private secretary, had been instructed to destroy the contents, burn them I believe Mr. Harding said, if anything happened to him. Many of the heart-revealments of which I have spoken and will speak were put in writing by Mr. Harding—and declarations much stronger as well—and he himself admitted that nowhere except in French had he ever read anything comparable to the love-letters we used to write to each other.

When he wrote to me he enclosed his letter in an inside envelope which he invariably stamped with postage also, sometimes on the back as a seal, and when I wrote to him I enclosed and sealed my letter as many as three times, buying for this purpose envelopes of graduated sizes. I wrote on a small-sized note pad, ruled, and always used a pencil. Usually I addressed the innermost envelope to “Dean Renwick” so that if a letter were opened it gave the impression that it had been sent to someone merely in Mr. Harding’s care and was not meant for him personally.

[Pg 78]

He told me laughingly how he had once received a letter which was meant for a Rev. Harding, although the contents, he said, were far from religious. Also he said he had received mail for the Mr. Harding who was the Governor of the Federal Reserve, as well as mail meant for the Mr. Harding who was once the Governor of Iowa.

We lost several letters in transit. One that Mr. Harding addressed to me at the Steel Corporation, in a blue envelope, contained $30 in cash. It never reached me.

I sent Mr. Harding a letter one time, as he asked me to do, to Atlanta, Georgia. I have forgotten the occasion of his visit to that city. I put the letter in an inside envelope, as we always did, addressed it to him correctly at Washington, then in another outside envelope addressed to him as we had decided to address it, “Mr. A. Y. Jerose, General Delivery, Atlanta, Georgia,” each part of this name having for us an intimate meaning. Then I mailed it so it would reach him during his stay there. We puzzled a long time over the disappearance of that letter for it never reached him in Atlanta. Nor did the inside envelope which was addressed to him correctly in Washington. I remember we decided that someone in the dead letter office must have got hold of it, and we wondered what they thought if they read it.

The latter part of February, 1919, I knew for a certainty that I was to become the mother of Warren Harding’s child. I remember one morning in the subway train I felt so queer and faint that I was obliged to ask someone for a seat. Too, I had faint spells from nausea. These things did not distress me except as I was sometimes taken with the feeling that I just could not sit there opposite Mr. Close a minute longer and take dictation. Yet, on the whole, I felt well. I wrote Mr. Harding as soon as my belief was confirmed in my own mind.

[Pg 79]

The effect of Mr. Harding’s letters whenever I was perturbed over anything was to calm me, and he wrote that this trouble was not so very serious and could be handled. I honestly felt from the very first that he was more interested in having the child by far than in helping me to “handle” the problem otherwise, but of course our difficult situation called for a discussion of an operation, or other means of procedure. He was a married man, and United States Senator from Ohio.

I think Mr. Harding came over once or twice before I left New York for Chicago—though curiously enough these meetings do not stand out in my memory for the very possible reason that my mind was at that time occupied with my immediate problem.

It was late March or early April when I went to Chicago, having received permission from my employer in the Steel Corporation to take a vacation in advance of the regular summer-time absence. I stopped in Washington enroute according to arrangement and went to the New Willard. Mr. Harding came up to my room. I remember well, how, in spite of the fact that his forehead was wet and he showed other signs of nervousness, he said in the low voice which always soothed me, “We must go at this thing in a sane way, dearie, and we must not allow ourselves to be nervous over it.”

The growing lapse of time since the conception of our child very likely had weighed upon his mind for that was, I think, the thirteenth week. His evident nervousness strangely belied his words, but it did not matter for I myself was by that time entirely free from fear. I recall also how he said repeatedly, “I do not fear for the future, after the child comes, but only for the now.” It was those frequent allusions to the future and his worded assumption that we were going ahead and have the baby, coupled with his letters telling me it could be “handled,” and his apparent indifference to an operation, that made me all the more determined to have the child. But most of all was I swayed by my visit with him at this time, the visit at the New Willard which convinced me absolutely that Warren [Pg 80]Harding craved to be the father fully as much as I craved to be the mother of his child. His wistfulness was so precious to me. “You know, Nan, I have never been a father,” he said.

However, he was deeply concerned for both of us, and in an attempt at a simple solution, he went out and returned with some Dr. Humphrey’s No. 11 tablets, which, he said, Mrs. Harding used to take and found in some instances effective. I affirmed my belief that they would do me no good. I even made fun of the tiny white pills. I remember how he smiled faintly at me from the lavatory where he stood washing his hands when I expressed my belief that the pills would not be effective in my case. “No faith, no works, Nan!” he said.

He sat in the big chair by the window and took me on his lap. He told me how I had filled him with the first real longing he had known to have children. He said he had wanted them, yes, but Mrs. Harding had been a mother when he married her, and she had not wanted any more children, and, he reminded me, “You know Mrs. Harding is older than I.” I think very probably the glory and wonder of having a child or children could not be aroused within him to the fullest by Mrs. Harding because she had already shared the initial glory of that experience with another man. Mr. Harding always spoke disparagingly to me of Mrs. Harding, and in loving as well as in disposition and everything else he certainly failed to picture her as his ideal. Rather did I seem to be his ideal woman. This never failed to fill me with wonderment.

I told him in mock seriousness that since he had always had such a desire for children I’d have to raise a family for him. “All right, dearie, but let’s see how this one comes out!” he answered facetiously.

Again he told me, as he had written me so often since we knew of the coming of our child, how he had “enshrined” me in his heart as “the perfect sweetheart and perfect mother.” “Enshrined” was a word he so often used. Or, “You are my [Pg 81]shrine of worship, darling Nan,” he would say or write to me.

This brings to my mind a scene in the New Ebbitt when I, upon a visit to Washington during 1917 or 1918, had waited beyond the appointed hour for him to come to my room. When he came, about half an hour late, he found me en negligée and weeping! He kissed me tenderly and sat down on a chair to take me on his lap. But I, in mingled contrition and ingratiation, perhaps thinking a woman had been the cause of his being held up, dropped at his feet on the floor. He arose immediately and raised me up.

“Don’t you ever get down like that to me, you sweetheart!” he said, and the attempted gaiety in his voice somehow carried a note of self-reproach. “I’ll do all the kneeling in this family that is to be done!”

Then he explained how he just couldn’t get away earlier, and as he talked he fussed with a necklace I was wearing, asking me where I bought it, and pretty soon we were both smiling over my foolishness.

Now at the New Willard, facing our problem together, he was telling me how he had always thought of me as “the perfect sweetheart and perfect mother.” Of course those things were immeasurably sweet to hear. So were the things he visioned often for me of our life together after he had “finished with politics.” It was an old story to hear about “the farm” where he would like to settle down and just enjoy life. There would be dogs and horses, chickens and pigs, books and friends, and of course he would have to have “his bride!” Yes, this was an old story, but today it sounded strangely new to me. As he talked his voice grew tense. His hands trembled visibly. I took one of them in mine and held it tightly. His gaze was directed out the window and he spoke as to himself. I had to blink very hard to keep back my tears. I had never seen him so moved, so shaken....

“... and I would take you out there. Nan darling, as—my—wife....” He freed his hand with sudden force and grasped both my arms tightly. “Look at me, dearie!” he [Pg 82]cried, “you would be my wife, wouldn’t you? You would marry me, Nan? Oh, dearie, dearie,” brokenly, “if I only could ... if we could only have our child—together!” This last came as a hushed exclamation, almost a prayer, scarcely audible. The yearning of a heart laid bare! I nodded wordlessly. The very air seemed sacred.

When he spoke again it was as if he had returned to stern realities, and the return brought partial emotional relaxation. He smiled at me sadly. “Would be grand, wouldn’t it, dearie?” I could not yet safely answer but I nodded. He repeated it and looked out the window at his left. The voice grew stern again; he did not smile now; only just turned and looked at me hard as a man might who is trying not to cry....

To marry Warren Harding! To live on a farm and raise children with Warren Gamaliel Harding! What rapture! I put my lips against his and spoke through my kisses. “Oh, sweetheart, that would be too heavenly!” He whispered back, “You tell me about it, dearie!” And so I in turn pictured for him just what it would mean to be his wife, to live with him before the world, to raise “the young lieutenant” and perhaps other children, to love him, to wait upon him, to worship him forever and ever as the true bride of his heart! And the light of a love divine was in his eyes as I spoke. “And the young lieutenant must be the image of his dad, remember!” I ended brightly. “The young lieutenant” we had always called our coming baby, and strangely enough this fitted in with the story we afterwards concocted in explanation of our very difficult situation. “Won’t it be g-r-a-n-d to have a son?” I asked him now. He nodded smilingly. But months later, as I roused up out of the influence of chloroform to inquire of the doctor, “Is it a girl or boy?” and he answered briefly, “girl,” I decided immediately that I had wanted a girl all along!

“Grand” was a word Mr. Harding used to say, which seemed to him to express the different raptures he experienced in being with me. He used to drag the word out just as one might hold a morsel of ambrosially delicious food in his mouth [Pg 83]to prolong the taste. “Isn’t this g-r-a-n-d?” he used to ask me.

Sometimes just to ingratiate himself with me, to make me feel he was really just human like myself, he would deliberately use words like “ain’t,” or he would deliberately mispronounce words, as he used to do with the word “pretty,” calling me “you purty thing!”

Once, remembering how someone from Marion had spoken of him to me as not having had a particularly good education, and that only his personality had “put him over” so strongly, I spoke unthinkingly of this to Mr. Harding. My object in telling him was merely to instance the manner of jealousy on the part of some people who were themselves unqualified to fill his position. And he replied, “Well, Nan, none of them is sitting in the United States Senate!” I assured him that that was just what I had told the Marionite who had gossiped about him.

But to return to the visit at the New Willard. Somewhat related to this characteristic visioning in which we both indulged were his many dreams of being able to have me in a “fitting atmosphere,” one, he said, which would, as he flatteringly put it, “become your beauty, Nan.” He used to tell me that he visioned me always in a “blue mantle,”—a fancy he had never had about anyone else before, he said. Perhaps that was why he seemed to like to see me in blue....

So the trend into which our “serious conversation” drifted—I had hoped Mr. Harding would tell me definitely to go on and have the baby—was not one, in truth, to decide the issue. Therefore our problem was left in the air, or rather for me to solve. The fact that my own fears about myself were in no degree comparable to his own brought him back into the mood in which I loved most to see him, and I left a far calmer Warren Harding upon my departure than I found upon my arrival. I am sure my own sense of comparative serenity was entirely due to the fact that way down deep in my heart I had resolved to have no operation.

I arrived in Chicago the following day.

Up to this time I had never told Mr. Harding that I had ever confided at all in Elizabeth, my sister. I knew it would worry him needlessly. The first afternoon Elizabeth and I were alone together we had a talk. Elizabeth must have felt that the letters I had received from Mr. Harding during my visit to her in June of 1917, and our trip together in Indiana when I met Mr. Harding in Indianapolis, would eventuate in a liaison, for she warned me before I had volunteered any information that I ought to be “very, very careful.” She herself had in the meantime married and was living in an apartment she and her husband had taken.

Perhaps my face betrayed me. I felt so free with Elizabeth and did not attempt to hide my emotions. In any event, when she said that I ought to be “very, very careful” I began to cry. I told her with an attempt at a smile that it seemed to be too late to be careful. She was distressed beyond measure, but I hastily assured her, as Mr. Harding had assured me, that it was “all right” and I could “handle” it while in Chicago. Though I had been amply funded for this emergency I had actually thought not at all about an operation. It frightened me so to contemplate such a thing. The thought of having a child held no terror for me; it was the natural thing, and I did not fear it.

Nevertheless I pretended to engage myself in the serious consideration of such an operation. My sister Elizabeth seemed far more anxious than I. She helped me to find a doctor who took care of such cases, and went with me to see him. I remember how he told me, after an examination, that I was of such a nervous temperament that he would be fearful of performing an operation upon me. “If it were your sister there,” he said, indicating that if I were as imperturbable as my sister’s plump [Pg 85]figure made her appear to be, “it would not be taking such a risk.” But I knew that Elizabeth’s forced smile belied her real feelings.

Moreover, the doctor reminded me that I had allowed thirteen weeks to elapse.... “If you are, as you say, so situated that you can have the baby, I say by all means go ahead and have it,” was his parting advice. He said also that the process of having the child would not be nearly so painful as a premature operation would be and not detrimental to my health.

Elizabeth, however, was far from being at ease, and she then sought the advice of a dear friend of ours, telling her that it was she who needed advice. This friend helped her to prepare some “bitter apple” medicine for me which had to be compounded with painstaking effort, but after it was all ready and bottled I just could not bring myself to take it. The real reason was of course that I could not bring myself to destroy the precious treasure within me.

My letters from Mr. Harding further inclined me to believe that he himself was really indifferent to an operation. He wrote his distress at my having told Elizabeth, and said he really felt there was no need for that, that he had provided ample funds and it seemed I might have sought counsel without telling her, and so on. He wrote that if he had to choose between medicine and an operation he personally would prefer “the knife.” Just reading that word “knife” seemed almost to stab me every way, and served to strengthen my determination not to consider such a course. I remembered the wistfulness with which Mr. Harding had talked of a child. In short, I made up my mind to “go ahead and have the baby,” as the doctor had advised. I wrote that decision to Mr. Harding after I had taken occasion first to shame him for criticising me because I had confided in my sister. I wrote him that one would think from his letter that I had “shouted it from the housetops,” and that Elizabeth was an entirely safe person with whom to entrust our secret; and that, after all, one cannot solve such problems all alone.

[Pg 86]

He answered immediately that it was all right with him, he was sorry he had complained, he trusted me implicitly, and was “strong for me,” and that it was “the greatest experience a woman ever has,” and that he was looking forward to seeing me again. I welcomed the experience of childbirth with all my heart.

I returned to New York. The first of May I left the Johnson’s home on 136th Street and moved into a one-room-and-alcove-bedroom apartment in the Hotel La Salle Annex in East 60th Street. I sublet it from a woman whose husband was in Constantinople and whom she was planning to join there. There was a nice private entrance and my apartment was one flight up, on the second floor, rear.

It was on a Friday evening, my second evening in the apartment, when Mr. Harding came over from Washington. As a matter of fact, I had not yet moved into my own apartment, which was not available when I arrived, but was being housed temporarily in a very much superior apartment in the Hotel La Salle itself. This hotel was at that time the home of Mr. and Mrs. Dick (the former wife of John Jacob Astor), as well as Cyril Maude, the English actor. In the annex, on the top floor lived Pearl White, famed in pictures. Of course I told these interesting items to Mr. Harding when he came over. He had first been sent up to my temporary apartment in the hotel, where I had a cozy living-room. But I had been advised that I could move into my own place that evening and Mr. Harding said immediately that he much preferred that we “go where we belonged.” So he helped me move my baggage.

I recall my disappointment in hearing his first remark about my little place—our little place—for it was one of marked deprecation. The apartment was so much roomier and so much pleasanter than anything I had ever had that I thought it a [Pg 87]veritable palace, and was much hurt at his observations. “Really, Nan, it isn’t worth $100 a month!” he said. “Why, dearie, it isn’t good enough—I wanted you to have something really fine.” I said very little. I knew that he had originally told me about what he thought I ought to have to pay, and I had kept within that figure. I decided I must be a poor picker, yet I had been justified in my decision by having seen other apartments for which a higher rent was asked and which did not compare in my estimation with that one.

However, I remember with satisfaction how he retracted his criticism the second visit he made, after I had had an opportunity to dispense with some of the unnecessary furniture and fix things up a bit. He was quite enthusiastic. “Why, dearie, this is not such a bad place after all!” he smiled, taking in “the effect” with a sweeping glance into bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette. I took his coat and he handed me a big box of dark red cherries, for which he knew I had a weakness. He used to send me five-pound boxes of Martha Washington candies, they being my favorite sweets at that time, but after he knew I was going to have a child he would bring me fruit.

For two months we were very happy with that apartment, the only place we could call our very own during the six and one-half years we were lovers.

I had intimated to Mr. Harding that I would feel more comfortable now if I had a ring, and I expressed, upon his interrogation, my preference for a sapphire surrounded with diamonds. So on one of his trips to our 60th Street apartment he brought me the ring. I remember how he kept quiet about it, not telling me at first that he had brought it, and I confess I was a wee bit disappointed. I wanted a ring so badly. But at a very propitious moment he fished it out of a pocket, threw away the tissue paper in which it was wrapped, and slipped it upon my finger. We performed a sweet little ceremony with that ring, and he declared that I could not belong to him more utterly had we been joined together by fifty ministers. The ring was indeed a great comfort to me, helping to sustain me [Pg 88]in the conventional atmosphere I tried to throw about our baby’s coming, and, during those days after her birth when I had tried to lie in bed idle when there was much to be done, it was a source of courage and support to me, steadying me in my uncertain plans about the future. It was a material evidence of a relationship which no wedding ceremony could have made more solemn or more sacred than that very own ceremony between ourselves, with God as our witness.

Of course I continued working at the United States Steel Corporation, for my physical conformation was such that I could “get away” with quite a good deal. In fact, I worked there until the first of July when I gave up the apartment and my position and went to Asbury Park, New Jersey. I have often wondered if I did create any secret comment in the offices of the Steel Corporation. I remember a Wall Street Journal editor, who used often to come in to see Mr. Close, said one day to me, “Miss Britton, you look so matronly these days; have you grown up?” Five months for an unmarried girl who is expecting a child to attempt to remain in a position such as that required a good deal of courage. But I did it only with Mr. Harding’s approval, and whatever he thought wise usually went with me.

During those years I had a few friends here in New York who were Ohio people, and some of them were even Marionites like myself. Mr. Albert R. Johnstone, as I shall call him, represented at that time a certain Marion corporation here in New York, of which Mr. Harding had been one of the larger stockholders. I had been friendly with Mr. Johnstone’s wife ever since my coming to New York, and I had spoken several times to Mr. Harding about them. Mr. Johnstone knew of my fondness for his wife and very often the three of us went together to dinner or to the theatre. There was a time, however, [Pg 89]when Mrs. Johnstone went to Marion to visit, and Mr. Johnstone telephoned me and asked me to dine with him. This I did, thinking nothing about it until he asked me when he left me that night not to tell Mrs. Johnstone. Then I saw that he was afraid for her to know, and I knew that in that event it had been wrong for me to go with him, for I didn’t care at all if she knew that I was gracious enough to spend an evening with her lonely husband because she was my friend. All this I told Mr. Harding and I remember he said, “Well, Bert Johnstone is the last person on earth I feel I need to be jealous of!”

Mrs. Johnstone had been in our apartment on 60th Street one evening when she and I had dined together, and I suppose she had mentioned to her husband where I was living—probably wondering, as did most of my friends I imagine, how I could afford to live in an apartment alone.

One evening Mr. Harding was with me. I was just preparing to jump into the tub, and he was already in bed, when a knock on my door arrested my further movements. My door was “chained” as well as locked, so that I could open it slightly with no fear of anyone’s pushing it open.

This I did cautiously, and there stood Mr. Johnstone. I confess it gave me quite a shock, but I spoke to him very casually and fearlessly, told him I was just preparing for bed as I was very tired, apologized, and asked him to come again sometime. But, knowing that that was the first time he had dared to do such a thing as call upon me without Mrs. Johnstone, and being quite a bit put out with his presumption, I called quite loudly after him, “Oh, Mr. Johnstone, the next time you call bring Mrs. Johnstone along, won’t you?”

Then I went to the phone and called Mrs. Johnstone. After chatting with her a few moments, I told her about Mr. Johnstone’s coming to see me, and pretended I was very sorry I could not receive him. Her amazement was unfeigned.

“Bert Johnstone?” she asked incredulously. “The very same,” I told her. He never called again.

[Pg 90]

When I came back into the bedroom after closing the door upon Mr. Johnstone, Mr. Harding was hiding in my wardrobe closet, and it did amuse me so to see him. I asked if he thought if anyone did break in, that his being in a closet, with his clothes strewn about on the chairs, would help matters! He laughed, of course.

In May or June, while I was still living on East 60th Street in our apartment, Mr. Harding had an engagement to speak at Carnegie Hall. He came over during the day and we were together until time for him to go on the platform. In the evening we dined at the Hotel Manhattan, where, I think, for business reasons, he had engaged a room. He wished to walk to Carnegie Hall from the hotel, which we did. I remember the exact route we took, up Madison Avenue and across 56th Street where we passed several little tea rooms which, Mr. Harding said, he thought ought to be “good and safe” places for me to dine alone in the evenings. He seemed to be afraid I might be annoyed and used to suggest safe places for me to go. He was always looking out for my comfort and peace of mind.

On our way up he inquired of me what this building was and that, and I in turn asked him a question. How could he speak that evening when, as he had told me, he had made no preparation whatever for his speech? “How do you know what to say?” I asked curiously.

“Gee, dearie!” he laughed, “it’s not so much what to say as what not to say!”

When we reached Carnegie Hall, Mr. Harding went to the box office and secured a front-row seat for me, sent me on in, and ascended the platform. I remember well that speech. I did not very often get to hear him speak and it was always such a joy—I was so proud of him. But that speech I remember because [Pg 91]he did not do himself justice. He rambled on about this man and that who in one instance had been a “farmer’s son,” and had persevered and become a banker, or “here’s Jim So-and-So, whose father was owner of the stone quarry back in my home town and who worked his way through school....” The Land of Opportunity, I think, was his topic.

Afterwards, in our apartment, I told him he seemed not to speak as well as usual. “Why, dearie,” he confessed, “I was so tired I thought I couldn’t even speak at all!” And I knew enough by that time to understand why. He had a lot on his mind.

There was an evening when we dined at the Savoy. We sat by the window and looked out upon the Plaza Square where the fountain is. The window was open and it was cool and lovely. We had dined there before in the days before prohibition and Mr. Harding, I thought, seemed to be known to the hotel management. We had once had one glass each of champagne at that same table.

Mr. Harding spoke to me. “You are not larger now than that woman, Nan,” nodding his head toward the lithe feminine figure which tops the fountain in the Square. “And far more lovely,” he added, smiling. He was always generous with his appreciations.

Of course prohibition had already gone into effect, but I was told it was possible still to obtain liquor or wines if one knew how to do so, and evidently Mr. Harding thought he did. In any event, he took me home after dinner and then suggested that he go back and get some champagne for us to have that evening before we retired. He had often said to me that he would love to spend an evening with me when I was relaxed and exhilarated from a glass of champagne, because when he allowed me a cocktail or something to drink, we were usually going to the theatre afterwards. I guess I was a bit shy with him, and a glass of champagne made me a bit more talkative and revealing. I doubt that in all the times we were together we had drinks more than six times; he allowed it rarely.

[Pg 92]

But now he went out for the champagne. In about fifteen minutes he returned, empty-handed, or rather empty-pocketed. I searched in his pockets myself and looked up at him.

“You couldn’t get it!” I said, half disappointedly.

“No, dearie, I couldn’t get it,” he repeated, but his tone belied his statement, and I felt instinctively that he hadn’t even tried. Nor had he himself had anything to drink. For some reason, which was no doubt prudential and right, he had decided that I should not have any champagne. Perhaps he had recalled a time at Reisenweber’s when I, for apparently no reason, had become ill after drinking part of a highball.

Warren Harding protected me at every turn. And I remember well that he once wrote, “Darling, when I pray for you it is that you may have abundant health. Health and freedom from worry, for worry kills, Nan.” And he was right. I think that worry killed Warren Harding.

One morning in that same apartment on East 60th Street, I dressed leisurely and Mr. Harding sat watching me. Milk, of a lovely richness, was already coming from both of my breasts, and my toilets those days required more than ordinary care, if I would not find when I reached the office at the Steel Corporation that it had seeped out and spotted my dress conspicuously. Mr. Harding seemed to love the maternal evidences about me those days, and often remarked that I possessed the loveliest woman-form of anyone he had ever seen. Or he would entertain me while I dressed by telling me that he had gone to the theatre the previous week and had watched some actress—I remember in one instance it had been Dorothy Dickson—dance, and, because I resembled her a bit, he had watched her to the exclusion of all others on the stage during the performance, and tried to imagine he was looking at me. He was such a darling.

[Pg 93]

That particular morning, he sat telling me some such tale and waiting for me to dress for breakfast, which we usually had around the corner at the Hotel Netherland, when he noticed a picture of my sister Elizabeth on the wall—one I had recently put up and which he had never seen. He took it down to look at it. The frame was a cheap one and I had broken the cord from which it was suspended and had replaced the cord with an ordinary office clip. It required no little ingenuity therefore to attach the clip to a nail on the wall. Mr. Harding worked at it for several minutes, adjusting his tortoise-shell Oxford glasses, but he could not re-hang the picture. I was so tickled, and finally giggled outright. “Let me do it, honey!” I exclaimed, holding out my hand for the picture. “No, I’ll do it all right,” he insisted, shaking his head. I said nothing. I think he worked at it for perhaps five minutes, then gave it up. He was always persistently firm when he set out to accomplish something. I have often read into this little incident that characteristic determination to carry upon his own shoulders his share of the burdens of a nation, and how he died in the struggle which is for any President a superhuman task.

I am reminded of another time when he came over to address an audience—this time at the Astor Hotel. It was back in 1917 or 1918. He was particular that he should deliver his address well on this occasion, and so left me at midnight at my home on 136th Street and went back downtown in the taxi to the Astor for the remainder of the night. The following morning I got up bright and early and we breakfasted together at the Astor, in the dining-room on 45th Street. He had his newspapers in his hands when I met him in the lobby. When we entered the dining-room the head waiter led us to a table on the far side, but I, noticing the light for that particular table was not as good for reading as the light on the table next to it, said, “Let’s take this table.” Evidently Mr. Harding thought my suggestion was just caprice. Anyway, he said quietly but very firmly, “We’ll sit right here, Nan,” taking the table the waiter had first indicated. But if he had any idea [Pg 94]of rebuking me, it was soon dissipated by my explanation. I won in this instance, though he usually did. But when I was really right in any matter he would acknowledge it only too gladly.

I remember too I wore that morning a very lovely georgette crepe blouse with my tailored suit. It was far too delicate a thing to wear to the office, but I had put it on especially for my darling. And it wasn’t lost on him! “That’s a very beautiful blouse you have on, dearie,” he said, “but do you wear things like that to your office?” He was relieved when I owned up that I didn’t.

In some of the first pictures I had taken for Mr. Harding I wore that same blouse. I had not had my picture taken but once—except for snapshots—since I was a child. That little-girl photograph was published in The Marion Daily Star. This was done, I remember hearing my mother say, without her previous knowledge, having been arranged between the photographer across the street from the Star Building and the editor of the Star, Warren Harding. I was then five years old.

The pictures I had taken to display the blouse Mr. Harding was so fond of (it was white with blue flowers embroidered on the front) were four in number and I sent one of each to my sweetheart. I wrapped them well and addressed them inside and out, sending them in time to reach him for a particular week-end during which he had expressed the wish to be with me but could not. Well into the following week I had not heard from him about the photographs, and finally wrote and asked if he had gotten them safely. In his reply which came immediately he said they had not been received. I was frantic, because I had autographed them especially for him and no one else. In a very few days he came to New York. He said he had looked everywhere in the office, in his stenographic secretaries’ office and in George Christian’s office, but he could not locate them. Had I addressed them correctly? I assured him I had, and he said he would ask “George” if he himself were not able to find them when he returned. He [Pg 96]could not find them and was therefore obliged to inquire of his private secretary. George Christian brought them to him immediately, having put the package away so safely that it was hidden from Mr. Harding. “I never knew portraits could be so comforting,” he wrote to me. I knew they could be, for I went to bed early every night with my sweetheart’s picture propped up beside me on the pillow.

Mr. Harding’s generosity took many forms. One time during 1917 or 1918 when we were alone—though I don’t remember where—I was sitting on his lap admiring his hands. They were large, well-shaped hands, the hands of capability, yet artistic too, and I never tired watching him use them. They were expressive of many feelings. They fascinated me completely. I was admiring them, and incidentally the ring on the third finger of his left hand. The ring was set with one quite sizable diamond—a beautiful ring in its entirety. Some organization had presented it to him “in appreciation,” he said. I think he thought I admired the stone and had visions of having it in a ring for myself!

“So far as I’m concerned, I’d as lief give you this ring, Nan, if it were not for Florence!” He smiled when I looked up at him, and hugged me tight. Frankly, I would have loved the ring, of course, but I knew he could not give it to me. I wonder who has it now, for I would cherish it so if it were in my possession. Many nights I have spent with that hand in mine and twisted and played with that ring. It sparkled at me across the table and I could see a thousand colors in it when I, lying beside him, held his hand up to the light which came through the transom above our bedroom door.

This was, as I said, before 1919. After I had my own ring I found the same pleasure in studying its lights. I remember the morning after he had put my ring upon my engagement [Pg 97]finger we walked in Central Park. A windy morning and a brilliant sun. I strolled along with my left hand in front of me, looking at my precious ring. He had given it to me!

I remember that morning Mr. Harding’s hat blew off and he had to chase it about half a block. Somehow I used to love to witness those “embarrassing moments”—his confusion was so boyish. I remember too how I exclaimed over the glory of everything that morning, in the sheer joyousness of being with him. We passed the zebras and I remarked upon their beauty! “Nan, you don’t think those things are beautiful, do you?” Mr. Harding asked incredulously, smiling. But, as I continued to express my admiration of each animal, he suggested that we look at them no longer, and led me into, the sheltered paths where eventually he found a bench where we could sit down and he could make love to me.

An instance of his kindly nature and generosity occurs to me. We were going down Fifth Avenue. He was taking me to a store of my choosing, Lord & Taylor’s, to buy me a bag. I was always happily oblivious of everybody and everything about me when I was walking on the street with Mr. Harding, and so I did not notice that we had passed a blind man carrying the proverbial tin cup and selling pencils. But Mr. Harding had seen him and he disengaged himself from my arm, went back and dropped a coin into the blind man’s cup, and was back with me, scarcely giving me time to realize what had happened.

“Never pass a blind man, Nan,” he admonished me gently. I knew his sympathy had been made the keener by his intimate knowledge of blindness in the case of his own sister Mary who had passed on a good many years before and who had been almost blind. To this day I cannot pass a blind person, and if they do pass me before I have got my money out, I go back, as he did, prompted by his voice and the impulse it always arouses.

Mr. Harding himself selected the bag for me at Lord & Taylor’s. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than to have something [Pg 98]he had selected for me himself. The bag was a dark blue pin-seal and cost $11.75. “Here, Nan,” he said brightly, picking up the bag from dozens of others on the counter, “I think this is fine—what do you think?” I loved it. I would have loved it had it been but one-hundredth as pretty as it was, but it happened to be a very stunning bag. Everything he chose, I thought, would be just right.

I afterwards had this bag in Marion, Ohio, at Miss Daisy Harding’s, during the time when she was still living with her father on East Center Street, before she was married. Mrs. Heber Herbert Votaw, her sister and Warren’s, was there. They were examining and admiring the bag.

“Where did you get this bag, Nan?” one of them inquired.

“Oh, a sweetheart of mine gave it to me,” I answered lightly, just as I was about to pass up the front stairs to the room I occupied while visiting there.

“Now, Nan,” called Carrie Votaw after me, “you know you never loved anybody in your life but Warren!” How little she knew the deep meaning of her words! I have since recalled this incident to Daisy Harding in a letter written to her last year.

Another instance of Mr. Harding’s kindheartedness comes to mind:

I always used to take him to the Pennsylvania Station when he left for Washington. I knew pretty well what trains came into New York from Washington and those that went out. Often he would come over just to spend the evening, taking me to dinner and the theatre and returning on what he called “the midnight” to Washington. When I first met him in 1917 at the Manhattan Hotel, one of the things he said to me, after learning that I had a great fondness for the theatre, was, “Nan, let me take you to the theatre! I’ll come over from Washington just for that, and I’d delight to do it too!”

So one night he had been over and was returning. It was quite late, of course, when we reached the station from the theatre—about eleven-thirty probably—and before he left me [Pg 99]to get his train he took me over to the candy stand in the corner of the vaulted concourse and asked me to pick out a box of candy.

Two or three unkempt little children stood gazing wistfully up at the colorful array of sweets above them—children whose bed-hour should have been six or seven o’clock. Mr. Harding looked down at them and put his hand on one little fellow’s head.

“Why don’t you buy it?” he teased. I adored him when he talked to children. Their eyes grew big as they looked way up at him and smiled sheepishly. He handed them each a coin—a quarter apiece I think it was—and looked at me and winked.

Around Christmas time in 1918 I received a letter from Miss Daisy Harding, with whom I have always corresponded more or less regularly. After I had read it I enclosed it in one of mine to her brother Warren. He had given me $50 that Christmas, with which I had purchased the long-coveted mesh-bag of which I have spoken. In his reply to my letter he enclosed a letter which he had recently received from his sister Daisy in which she thanked him for his Christmas gift to her of $10. Miss Harding remembered having received this amount of money from him as a Christmas gift when I recalled it to her mind in June of 1925.

I remember hearing my mother tell how Mrs. Sinclair had told her that Warren Harding, upon being at their residence one Sunday morning when she was about to leave for church, had given her $25 to put in the collection basket. Although he did not attend the church Mrs. Sinclair attended, nor even attended his own church regularly, Mr. Harding was quick to recognize the good in any organization, religious or otherwise, and wanted to contribute to its progress. Warren Harding was one of the three kindest men I have ever known.

I have gotten away from my main story, but these things occur to me and I wish to set them down. Little things that happened, or that dropped, unconsciously perhaps, from Mr. Harding’s lips, often gave me clues as to how he felt about important matters concerning which we had no actual discussion.

In this connection, I remember well a dinner at the Manhattan Hotel early in 1918. Woodrow Wilson, then President, was making spectacular efforts which occupied front-page space. However, the newspaper headlines that night carried the latest news from the battle-front, and Mr. Harding’s eyes were heavy when he looked up at me. He was quiet for several seconds and his eyes went wet.

“The world’s in a bad way, Nan,” he said, shaking his head.

I myself had had no intimate contact with the war except through my friends, having had no relatives—at least no near relatives—who had gone over, and its grim horrors were not felt by me as deeply as those who had sent their dear ones to the front. In fact, the two years the United States was in the war were the two years I shall ever look back upon as the happiest of my life, as one cherishes the memory of precious hours with one’s sweetheart. And if I ever during that time voiced a desire to be of more active help in war-work, I was reminded by both Mr. Harding and my employer in the United States Steel Corporation that an employee of that Corporation, in view of the vast part steel played in the war, was doing his or her bit effectively.

Perhaps something of this was going through my mind as I watched Mr. Harding over the dinner-table. So far as I knew, he had no near relative “over there” either, but I was sure he was very close to the war situation as a United States Senator. [Pg 101]His tone changed into one of severe criticism with his next remark.

“Wilson’s a plain damned fool!” he muttered, as to himself, still perusing the front-page headlines.

I meekly acquiesced in Mr. Harding’s view that the world was “in a bad way” and that Wilson was “a plain damned fool.” “But, sweetheart,” I reminded him, “wait until the next election, when you will be President!” He smiled indulgently and leaned over the table, head bent to one side in the appealing pose he sometimes affected when he made love to me.

“If I’m President, Nan, I’ll make you White House stenographer!” were his exact words. “A President can do just about as he pleases, you know!” he added, smiling.

I recalled vividly that statement three years later when I visited him at the White House and heard from his very lips, lips that were set in grim determination to bear up at any cost, that “the White House was a veritable prison,” and that he could not even retire to the privacy of his toilet without being guarded—“shadowed” as he termed it.

“I’m in jail, Nan!” he would say in a broken voice, shaking his head sadly, “and I can’t get out; I’ve got to stay,” and he would lift his hands in a gesture of futility. No, Warren Harding did not like being President of the United States, as I am sure no man with real American blood and a love of life and fair play and freedom would or could like it. What a pity the highest honor a great republic can bestow upon a loyal citizen should be one which saps that citizen’s vitality, and makes impossible the achievement of certain ideals through breaking him down physically! And, in my humble opinion, the “system” of American politics is wholly responsible for these hellish conditions. No, Warren Harding did not like being President. Six months after he went into the White House he was a broken man. The seven million majority of votes cast for him by the American people was his death sentence. And I, too, cast my vote for him!

[Pg 102]

Even in gayer mood, I seemed to see in Mr. Harding a certain pathos. People have observed it in Elizabeth Ann, our daughter, not knowing of course whose child she is. “There is something pathetic about watching her at play,” a girl friend of mine said to me last winter. And so it was with her father. There was something pathetic about watching him at play. But he had a keen sense of humor.

I think it secretly amused him to realize, as he did and I did, that the scandal that came up in the presidential campaign of 1920 in which Mrs. Arnold’s name and his were linked very frequently, was for us the source of greatest protection, for while the Democrats who were “slinging mud” played with Mrs. Arnold’s name they were not looking for mine or any other.

One time, when we were dining, Mrs. Arnold’s name came up naturally. Of course Angela, her daughter, had been my childhood playmate, and when I went to Marion I usually saw her either at a party or dance or on the street, and likely this had been the case and I was relating to him how lovely she looked. She was a stunning girl. I had never mentioned Mrs. Arnold’s name to him in connection with the old-time gossip I used to hear, but something I asked him brought forth this spontaneous ejaculation, “Mrs. Arnold is a damned fool—a brilliant conversationalist but a damned fool—if she had half the sense of her daughter....”

I do not know a thing about the truth of things that were said concerning Mr. Harding’s one-time relations with Mrs. Arnold. I never pressed him to tell me anything, nor did I care what he had done before we became sweethearts. I only know that during our six and a half years I remained true to him in those essentials that are demanded and expected by one’s sweetheart, and I most certainly know that Mr. Harding was most loyal and true to me. There were times when I made frantic endeavors to break away from him, feeling that I was becoming so growingly dependent upon his love and support in every way as to make it inconceivable for me to do without [Pg 103]him, but he was constantly in the background of my thoughts—why, I have thought about him every hour of the nine years now since we first met at the Manhattan Hotel in 1917, and not a day has passed since I first saw him in Marion when I was a child that I have not thought lovingly of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

During his visits to our 60th Street apartment, Mr. Harding had advised me to deliberate well before deciding upon a suitable place to summer, and await my confinement. He suggested numerous avenues of procedure with regard to helping determine the best place to go, and I remember it was with some timidity that he even made the suggestion that I might look into the Catholic institutions here in the East where I might find comfort and quietude and safety, and perhaps some occupation for diversion. However, this appealed to me not at all, because an institution immediately presented to me a picture of enforced seclusion. I vetoed the idea and he then suggested I take a taxi and go along the Jersey Shore and also over into Long Island, sizing up the possibilities and going there leisurely afterwards. I spent several days going about week-ends in search of a place where I felt I might live happily for the several months intervening. Long Island did not appeal to me and I finally decided upon Asbury Park, New Jersey. There seemed to be plenty of entertainment there, good air, pleasant surroundings, and yet it was far enough from New York to make embarrassing contacts improbable. As a matter of fact, I saw only one man during the whole summer whom I knew, and that was during my first week in Asbury Park while I was still in such figure as to excite no comment.

I registered at the Hotel Monmouth, one block from the ocean, under the name of Mrs. Edmund Norton Christian. [Pg 104]Mr. Harding had suggested that I simply keep on using the name E. N. Christian, prefixing it with a “Mrs.” instead of “Miss” and substituting for the initials “E. N.” a man’s full name. I used to go a bit with a young fellow back in Marion whose name was Edmund, and had always liked the name. So Edmund it was for the first name. “N” was rather difficult, but one of the managers of a theatre in Chicago where my sister Elizabeth was in charge of the orchestra had the name of Norton. “Edmund Norton Christian!” It sounded rather well and we agreed to it.

My “story” which I took to Asbury Park and which Mr. Harding and I had rehearsed carefully was as follows:

I secured a Post Office box immediately in Asbury Park in the name of Mrs. E. N. Christian. My mother of course knew nothing about my physical condition, nor indeed anything about my relationship with Warren Harding, so I was under the necessity of having her write me as Nan Britton. However, I wrote her I was planning to do social secretarial work for a Mrs. Christian for the summer and that I could be addressed in her care, Box so-and-so. My sister Elizabeth was apprised of my fictitious name for the summer, and so in that way I had letters coming from both Elizabeth and Mr. Harding in the name I had assumed. Mr. Harding’s letters were tender and solicitous—sweeter love-letters I am sure no one has ever written—and there were many of them, in lieu of our ability to see each other.

[Pg 105]

My sunny room at the Hotel Monmouth was comfortable, except for an egregious rose-red rug upon the floor, but I felt somewhat conspicuous, living alone with apparently no friends, and I determined to leave and go to a regular rooming-house.

I stayed at the Monmouth, however, two weeks, during which time the following incident added to my temporary dissatisfaction and comparative unhappiness:

I had left New York for Asbury Park on the 7th of July. One evening on the Boardwalk I read among the society items of the local newspaper which I chanced to glance through that the Frelinghuysens and Senator Harding had been bathing at the Casino on the Boardwalk. My sweetheart in Asbury Park! And he did not look me up! My first sensation was one of fright. Fright occasioned by the suggestion that he was possibly “dropping me.” This was followed by a feeling of nausea, a faintness due to the shock which the reading of the announcement gave me. Then, I experienced hurt and a cynicism that would have vented itself in unkind words, I am sure, had I been able to say them to him I loved. After all, I had not got into my condition by myself, and why should he have any feeling of shame about being seen with me! I was seething with indignation. I hurried back to the hotel and wrote him. I referred sarcastically to the incident, expressing my regret at not having taken my books and done my reading down at the Casino on the morning when I might have witnessed an interesting bathing party. I tried to be as unkind as my hurt pride encouraged me to be, and still infuse an element of shame into my reproach.

In New York, shortly afterward, I met him for luncheon. He had not alluded to the bathing party incident in his reply letter, only specified where we should meet, and I felt sorry for what I had written. After all, he was shut up all day long and at night he was not always with congenial companions. Why not allow him a little respite with those he enjoyed? So I had determined to let it pass unmentioned at our luncheon. [Pg 106]However, before we had finished, he remarked quietly and with appealing intonation, “Sweetheart, on what date did you leave New York?” I replied that it had been the 7th. “Well, Nan, I was in Asbury Park on the 5th, two days before you got there.” Not even a retaliatory tone, simply a statement of fact! He was nearly always right, and made me feel ashamed of myself more than once. I just worshipped him when he proved himself and his love for me in ways like this.

I went from the Monmouth Hotel to a rooming-house. My new quarters proved to be very unsatisfactory—damp, dark and dusty. Moreover, the roomers were mostly elderly people who looked at me severely as I passed in and out. But while there someone told me of a boardinghouse where three meals a day could be obtained for the nominal sum of $9 a week. I began eating there and it was then that I met Mrs. Marietta Tonneson.

I do not recall how I met Mrs. Tonneson. But I secured a front room in her rooming-house on the third floor for $14 per week, and moved into it immediately, having been at the other place about a week. This combination brought my room and board to $15 a week, which I decided was as well as I could do in Asbury Park. I had been paying $40 a week at the Hotel Monmouth and both Mr. Harding and I agreed that it was steep. Mr. Harding was always very generous with me and I had ample funds for my comfort during the summer, but I seemed to need a good bit of money even then, and it was a satisfaction to have my board and room reduced to the minimum.

Mrs. Marietta Tonneson (Mrs. Martin Tonneson she had been until her husband’s death made her a widow about a year or so previous) lived with her brother Billy in a large house just around the corner from my boardinghouse. They had [Pg 107]lived, she told me, in Marlborough Road, Brooklyn, and after her husband’s death, probably wishing to conserve all of his monetary bequests, she and her brother had decided they would defray their summer expenses by keeping a rooming-house that season. That accounted for the rather unusually nice furniture in her house. I think my being alone excited her curiosity, but I was so perfectly well, and my physical soundness coupled with a growing sense of ease as I lived myself day by day into the plausibility of my “story” and my situation, made it a pleasure for me to witness evidences of this curiosity and deliberately refuse to satisfy them.

I wrote Mr. Harding, telling him all about Mrs. Tonneson, my feelings concerning her, and how she did attempt to take sort of a motherly interest in me, and his reply brought forth the advice that she might prove a valuable person to “hang onto,” and that I should simply “pay my way” and stay out-of-doors away from her and everybody else who might be interested in knowing more about me.

During the latter part of the summer Mrs. Tonnesen had also as roomers a Jewess and her husband. The woman was a nurse and her husband a musician. She had charge of a Brooklyn hospital and it seemed to me an excellent idea to accept her proffered invitation to visit her in the hospital after she returned there with a view to deciding whether such a place would be desirable for my approaching confinement.

I shall never forget that visit. I had luncheon with the nurse, whose name has slipped my memory. The food seemed to me to be half swimming in grease. I walked all over the place, and even submitted to an examination by the head doctor, who was, I thought, rough and uncouth and who informed me gruffly, when I complained that he really hurt me, that I would be “hurt harder than that when my baby came.” A woman who had given birth to a child that morning lay apparently unconscious from the agony of her experience, and I went in and touched her to see if she really lived. The nurse took me into the baby ward where a dozen or more babies lay [Pg 108]in baskets, each tagged on their tiny wrists with numbers to identify them. Many were crying loudly.

The building itself stood alone and lonely with no companion buildings within several blocks, and I thought when I had done looking the place over that I could not possibly consider having Warren Harding’s child born there. Goodness! I thought, to have our baby tagged! Perhaps it was customary and the only safe way, but I preferred to keep her in my room where she would not need identification. I say “her,” but as a matter of fact, when I thought then about our child I thought of a boy, for as I have said Mr. Harding and I always talked about “the young lieutenant.”

While I was in Brooklyn I looked at possible apartments and decided after a weary afternoon, in which I trailed around in the heat, that I would stay in Asbury Park, and possibly right with Mrs. Tonnesen. She was sympathetic and willing to do anything to help me.

As the summer progressed and early fall set in, Mrs. Tonnesen told me of her plans to take for the winter a small cottage on Bond Street, a veritable “doll’s house,” as she described it. Not committing myself to the promise of staying on with her through the fall, I went with her to see the house. It was No. 1210 Bond Street. I passed it this summer. It is very near the North Asbury Park Railroad Station, near a wood I was fond of, and I agreed with her that its cozy sun porch would be a delight through the winter, and the rooms, though small, were certainly cheerful. And infinitely preferable to a hospital!

Mrs. Tonnesen, having learned not to inquire into my affairs too far, suggested that it would be foolish for me to go to Chicago just to have the baby, as I was contemplating, when I might better remain with her and her brother Billy and have my sister Elizabeth come on to Asbury Park. She even suggested that I allow her to snap my picture and that I send it to Elizabeth to show her how healthy I was looking—which fatal thing of course I did not do.

[Pg 109]

[Pg 110]

However, her interest was becoming more appreciated by me since my trip to the Brooklyn hospital, and finally I wrote my sister in Chicago not to bother about hospital accommodations there for I had decided to remain in Asbury Park, away from everybody, and go through it all by myself. I was so free from fear concerning any serious complications that I even welcomed the coming pain of childbirth; I have never been so superbly healthy as I was that summer.

Mr. Harding had listed some books which had been favorites of his at different times in his life and these books I obtained from the public library in Asbury which was just down the street. I have a notebook which contains many of the names of these books, copied from the list Mr. Harding gave me, and others which I read that summer. Among them were Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, Gertrude Atherton’s The Conqueror (Mr. Harding said he had met Mrs. Atherton, and had told her how he admired her novelized life of Alexander Hamilton, his favorite character in American history); O. Henry’s books, and many others. I can see Mr. Harding now as he wrote down the list for me—the way he would look up and ask me if I had read this or that, and his hearty, “Oh, you must read that, Nan!”

My time was delightfully idled all summer, reading, crocheting baby’s jackets and writing love-letters to my beloved. The latter consumed a great deal of my time. His letters to me were the most beautiful things imaginable, always full of cheer, and ever implying that he wanted to do everything in his power to make me comfortable. He spoke often of the “reverential love” he felt for me as the mother of our coming child. I used to wish in moments when I naturally yielded to the longings I felt for him, that we were together on the longed-for “farm” and that he could minister to me personally in the manner portrayed in his incomparable letters.

It was Mrs. Tonnesen who suggested my seeing the “society doctor of the Jersey shore,” as Dr. James F. Ackerman is called. He was of a very sympathetic and kindly nature, albeit brusk. [Pg 111]I liked him immensely from the start. He advised me that I should make a reservation for my confinement period in the hospital in Spring Lake, not far distant, but I said I would wait, for I might yet decide to go on to Chicago. It was only my fear of hospitals that made me say that, and when I found he would attend me at Mrs. Tonnesen’s home, I indicated to him definitely that I wished him to take my case. I was happy in the contemplation of having the baby in my own sunny room.

On September 22nd, just one month before the baby was born, I made a trip to Washington, stopping while there at the Capitol Park Hotel near the Railroad Station. I telephoned Mr. Harding immediately upon my arrival, at the Senate Offices, and he told me afterward that the man who answered the phone was Heber Herbert Votaw, his brother-in-law, “Carrie’s husband.” When he heard me on the other end of the wire he seemed so pleased and said that he would come right over. Which he did.

I shall never forget how he rejoiced to see me, even in the shape I was in! I remember we sat by the window, I on his lap, and talked about everything. It was while we were sitting with our cheeks together looking down upon the passing automobiles that he sighted Senator Newberry’s car. With some pride he told me the occupant was the richest man in the Senate, and said what he would like to do for me “if he had Senator Newberry’s money.” I forthwith assured him he could have done no more that summer to make me happy if he had had the combined riches of all his senatorial colleagues.

He provided me with ample funds to tide me over my confinement period and to buy our baby’s layette, found out about trains for me as he always did, and took me to the station. There he bought me magazines—I even remember distinctly that they [Pg 112]were Smart Set and Harper’s Bazaar—and candy and fruit, then sat in the station and talked to me until my train was called. At that time Mrs. Votaw, his missionary sister, “Carrie,” was on the Washington police force in the capacity of welfare director—as Mr. Harding explained to me with a sly smile, “one who cares for fallen girls”—and we had quite a bit of fun wondering just what his sister would say could she see me at that time with him! I told him I certainly had fallen—for him! He took me to the train, kissed me adorably, asked me to tell him I was happy, and stood on the platform talking to me through the window until the train pulled out.

I went to Philadelphia, where I stopped at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel over night and did my shopping at Wanamaker’s the following day. My baby’s clothes cost me the outrageous price of $75, which I knew afterwards was far too much to spend for clothes which were so soon outgrown. But it was heaps of fun to pick them out.

Then I returned to Asbury Park.

About a week before my confinement my mother wrote me, demanding to know the reason for my continued stay into October at Asbury. I had previously written her that I intended to go to Chicago, but that was when I thought I might go there to have the baby. She said her alarm about why I was remaining so long had been to her such a nightmare that, had she the necessary funds, I would have long since seen her in Asbury Park. Poor mother! What worry I must have caused her!

Inwardly terrified at the possibility of her coming on, but realizing that I would not dare indicate such terror to her, I wrote immediately, expressing my regret at not being able to supply the funds she would need for fare, and saying that “Mrs. Christian” had elected to remain longer in Asbury and I could not of course [Pg 113]desert her when she had been so lovely to me all summer. That seemed to satisfy my mother.

Then I wrote my sister Elizabeth that I did not think it at all necessary for her to come on, entailing an unnecessary expense, and gave her as nearly as possible the date of my confinement. This I did also with Mr. Harding, so they both knew exactly where I would be and when I expected to be confined.

Mr. Harding wrote immediately and asked me to please write him a love-letter before I would be in such position (in bed) that I couldn’t write him for some time. I remember well the tone of that letter from him. I knew he was homesick to see me, and it reacted to make me more impatient for the day to come which would give me our baby so that I could begin to plan to see him again. I went over to Dr. Ackerman and asked him when he thought I would have the baby. My hands were somewhat swollen, I complained, and I was getting uncomfortable generally. He assured me I was in excellent shape and that I would soon have my baby. Somewhat mollified, but still irritable, I walked down to the post office. I found another letter from my sweetheart and devoured it as I walked back home. I think that was Saturday, perhaps Friday.

On Sunday afternoon, a gorgeously brilliant autumn day, I went over to the woods to my three-cornered seat, which was a board nailed to three trees. I sat there for a couple of hours and wrote to my darling. I remember I wanted to cry my eyes out that afternoon, I was so homesick to see him, and very likely this longing was written vividly into the letter which I mailed at the post office late that afternoon. Incidentally, I used to take his letters to various towns all along the shore just to avoid sending too many from one post office. As though they would have noticed to whom the letters were addressed! But it was just another of those precautions which were responsible for the absolute safeguarding of our secret from the world.

On Monday I walked most of the day, anxiously. Tuesday evening I found a letter from Mr. Harding, telling me he had never in his life received from me a love-letter equal to the one I had [Pg 114]written Sunday out of the depths of my longing for him. He cautioned me to “take it easy,” and stressed, as he had all summer in his letters, the necessity for complete recuperation after the baby’s birth. “It will mean your health, Nan, so be deliberate in getting up afterward. I cannot emphasize this point enough.” Elizabeth wrote me the same thing, telling me I wouldn’t be at all the same afterward, my strength would be gone, and I must rest all I could. I smiled to myself; they didn’t realize how strong I felt, nor how well I was! Probably many women who were weak would have to wait through long periods of recuperation, but I was sure I would be strong enough to travel soon after my baby came.

I spent a great deal of time conjecturing about the baby’s looks. Mrs. Tonnesen and her brother Billy took a great interest in the coming event, though I stayed away from the house and away from everybody as much as possible, talking with them only when necessity commanded. On Monday or Tuesday Helen Evans, the nurse Dr. Ackerman had recommended, came to call upon me. She told me all the different things I would need to have for a home confinement, and I was surprised, for I had thought all I needed was clothes for the baby! I liked Miss Evans. She was Scotch, and had something of a burr, though she said she had been quite a while in this country. I decided we would get on splendidly.

Wednesday, October 22nd, 1919, dawned clear and bright. My room, though tiny, had three windows on the front and one on the side and my bed was by the latter window. It looked out upon the loved park where I had done much of my reading, and the trees were beautiful in their autumn colors.

I was awakened very early, about five o’clock, by pleasant sensations which reminded me of caresses, except that they were [Pg 115]inside. I lay there marveling. My baby would come today, I was sure of it. My baby, and my darling Warren Harding’s child!

It was quite seven-thirty before I felt I should call Mrs. Tonnesen and have her send for Miss Evans. Having no telephone in the house, Billy was obliged to go to the nearby drug store and phone the doctor, who in turn sent the nurse over immediately. I dressed and went downstairs and ate a hearty breakfast. Mrs. Tonnesen suggested I’d better eat all I could, but I thought she was fooling when she said it would be all I would get for awhile. I wanted so badly to go once more to the post office, but the nurse refused to let me.

I continued at intervals to have the little sensations which gradually increased into intermittent pains growingly severe as the morning advanced. The doctor came to examine me. Toward noon he came again, and I heard him say to Mrs. Tonnesen on his way out that I was “physically superb,” or “superbly fit,” or something like that, which encouraged me. But I didn’t need much encouragement. I really was not the least bit frightened.

I had taken the two front rooms, both facing the street. One I occupied and the other was for the nurse. Mrs. Tonnesen supplied a clothes basket for a temporary bed for the baby. I roamed around in and out of the four rooms on that floor, watching the proceedings of the nurse with interest.

At two o’clock sharp, on one of the most beautiful afternoons imaginable, a little girl baby was born to me. The doctor said that I was an excellent patient, and I know myself, despite the agony of that experience, that God made possible to me a perfect birth. After the ordeal, still, as I felt, in the “pink of health,” I ran up against the first law of medical care in that connection that bothered me: I requested a chicken dinner with all of the appetizing accessories that go with it! Imagine my disappointment when I was given nothing then but a glass of cold water, and later some weak tea!

I am reminded of a point right here that has often occurred to me. I am not very superstitious, but I do think queer things happen sometimes, in that the same number or the same day figures [Pg 116]strongly in one’s life. Two seems to me to have a weird way of springing up in Mr. Harding’s life. He was born on November 2nd. He died on August 2nd. He was elected our 29th President on November 2nd, having accepted the nomination on July 22nd. I saw him on September 22nd, one month before the date of my confinement which was October 22nd. Our baby came at exactly 2 o’clock in the afternoon. These are not the only 2’s that occurred in our chronology. I used to note how often the number 2 appeared, though I did not jot the times down, nor remember them, except for those I have given above which were the outstanding recurrences.

Even as early as the day of her birth, the “young lieutenant,” as Mr. Harding and I had always referred to the girl we thought might likely be a boy, there was a distinct resemblance to the Hardings, and more particularly to her distinguished father. As she grows older this resemblance is strikingly like his sister Daisy, but she retains her father’s smile, his eyes, and many of his mannerisms. As she lay in my arms, a few hours old, drawing her mouth into comical contortions, and wrinkling her face in what seemed a thousand wrinkles, I saw Warren Harding—oh, I saw him so strongly that it seemed I was holding a miniature sweetheart in my arms! She was born with black hair which afterwards disappeared to give place to the soft blond fuzz which was more like her mother’s.

I could not nurse her of course, because I did not know how our difficult situation would work out, but oh, how I longed to! Miss Evans put her on a good brand of infant’s milk, and would feed her and then bring her in to me. It seemed to me almost sacrilegious to submit to the treatment I was obliged to undergo in order to have my breasts dried up, and somehow I thought the pain I experienced in this procedure was the merited punishment [Pg 117]for not nursing my baby. How strong was my urge to nurse her! Even before she came, when I would lie on the bed and watch the various shapes my body assumed as she moved around inside, I used to think of the natural nourishment process and picture it. I wanted to experience every one of the sensations belonging to a mother. One time, after I had been up a week or so, I took her on my lap and gave her an empty breast that two or three weeks previous had been swollen with milk, and I shall never forget her tiny hands nor the feel of her mouth at my bosom, nor the indescribable thrill that swept over me in those moments of pretended nursing. I just seemed to want to keep her a part of me, and this denial gave the keenest suffering I had ever known.

During those days I had a colored laundress, Mrs. Jones, whose daughter, about eleven or twelve, used to come for my laundry. She also went to the post office for my mail. As soon as I could prop myself up fairly comfortably, I wrote notes to Elizabeth and to Mr. Harding and “Lieut. Edmund Norton Christian.” The one to “Lieutenant Christian,” addressed fictitiously to Paris, I handed to the nurse to mail, for obvious reasons; the other two the little colored girl mailed. My first letter from Mr. Harding after the baby arrived had been mailed from Philadelphia, and was sent to me at the house, 1210 Bond Street, Asbury Park, instead of the post office. It was written in pencil, as most of his letters were, and in it he said he had received my note. Evidently he thought he should take precautionary measures in writing this first letter lest it fall into another’s hands, so he wrote that he had “conveyed the news to the Lieutenant who was proud to hear it.” That was all right and might have served to throw anybody off the track who read the letter had he not followed it immediately with the sentence, “If she looks like her mother, I will be satisfied,” directly alluding to himself as the party who was really interested in the news! Bless his heart! He tried to protect me and himself and everybody, but sometimes he surely did stupid things. Forgetting all about “the Lieutenant” he proceeded in his letter to urge again my leisurely recuperation, and the manner of his concluding would hardly have been construed [Pg 118]by an outsider as the heart-promptings of his friend “the Lieutenant” who would obviously have written his own love messages and not sent them second-hand!

No sooner was I upon my feet than I was nervous and anxious to get to Chicago to my sister Elizabeth. The superb strength which had been mine before the baby came had completely left me. My appetite was forced, my cheeks were pale, and constant letters from my mother as to when I was coming West worried me terribly.

Several mornings after the baby was born Dr. Ackerman came to see me. He sat on a straight chair at the foot of the bed and took out a notebook. I was amazed at myself for becoming frightened, but somehow my nerves were shattered and things troubled me which amounted to nothing at all. He informed me that he needed certain data for registering the child’s birth. I didn’t know exactly what that might mean to Mr. Harding, and so I inquired if it was necessary to register a child’s birth always. “Unless you want to pay a fine of $100,” he replied in his business-like voice. He said he merely wished to know my maiden name, my husband’s, and our ages, my husband’s business, etc. I thought quickly about whether I ought to tell him at least the partial truth—that I was not married! I didn’t know whether or not it was a criminal offense to say you were married when you were not. I longed to shout the whole truth to the world, that my baby was Warren Harding’s baby, that we were not married in the eyes of the world, but truly married in the sight of God, and that I was proud, proud, proud to be her mother!

Within, I was growing hysterical in those brief moments, but controlled my voice as I told him that my age was twenty-three, my husband’s thirty-two, his business was an officership as Lieutenant in the U. S. Army, and that my name before I was married [Pg 119]was “Nanna Eloise Britton.” I said this I thought very clearly, but when he repeated it he said “Emma Eloise Britton?” I nodded. The first name did not matter anyway, I thought, but I wanted my surname to go into the records in the only right way—Britton. I could not give her the name Harding without betraying my darling, but I could give Britton. “Eloise” was a middle name I had adopted when a child in substitution for my real name of “Popham,” which was always so objectionable to me. I have postcards from my father which he addressed to me “Nanna Popham Eloise Evelyn Britton,” the full name I cherished as an ideal combination when a child!

When I had been out of bed about a week, one morning a man called. I heard Mrs. Tonnesen say, “Yes, Mrs. Christian lives here.” I was abnormally apprehensive those days, an inexplicable nervousness seizing me when the least little thing went wrong, and I called downstairs quickly, “What do you want of Mrs. Christian?” I sat down on the top step of the stairs. He called up to me, “What’s your baby’s name?” Immediately I thought maybe something was wrong. They wanted to take her away from me! The most absurd possibilities danced like demons in my mind. “Who wants to know?” I asked, almost quivering. “Gotta have it for record,” he replied, in what seemed to me a surly voice. I breathed a great sigh. “Oh, I see! Well, I haven’t named her yet!” I said. “What! Two weeks or more old, and you haven’t named her?” he shouted. I became frightened again. Maybe this was an offense under the law! “Oh, that’s all right,” I said timidly, “you may register her as ‘Elizabeth Ann!’” Only that morning I had had a letter from my sister Elizabeth in which she said she would love to have me call the baby Elizabeth, and my own name, Nan, didn’t seem to go as well with Elizabeth as Ann. So Elizabeth Ann it was. Elizabeth Ann Christian it was, and was so written into the records of the Department of Vital Statistics in Trenton, the capital of New Jersey. Afterward, when I said it to myself, I used to think, “Elizabeth Ann Harding! Elizabeth Ann Harding!” And as she lay in my arms in bed I would whisper to her, “Say, you darling (a verbal salutation I so [Pg 120]often heard from her father), do you know who your dad is? Oh, wait until he sees you! Wait till you see him, sweetheart!” She would lie there complacently blinking her eyes and working her mouth. It seemed to me as if Harding were written in every twist of her lips.

I went to New York about six weeks after the baby came, which was about the first week in December. My clothes were very shabby, and so I bought a new hat at Arnold, Constable’s, and some other things I needed. The cape which I had worn all the fall, during the two chilly months before Elizabeth Ann came, now seemed big enough for two, and I was so thin that I was sure I must look ill. The hotels were filled with automobile show visitors, and after trying several places I finally was given a room at the Hamilton Hotel on 73rd Street, though with the stipulation that I would give it up the following day to another guest who had reserved it several days in advance. I registered as Nan Britton, and I remembered it was with almost a sense of relief that I did so. I had moved in an atmosphere of make-believe for so long that somehow it was refreshingly good to be myself.

I was so pitifully weak that I should not have gone over to New York in the first place, but once there, there were several things I wished to do. One was to go up to my friends, the Johnsons, for my mail, for when I had moved down on East 60th Street I had not apprised many people of the change, and I knew there must be mail for me at the Johnson home. I knew that even Marie Johnson (Mrs. Johnson) did not know the number of my apartment on East 60th Street, so could not have forwarded my mail there.

Another thing was to call Mr. Harding on long distance, a thing I would not have attempted while in Asbury Park.

[Pg 121]

The following day I went up to Marie Johnson’s. She was surprised to see me, of course, and I am sure the manner in which I conducted myself must have given her reason to think something was wrong with me. I had to lie down almost as soon as I got in the house. She handed me a big bunch of mail, among which was a telegram. I almost fainted at the sight of it. Probably somebody had found out that I had had a child by Warren Harding! I said, “You open this, Marie.” Then I caught myself. Suppose it was some kind of a summons, or even suppose it was from Mrs. Harding! I opened it myself. It was from a girl in Cleveland who wondered why I had not answered her letters!

At the apartment of a friend up the street I secured a room. I think I stayed one night there at that time. After I had deposited my bag, I went to the corner drug store at 136th Street and phoned Mr. Harding at the Senate Chambers in Washington. He had scarcely said “Hello!” when I began to cry. I told him I was so weak and asked him when he thought I would be strong again. He said, “Why, Nan darling, you should go back and rest at Asbury Park another month. Don’t do a thing but rest. Everything’s all right.” But that was just the thing I couldn’t do. I told him I seemed to have lost all my courage. Wasn’t it possible for him to come over? He said he was in fact coming over to New York, but he thought it unwise for us to be seen together if I were in the weakened condition I said I was. I told him that I was sure I would be stronger if he would only take me in his arms. Bless him! I realized it would be dangerous for us to be together when I felt so weak that it seemed I might faint every minute. He begged me to return to Asbury and rest, and urged me not to stop to see my mother in Ohio when I did go on to Chicago.

“Be of good cheer, Nan!” came over the wire in a voice that was so sweet that it wrung my heart and brought the tears so fast that I could only cry, “Goodbye, sweetheart!” and stumble out of the booth.

I went back to Asbury Park faint and dizzy, but found our baby Elizabeth Ann in fine condition. This pleased me and seemed to give me some strength.

I dismissed Miss Evans at the end of three weeks, and the nurse I next employed, upon Dr. Ackerman’s recommendation, was a Mrs. Howe. She was what he termed a “practical nurse,” and not so expensive as Miss Evans, who was strictly a private nurse. Mrs. Howe had raised a family of five children and was more like a mother than a nurse. She sometimes held me close in her arms, and I felt so much safer now that I had her.

She did not get along well with Mrs. Tonnesen, and we decided that we would change quarters before I left for Chicago. I had discussed my plans with Mr. Harding, both over the phone and by letter, which were that I should go on ahead to Chicago and find a suitable place for Elizabeth Ann, having Mrs. Howe follow later with the baby as soon as I had found someone to take care of her in Chicago.

So one day Mrs. Howe and the baby and I bundled ourselves into a taxi and went around to a semi-sanitarium, nearer the downtown district of Asbury Park, and quite a distance from the Tonnesen abode. Here the lady usually took only those who were recuperating from illnesses, she said, and I thought it seemed like a fairly good place to leave Mrs. Howe with the baby until I could send for her to come on to Chicago with Elizabeth Ann. I trusted her implicitly.

Late that evening an automobile ambulance drove up with a woman on a stretcher. They brought her in and she and her nurse had a room on the same floor, across from my nurse and baby. About an hour or so after she arrived we began to hear the most horrible moans and groans accompanied with shrieks of, “Oh, I’m nervous! I’m nervous!” This kept up until I was myself [Pg 123]completely exhausted listening to her and in such a high state of nervousness that I thought I, too, would scream. It didn’t seem to bother Mrs. Howe and I asked her to read aloud to me to take my mind from the moaning across the hall. But the walls were very thin and it was as though the poor woman were right in the room with us. I had to tell the landlady that if that kept up we would have to go to a hotel. They gave the woman some morphine which quieted her temporarily, and I went into my own room and soon fell asleep. About three o’clock next morning it started again. I crept into Mrs. Howe’s room and into bed with her, and lay there shivering and mentally crazed with nervousness until the morphine which they administered again took effect and the poor woman slept. The next morning they took her back to her home in Philadelphia. I was so tired of doctors and nurses and of shifting from place to place!

Someone had told me that it took about six months to recuperate completely from having a baby, and I began to count the weeks and try to find some improvement in myself as time passed. But when I took the train back to New York, from where I was going to leave for Chicago, I had to confess that in the seven or eight weeks that had passed since the baby’s birth I had grown weaker instead of stronger. In New York, in the same room I had when I had been there before, I stayed in bed most of the time. The lady who rented the rooms had been an actress and was very broad-minded, and once or twice her sympathy and tender solicitude tempted me to tell her why I was so ill. But I didn’t. I called Mr. Harding again on the phone and he urged me to get to Chicago and to rest after I got there. “Never mind about the baby now,” he said, “she will be all right. It is you who need to be taken care of now.” But the baby was on my mind constantly. I phoned Mrs. Howe sometimes twice a day. I had given her my sister’s address in Chicago and I told her to write me immediately if anything went wrong.

I remember I bought a ticket for a Saturday train—it was almost impossible at that time to procure reservations, soldiers [Pg 124]returning home for Christmas, the general rush of holiday travelers—and I was fortunate to get a reservation at all for that particular day.

A chum of mine, Dorothy Cooper, who lived where I had been staying, went down in the taxi with me to the train. I felt so faint that she suggested we stop at a drug store and get a bottle of smelling salts for me to have on the train. As a result, when we reached the Grand Central Station, we were just in time to see the iron gate close and watch the train pull out. I had wired Elizabeth I would be there for Sunday, and of course I was just sick over missing the train. I went to the Consolidated Ticket Office and learned that I could not get another reservation until the following Tuesday. Those days of waiting tortured me. When finally I found myself in the train, bound for Chicago, where I longed to creep into my sister Elizabeth’s arms and cry, I sighed audibly with relief.

I had taken an “extra fare” train, scheduled to reach Chicago earlier than the others, and that night I wakened after a first sleep to feel the train fairly skimming the tracks. “Gone wild!” I thought and sat up quickly in my berth. I pulled the curtains and peeked out. Everything seemed to be normal and the passengers were sleeping. How could they sleep, I thought, when every moment brought us nearer to destruction! It would be awful to die in a railroad crash, I thought to myself. And terrible fears assailed me when I thought that maybe Elizabeth wouldn’t be able to locate our precious baby, and perhaps my sweetheart would be afraid to claim her openly after my death—horrible, horrible! I felt I ought to get up and go forward to the engineer—but what could I tell him! Evidently he knew the train was going wild and couldn’t do a thing to stop it. Nor could I help him, surely. I became drowsy and concluded that a protecting Providence would intervene. At any rate, this was a case beyond human power! I lay back on my pillow praying, and gradually the rhythm of the flying wheels grew fainter and fainter and I slept.

[Pg 125]

I must have been a pitiful, broken-looking creature when Elizabeth met me the following day at the Englewood Station in Chicago. The train was late, after all, and had not made the usual fast time. I was amazed to learn this after the nightmare I had had. I told Elizabeth and she just laughed at me. I thought it would be impossible to explain to anybody what agony of mind I had been through. Elizabeth looked so healthy and strong and it seemed so good to be with her. She took me straight home and put me in bed, and I lay there until the waves of weakness which enveloped me had passed somewhat and I felt more serene.

In a few days Elizabeth located a nurse, recommended by the same doctor who had discouraged my having an abortion—a woman by the name of Mrs. Belle Woodlock, who would take Elizabeth Ann into her home and care for her for $20 a week. She lived within easy distance from my sister’s apartment, which was at that time at 6103 Woodlawn Avenue.

During the lapse of time—which was about three weeks, I think—between my arrival and my sending for Mrs. Howe to bring on the baby to Chicago, I carried on correspondence with her regularly. I received my letters, addressed to “Mrs. E. N. Christian,” in care of my sister Elizabeth (Mrs. S. A. Willits), usually getting the mail before my brother-in-law, or “kid sister” Janet, who was living with Elizabeth then, had a chance to see to whom they were addressed.

Once, I remember, my brother-in-law, Scott Willits, was quite put out because the postman requested him to sign for a special delivery letter from Mrs. Howe to me and he stoutly refused to do so, saying there was no such person as “Mrs. Christian” living there! In the end, the postman took the letter back and afterward I myself signed for it.

I remember also another incident. It was before Mrs. Howe brought Elizabeth Ann on from Asbury Park to Chicago that my [Pg 126]mother came to Chicago to visit. It is possible the occasion of her visit was explained by the Christmas vacation from work in Ohio University where she taught, though possibly she was curious to see whether or not her daughter Nan was really safe and sound, perhaps not believing my written reports to this effect.

Mother and I had just come downstairs and were leaving the apartment to go shopping over on 63rd Street when I spied the postman across the street. Without thinking I called, “Any mail for us?” “A letter here for Mrs. Christian,” he answered. I knew it was foolish for me to disclaim knowing such a person before my mother, inasmuch as she had been told that I was living in Asbury with a “Mrs. Christian,” so I said, “Give it to me—it is for a friend of mine.” And I took it and put it away in my bag. Mother asked sharply, “Nan, what is Mrs. Christian having her mail sent to you for?” And I, searching my mind for a quick explanation, found this to say, “Why, she is coming here enroute to California and I shall see her soon. I told her I would take care of any mail she might want sent here.” This, you see, came to my mind because Mrs. Howe, the nurse, had written that she was planning to go on to California—so I simply substituted names.

I think about that time, however, my mother’s suspicions were definitely aroused, for she remarked to me on one occasion, “You think you are deceiving your mother about a lot of things, but you’re not.” Often she has said to me, “God has certainly protected you, my girl,” and of course I know that He has. More fortunate was this protection for my sweetheart, however, than for me, for his position, as United States Senator, demanded protection.

The day arrived when Mrs. Howe and my darling baby girl would reach Chicago. It was difficult for my sister Elizabeth to go to the station with me, for she had a regular position as leader of an orchestra in a local theatre and she had to observe on-the-dot hours. But she went with me. We arrived fifteen [Pg 127]minutes or so before the train came in, and I was so weak from the trip downtown and the excitement of seeing my baby again that I lay in Elizabeth’s arms in the waiting-room until Mrs. Howe came. She was a rather heavy-set woman, with grey hair and spectacles—mother-looking—and I can just see her as she came into the waiting-room, carrying my precious baby in her arms.

We had arranged for Mrs. Howe to go over to the Plaza Hotel on the North Side, so we bundled her into a taxi and I promised to get in touch with her the following day. Then Elizabeth, the baby and I took a taxi for Mrs. Woodlock’s on the South Side. I can’t remember that I had made a previous visit to Mrs. Woodlock’s, having let Elizabeth make all the arrangements and trusting implicitly to her judgment in the matter. In the taxi, Elizabeth held the baby and exclaimed over her prettiness. She had grown even in those brief weeks of my separation from her, and I thought there never could be a baby to equal her in sweetness. As soon as the taxi began to move she fell asleep. Elizabeth and I studied her little face and Elizabeth, too, marked the Harding resemblance.

Mrs. Belle Woodlock’s apartment was half a block from 61st Street, I think on Prairie Avenue, and Elizabeth lived at the corner of 61st Street and Woodlawn Avenue. So it was but a short street car ride for me. Mrs. Woodlock’s apartment was quite comfortable, like her good self. She was a fat, husky Irish girl, and quite pretty. She had a daughter about six, Ruth, and an old Aunt Emma who lived with her. I don’t know whether Belle Woodlock’s husband was dead or whether she had been divorced; I never asked her. But the atmosphere was not at all bad, I thought, and there was enough youth about the house to make it pleasant. I remember how grateful I was to see a little girl of six there.

Of course the excitement had been great and I know Mrs. Woodlock wondered why I broke down and sobbed as I knelt over my tiny treasure. We did not stay long, but went away, I back home to bed and Elizabeth to her theatre, leaving the baby in charge of her new nurse.

[Pg 128]

Mrs. Woodlock was a person not to be downed, I soon learned. In her position as nurse, she had acquired a hardness of a sort, but withal I found her extremely sentimental and sympathetic. She took an immediate fancy to Elizabeth Ann, as did her little daughter Ruth and her old Aunt Emma. Aunt Emma was a partial cripple, and she proved to be a great comfort to me because I knew she kept watch over our baby at times when Mrs. Woodlock’s attention was demanded elsewhere.

Mrs. Woodlock moved twice during the year and two months that the baby was with her. She soon moved over on 48th Street. That place, too, was accessible from Elizabeth’s, even though it was a longer trip for me to take. But my strength certainly seemed to be gone permanently. I ate normal meals, but I was just unable to do the things I formerly did. Mr. Harding urged me in every letter to rest, rest, rest, but it was growingly impossible. My mind was sick, and nothing would cure it except an arrangement whereby I could have my baby with me.

Mr. Harding was very generous, sending me as a rule $100 or $150 at a time, and of course I kept Mrs. Woodlock paid right up to the minute. I have in my possession a little red book in which I have jotted down at different times how I spent the cash Mr. Harding sent me in his letters. He used to send very old bills so they would not be noticeable to one handling the letter, and has sent me as much as $300 and $400 in one letter with nothing but a two-cent stamp to carry it. For instance, about this time I made the following notation:

[Pg 129]

Before Elizabeth Ann’s birth, during the early days when Mr. Harding and I referred to our coming baby as “the young lieutenant,” we had discussed many times the possibility of giving the baby over to his sister in California, Mrs. Charity Remsberg. Mr. Harding said that, of all of his relatives, he was sure she would understand the situation best, and also she had children of her own. I entered into this and other discussions very seriously, and I marvel now to think how I could have done so. For, months before Elizabeth Ann actually came, I had fully determined within my heart that I could never, never give her up—I could never allow our darling baby to be reared and loved by anyone but myself or her father.

However, I talked over these possibilities with Mr. Harding both in person and in letters. He was disposed also to consider the Scobeys—Mr. Fred Scobey and his wife of San Antonio, Texas. Mr. Harding had told me once upon a visit to New York how Mr. Scobey had mailed a letter from Mr. Harding, addressed to me. He said he thought afterward it hadn’t been exactly wise to entrust it to him, for, he said, Mr. Scobey had been a bit convivial that afternoon. I remember how I said, “Oh, sweetheart, why will you do foolish things like that?—why, he might have looked at it!” I was amazed at such daring on Mr. Harding’s part. It was then that Mr. Harding told me what I recalled afterward, in later years, so vividly, “Why, Nan, Scobey’s the best friend I’ve got!” Of course I took his statement very literally.

[Pg 130]

The Scobeys had quite a bit of money, Mr. Harding said, and I think he said they had no children of their own. He was sure they would love our baby and he said he would “have no hesitancy” in telling Mr. Scobey that he was the father of the child.

We also discussed an institutional home where the baby might be placed until of such age that I, through some unforeseen favorable circumstance, might be able to take our child myself. It was then that Mr. Harding first discussed with utter frankness the probability of Mrs. Harding’s death far in advance of his own, in which event he said with undisguised enthusiasm, “I’d take the baby myself and make her a real Harding!” Later he repeated that statement very emphatically to me in the White House, telling me how he wished to make Elizabeth Ann a “real Harding.” Of course that plan met with a hug and a kiss from me and much worded enthusiasm. But Destiny thwarted the plans Warren Harding had for his child, although during those days we were completely oblivious of its presence.

The summer of 1920 was arriving, and with it the Republican Convention in June which was to nominate my sweetheart for the Presidency. Only four years before I had hung on street car straps going to and from my work at Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, reading about my beloved Mr. Harding and his much featured oratorical achievement in connection with making the nominating speech for his friend Charles E. Hughes, the then Republican candidate for President.

Now I was back in Chicago, making almost daily visits to Warren Harding’s child and mine, and watching every political aspect with keenest interest. Only four short years and I had come to these heights! The mother of Warren Harding’s only child! The glory of it!

[Pg 131]

Mr. Harding came on to Chicago early in June and came out immediately upon his arrival to my sister’s, 6103 Woodlawn [Pg 132]Avenue. I remember I missed him at the station and was so disappointed because I thought he had not come, but I had gone to the wrong station to meet him and so we reached the apartment almost simultaneously, having come from opposite directions.

I had, in letters to Mr. Harding, described Elizabeth’s apartment, calling it a “perfectly adorable place.” When I came on from Asbury Park I was in such a weakened condition that any place where my adored sister lived seemed heaven to me. And I really did think for a young married couple their apartment was dear. Elizabeth’s husband is rather small compared with Mr. Harding, and the tiny four rooms did not seem out of proportion to his stature. But I shall never forget how I gasped when I beheld Mr. Harding in the living-room of that apartment. His head nearly touched the ceiling!

“I thought you said Elizabeth had a lovely roomy apartment, dearie!” he teased me.

“Well, I thought it was—but, my, you fill it up so!” He sat down in a big chair and took me on his lap. Elizabeth knew he was going to be there and had arranged so that the rest of the family would be away during his visit with me.

That visit was a very important one from many angles. While Mr. Harding scouted my prophecy that he would soon be the President of the United States, it must have been that he did think some about it, for even as early as that first visit he warned me about what might happen in case he were nominated. I would be “shadowed” very probably, he said, and certainly would be if he were elected President.

[Pg 133]

Those were stirring days for me as well as for my hero. I would fly from the Republican Convention at the Coliseum out to our baby, often giving her airings in the nearby park. The excitement those days seemed to sustain me with a strength not really mine. Elizabeth Ann made a perfect picture in her new carriage. I tried to persuade Mr. Harding to meet me some morning in the park so he could see her, but, though he pondered it all lovingly and said he was as “crazy to do it” as I was to have him, he never did. I suppose it would have been unwise, though I was [Pg 134]sure I could pilot that project as safely as I seemed to have done the others up to this time, with my sister Elizabeth’s good co-operation.

Elizabeth Ann and I had lovely times together. I talked to her even from babyhood as though she were a companion instead of a baby, and she would lie there looking up at me so seriously that sometimes I felt she must understand me. I would whisper to her, “Darling, do you know who your daddy is? Well, maybe you do (her answering look was full of wisdom!), but you don’t know who he is going to be!” Then I would stoop down and whisper in her ear, “Your daddy is going to be the President of the United States!” And surely her look of comprehension was more than a baby’s look—it seemed to me to be the understanding gaze of her father’s own eyes.

Mr. Harding came several times to 6103 Woodlawn Avenue during that month. I remember one time I rode downtown on the elevated with him. Standing on the platform at University Avenue, I said, “Honey, why do they have primaries?” I could see no need for them. In fact, I told him I thought politics was a terribly complicated business—to go through all the red tape, when he would be President anyway. I talked on and on, suggesting a simplification of the whole governmental machinery. He seemed highly amused. “A fine politician you’d make, Nan!” he said. I remember also how he leaned far over to read his neighbor’s paper after we were seated in the train, and when I strained my eyes to see what could interest him, he turned and explained that he “was just trying to steal the baseball score.” He followed the ball games with great interest, and was a dyed-in-the-wool fan if ever there was one.

A few days later, in the lobby of the Auditorium Hotel, I met him and he gave me a ticket to the Convention. It seemed to please him to do it, and very likely he could not help recalling my many predictions. He may even have gloried a bit in the knowledge that he was fulfilling every ambition I ever had for him.

[Pg 135]

I listened with rapt attention and rising regard to Frank B. Willis, who made the nominating speech for Warren G. Harding. I had heard Mr. Willis only once before and that was at Kent, Ohio, where I attended Normal School the summer immediately following my graduation from high school. At that time—1914—I had looked upon him as an illy-groomed, small-stage politician, but my appraisal of him swiftly swung in his favor with that speech.

I witnessed excitedly the balloting at the Convention which slowly but surely rose in favor of Ohio’s son. I could not share with anyone, by the most extravagant verbal picture, the emotions I experienced as it was announced amid roaring acclaim that the Republican nomination for the Presidency of the United States had been given to Warren G. Harding. How could that surging multitude—cheering and whistling and stampeding the aisles with their Harding banners held aloft—be interested anyway in the tumult of unutterable emotion that rose within me? My eyes swam, and I recalled my Freshman school year at Marion, when, in the margins of all my books, I, then but thirteen years old, had written the prophecy of my heart-longing, “Warren Gamaliel Harding—he’s a darling—Warren Gamaliel Harding—President of the United States!”

The next conference between the new Republican candidate for President and his sweetheart, which took place at 6103 Woodlawn Avenue, was necessarily an important one. This time he was “dropped off” by the man whose car he said he could command during his stay in Chicago. He had been, he said, held up by Moffett, who had taken innumerable photographs of him and who, Mr. Harding told me in his adorably modest way, had seemed to take quite a fancy to him. He had [Pg 136]wanted to get to me earlier but he just couldn’t. Mr. Harding said that the pictures Mr. Moffett had taken ought to please me because he had been thinking about me every minute during the sittings for them.

He warned me again that if I were shadowed I should give no heed to the trailer and just go about my business as usual. He told me how proud he was of the way things had been handled to date, and he did not seem at that time to have very great fear concerning our secret. He was, however, hurried, and I complained because he had to leave me earlier than I had planned. When I told him I had many things to tell him he smiled and said, with his characteristic slang which seemed to be reserved for me alone, “Well, shoot!” He used often to say that when I bubbled over with confidences. He was with me a couple of hours, and, though disappointingly brief, that visit was one of the sweetest I ever knew.

He attempted to seriously discuss with me plans for financially caring for my situation and for Elizabeth Ann’s, but, though I finally changed the topic, saying, as always, that I didn’t want to discuss those things, he did persuade me to begin some insurance, and he said that no matter how small the amount I took out, he could add to it. He had other plans, he said, for establishing a fund in a more substantial amount, but I curtailed that discussion. The time was so brief and I adored his kisses. However, I did actually start a policy with the Prudential Life Insurance Company, one of $500, requiring no medical examination. I had only a little over $100 paid upon it when I went to Europe in June of 1923, and when I returned I dropped it altogether.

Mr. Harding saw that I looked greatly worn and he fell in very readily with my plan to go to the Adirondacks for six or eight weeks, in the hope that the elevation and air might bring back the lost roses to my cheeks. My sister had assured me that she would herself visit the baby periodically and every day phone Mrs. Woodlock and keep in close touch with her. Mrs. Woodlock’s efficient care of the baby was my chief inducement to leave for the mountains. I explained all of these things to Mr. Harding, [Pg 137]and he agreed that it was imperative that I get on my feet as soon as possible. I assured him that I would not try to write to Mrs. Woodlock or have her write to me while in the mountains, for, of course, except for my visits to the Woodlock home where I was known as “Mrs. Christian,” I had resumed my maiden name and could not divulge this name to her. I remember how discreet Mrs. Woodlock was, for she did not even ask why nor where when I went away. She merely promised to take good care of my darling baby.

Mr. Harding made suggestions as to a suitable place to go, and talked to me a little about Paul Smith’s. But I told him I had already consulted with the Foster Bureau and had decided upon the Eagle Bay Hotel at Eagle Bay, on the Fulton Chain of Lakes. One reaches there by going to Utica and changing for the northern train. It is on the western side of the Adirondacks. I could obtain board and room there, I told him, for something like $25 a week. He seemed to think this a fine plan all around. He instructed me not to write to him while there except as he advised me, because his own movements were uncertain. And, as usual, when he kissed me he asked me to tell him I was happy. I walked over to the “L” with him and watched the tall, handsome figure of my sweetheart until he disappeared inside the station. Then he came out to the railing of the elevated platform and waved to me below. That was the last unguarded tryst we ever had, for after that he was always surrounded by secret service men, and we were not together again until after he had been elected President. Even as President-elect he had ceased to be his own boss.

[Pg 138]

During my stay in the Adirondacks I wrote many letters to Mr. Harding, saving them, of course, until such time as I should see him to deliver them in person. He wrote me, but more guardedly than ever before. During my stay there I also [Pg 139]received a couple of letters from his sister Daisy, one of which I have and which asks me all about Eagle Bay, requesting the information on account of her desire to leave Marion, where, she said, she was under fire photographically and socially, and was growing weary of it all. Although I sent Miss Harding pictures of the hotel and instructions as to how one reaches there, she did not decide to join me. Which, from the standpoint of the following incident, was a good thing.

About the third or fourth week of my stay in the mountains, Mr. Harding sent the first communication which ever came from him to me by personal messenger.

I had been out walking in the late afternoon, and when I came into the somewhat deserted lobby of the Eagle Bay Hotel the manager at the desk called to me that a gentleman in the lounging room wished to see me. Of course, having been warned by Mr. Harding of shadowers and reporters, I became frightened, and it was with some misgivings that I approached the man who now came toward me with the query, “Is this Miss Britton?” I said it was, and in turn asked him who he was and why he wished to see me.

He immediately delivered into my hands a rather bulky envelope which was obviously more than a mere letter, and asked that I follow the instructions which he told me I would find inside. I retired to my room to do so. Mr. Harding had not dropped me a note apprising me of this proceeding. In the package he had enclosed $800 in bills and a short, hurried note, which he asked me to please return with one from me, telling him the money had been received and indicating the amount. This I did, not sending him, however, any of the love-letters I had written and been saving up to this time, but merely doing exactly as he requested. Then I joined the gentleman below.

The messenger was a man of slight build, with ruddy complexion and pleasing manner. Inasmuch as it was impossible for him to leave Eagle Bay before that evening (there being no train out), we took a walk down the road, and afterward returned to sit awhile down by the lake, on one of the porches of the casino. [Pg 140]I had gone about very little with the young crowd up there, preferring for many reasons to be by myself the greater part of the time and to retire early, and I knew that this messenger had come direct from the one man I would rather be with than all the others put together. Therefore I felt friendly toward him.

He had not told me his name, and his obvious reticence had piqued my curiosity. When I inquired of him who he was, he indicated that he did not care to disclose his correct name. On his finger, however, he wore a signet ring, rather an unusually good-looking one I thought, and I made out the initial “S.” “Mr. S.” I called him then, and he smiled and substituted the name “Scott.” So “Mr. Scott” it was during the remainder of his visit. He seemed to think I had selected the most God-forsaken, undesirable place in the world, and I did not blame him, for the mosquitoes were more than usually aggressive that evening. I had a lot of fun with him, and discovered to my delight that he had quite a sense of humor in the many suggestions he had for making Eagle Bay a passably habitable place for human beings who had small regard for where they lived!

The following Sunday in the paper I happened to see a picture of a man who, in this narrative, I shall call Tim Slade, chief secret service man and bodyguard to the President-elect, and in this newspaper likeness I identified the messenger who had come to me at Eagle Bay. In the same paper there was an excellent enlarged snapshot of Miss “Daisy” Harding and Mrs. Votaw, her sister, together in the garden of their father’s home at Marion, and I cut it out and have it now, framed.

My sister Elizabeth, writing from Chicago, kept me pretty well posted about the baby, but there were times when I felt I just must get back immediately to her. I managed to gain several pounds while in the mountains, and in early August, if I remember correctly, I returned to Chicago. I found the baby pink and white, like a peach blossom, and was delighted with Mrs. Woodlock’s fine care of her. She was getting prettier and prettier every day. And, oh, that Harding smile which captivated everyone who saw her!

July 22nd, 1920, Warren G. Harding formally accepted the nomination for the Presidency of the United States, delivering his acceptance speech at Marion, Ohio, to the thousands gathered in Garfield Park to hear him. I never had the privilege of hearing Mr. Harding in his supreme moments, though I bought all the available newspapers and thrilled second-handedly at his speeches. In the public utterances of my beloved hero were instanced variously the characteristics which I knew so well dominated his life movements, and I need not cite passages to illustrate the sincerity by which he seemed to be actuated in his every purpose. However, in the papers which I have retained, now becoming yellow and worn, as well as in my huge Harding scrapbook which contains clippings from many newspapers dating from the time of his senatorship to his death, I find marked passages which have moved me deeply and in which I have seen the character of the real Warren Harding. “These are the things I so love in him,” I think as I read them over. His humbleness, kindness, good will, generosity, sympathy, honor, trust in mankind, honesty, fidelity to friends—these qualities mark the Warren Harding the people love and revere. The concluding paragraph of his speech, accepting the Presidential nomination, is as follows:

[Pg 142]

All the editorial panegyrics which followed the unexpected and tragic death of Warren G. Harding might well have been based upon any one of the above ideals of service to his country and to his God. Adding three words to the shortest sentence in the paragraph quoted above, he could truthfully have said, “One cannot give more than one’s life.”

These inherent qualities of nobility in Warren Harding were readily discernible even to those who knew him slightly, but the friends who knew him intimately as a man as well as a President carry in their hearts the memory of sincerity and loyalty in the numberless manifestations of his service to others. And what more meetly parallels the above quoted paragraph, and others of similar manfulness, than the text upon which the President’s lips rested when he took the oath of office? This text, kissed by the President as a seal of his oath, is the eighth verse of the sixth chapter of Micah and reads: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Back in Chicago, after my several weeks’ sojourn in the mountains, I set about immediately to seek admittance into the Republican National Committee offices in a secretarial capacity, so that I might help in a small way to elect my hero. The headquarters were in the Auditorium Hotel. There I went and, upon hearing that Congressman Martin B. Madden was there, I went to see him. I explained that Mr. Harding had been kind enough to put me in the United States Steel Corporation in New York in 1917; that I came from Marion and had known him as a child; also that I was a girlhood chum of Judge Grant E. Mouser’s daughter Annabel, Mr. Mouser having been at one-time a Congressman and close friend of Mr. Madden. Mr. Madden forthwith took me in to Captain Victor Heinz’s office and introduced me as a friend of Mr. Harding. Captain Heinz was from [Pg 144]Cincinnati; I afterwards met some of his relatives at the Mouser’s in Marion where they visited. Captain Heinz in turn took me to Mr. Frank A. Nimocks, whose regular job was postmaster in Ottumwa, Iowa. He “took me on” in a secretarial capacity immediately at a salary, if I remember correctly, of $35 a week. He had charge of the distribution of Republican campaign lithographs—a highly pleasing branch of the work to me. Next door to our office was that of the afterwards Postmaster-General, Hubert Work.

I was very happy to be a Harding booster; in fact, of all the work I have ever done, that was the most enjoyable. Everything was Harding! I wrote to Mr Harding’s sister Daisy, telling her where I was, and in her letter she said she knew how happy I must be to be working for my “hero.” She well knew he was that to me.

It seemed to be rather generally known in the offices along the corridor that I came from Marion, Ohio, and it is very likely that those who were not acquainted with this fact learned it from me, for I was the proudest person alive and wanted everybody to know where I hailed from.

Many notables were in and out of campaign headquarters, some of whom I met. Mr. Charles E. Witt, one-time secretary to Governor Harding of Iowa, had charge of another phase of the Harding picture distribution work and had his desk in our office. When Governor Harding came in one day Mr. Witt introduced me as a “friend of the next President.” In some such similar manner I was introduced to Senator New, whom I had often heard Warren Harding speak of and whom I was anxious to meet so that I might tell Mr. Harding I had met him.

Political fanatics roamed in and out of the headquarters as well as substantial party supporters, and I have devoted a whole page in my Harding scrapbook to clippings concerning one, Everett Harding, who falsely claimed to be a cousin of Warren G. Harding and embarrassed the President-to-be through spurious publicity.

[Pg 145]

Mrs. Woodlock was living on 48th Street during that time, and invariably when I left the offices of the Republican National [Pg 146]Committee it was to go directly to her home to see our baby, Elizabeth Ann. I would usually reach there so fatigued I could scarcely stand, but what recuperative powers her baby exuberance had for me! And Mrs. Woodlock’s hearty laugh would ring through the length of the apartment as she related to me something amusing that had happened during the day. Or she, with her daughter Ruth, would show me how my baby had learned to laugh, and we would all bend over her, each trying to bring to her face the Harding smile that quickened my heart and made the others cry, “Isn’t she a darling!” Aunt Emma, gentle soul, would hobble into the room and say, as she said over and over again to me those days. “I don’t often take to babies, Mrs. Christian, but Elizabeth Ann certainly has won my heart!” She was her father’s daughter, all right.

I wanted very much to see Mr. Harding, of course, not having been with him since June, and when I wrote to him in Marion that I would leave Chicago for our home town the night of election and see him there, I immediately had his hearty approval and his worded assurance by letter that he was “hungry” to see me. That was the word he used.

At campaign headquarters they knew of my intended visit to Marion and, before I left, Mr. Witt handed me a letter of appreciation. I have this letter pasted in my Harding scrapbook. It commends my “faithfulness, efficiency and initiative” in the campaign work at the Republican National Headquarters. I do not remember how Mr. Witt happened to give me this letter, but I recall very vividly one story which the Ohio Democrats, in casting about for propaganda, were endeavoring to circulate. It stirred me to such bitter indignation that my expressed desire to work overtime, or all night if necessary, to effect its immediate repudiation, may have been so marked as to excite wonder on the part [Pg 147]of those about me. The remembrance of my zealous belligerence may have prompted Mr. Witt’s letter of appreciation.

The story to which I allude had to do with the propaganda of a statement that Mr. Harding’s family had a strain of colored blood in their veins. I do not know how the promoters supported their story nor whence its origin; I only know that my being revolted at such a suggestion. The first time it reached my ears was one morning when my boss at campaign headquarters received an out-of-town telephone call, apprising him that such a story had been circulated in that particular town, and requesting suitable literature as a means of refutation. Well I remember how he turned to us in the office, repeating what had been said to him over the phone, and how someone in the office said, “Tell them it’s a damned lie,” and how I reiterated with all the intensity of one who knew better than anyone else the falsity of such story, “Yes, tell them it’s a damned lie!” I was defending my own baby.

The following day as I entered the headquarters I found, stacked outside along the corridor and inside our offices, great piles of genealogical sheets, tracing, in diagram form, the Harding stock back to Stephen Harding, who was born about 1624.

It is needless to comment upon the reaction of this piece of unfair and unsuccessful propaganda. All one needs to do is to recall the Harding majority, unprecedented in the history of national elections.

The evening of the election, November 2nd, 1920 (Mr. Harding’s birthday), I took a midnight train for Marion, Ohio, with a view to returning to New York and even possibly to the United States Steel Corporation. I had an idea if I could get back to New York I might work out some plan whereby I could have our baby with me, though my ideas as to how such a plan would develop were vague. My sister Elizabeth again promised to watch over her for me, and I myself planned to return [Pg 148]to Chicago for Christmas anyway. But the hurt I experience every time I leave Elizabeth Ann is a hurt of indescribable poignancy, just as the homesickness I experience in being separated from her is torture in the raw, like a thing one can stand only so long before breaking.

My train pulled into Marion about seven the following morning. About half-past six I called the porter and asked with pardonable excitement in spite of inward assurance, “Well, porter, who is our new President?” He grinned from ear to ear. “Harding’s the man, Miss,” he replied. I sprang out of bed with a thumping heart and dressed quickly.

Everybody in Marion had been up all night and had only just retired about six that morning. So I was informed by the first girl friend I telephoned upon my arrival. She herself had just gotten into bed. So I told her to return to her sleep, and, in spite of her insistence that I come right up to her home, I went to the Marion Hotel for the time being. I had told none of my friends of my coming and did not intend to impose upon them, but when I talked with Mrs. Sinclair over the phone she said she would not permit me to remain even for one night in the hotel, where I had, by this time, settled myself and had my breakfast. She told me to go out to her sister’s, because she herself had company. I did not call up Daisy Harding until the next day, knowing she must be exhausted with excitement and company.

Mrs. Sinclair’s sister lived on a street in which several houses had been converted into temporary clerical headquarters during the famous Front Porch campaign period, and she lived beyond these houses in the house almost at the end of the street.

I wanted to see Mr. Harding first of all, and so I telephoned Tim Slade, the secret service man whom I had first met at Eagle Bay, and asked him to make an engagement with Mr. Harding for me. I met Mr. Slade, who was also bodyguard to the [Pg 149]President-elect, that evening in front of the post office and he took me out East Church Street and Mt. Vernon Avenue and down to a little house where Mr. Harding soon met me. It was one of the houses I have spoken of which were used by the campaign clerical forces, and the sun parlor into which I first entered was filled with desks and papers. Evidences of great activity were apparent.

Tim Slade stood outside the front door and I had to wait only a few moments for Mr. Harding. He came up the short flight of steps and entered the door which Tim held open for him.

“Why, good evening, Nan!” he said. The door was closed behind him and we were alone. We went into the room on the left, which had evidently been used as a dining-room when the house was occupied as a home. The shades had already been drawn down, but Mr. Harding whispered to me as he greeted me with kisses that we would be wiser to go on out into the kitchen. The kitchen was almost totally dark except for the shaft of light which came from under the swinging door we had just come through. We stumbled around until we found a chair where Mr. Harding could sit and hold me on his lap.

After affectionate greetings, I exclaimed softly, “Oh, sweetheart, isn’t it wonderful that you are President!” He held me close, kissing me over and over again. Our eyes were now becoming accustomed to the darkness and I could see his face dimly outlined. Oh, how dear he was! I repeated my exclamation. “Isn’t it wonderful that you are President!” He looked at me some time before he answered. Then his “Um ... say, dearie, do you love me!” showed me that the glories of a victorious hero were submerged in the grander glories of a lover’s delight in being with his woman. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me lately, dearie!” he whispered.

[Pg 150]

“How’s our little girl?” he asked when I had settled myself back in his arms for the talk I knew would be all too short. It delighted me to tell him all about Elizabeth Ann. Even then I had some snapshots and the first baby picture she had had taken. [Pg 151]I showed them to him after we had again come back to the light of the dining-room. “Thought you said her ears were flat against her head!” he teased with an adorable smile. I observed then for probably the first time that the camera had not so registered. “But they really are!” I affirmed.

Then we talked of other things and Mr. Harding gave me two (or maybe three—I cannot remember) $500 bills. “Now, put these away, Nan, where they’ll be safe—where are you going to keep them?” he asked, as I opened my mesh-bag and lightly dropped them into it. “Oh, I’ll take care of them all right, darling,” I assured him, as I thanked him for what I told him was far more than I should need. I had always found that with his letters I experienced a greater sense of safety when I carried them with me constantly than when I left them at home in a dresser drawer, so I decided I would do the same with this large amount of money.

While Mr. Harding and I stood there, he getting out the bills for me, I glanced down at the array of papers on the desk or table in front of me. The paper on top caused me to look at them more closely; they were concerning Mrs. Harding’s first marriage to Mr. DeWolfe, and stated that she had been obliged to obtain a divorce because of Mr. DeWolfe’s intemperance in drink. I read further to the end of the page and a wave of sympathy for Mrs. Harding swept over me. I knew of her son by Mr. DeWolfe and of how they said he had followed in the footsteps of his unfortunate father, and it really grieved me to think how one’s personal sorrows must be unearthed to be made the topic for discussion by a gossipy public. And the enormity of Mr. Harding’s secret and mine again possessed me as I thought triumphantly, “They haven’t got our story!” And when I spoke of this to Mr. Harding he agreed with me that Providence had protected us.

Mr. Harding left ahead of me, returning to his home only about a block away. Of course Tim Slade did not know that I was far better acquainted with every corner of Marion than he ever could be, and when he asked me where I was going I told [Pg 152]him I was going out on East Center Street to see a girl chum of mine. I do not remember in whose car we drove, probably one of the official cars that were at Tim’s disposal, but I remember we drove out East Church Street and Tim let me out at a particular corner which was a block or so away from the home I intended visiting that evening.

It was the following day or the day after that I went out to see Miss Daisy Harding. She had as a guest in their home her sister’s daughter, the daughter of Mrs. Charity Remsberg of California, the sister to whom Mr. Harding had told me he would not hesitate to confide our secret. Miss Harding’s niece looks remarkably like her Aunt Daisy. It was during one of my visits with Miss Harding, perhaps while I was visiting with her during her lunch hour at high school where of course she was still teaching, that I told her I had a picture of Mr. Harding which I wanted him to autograph. I thought it better to ask him to autograph it with Miss Harding present. She immediately said she was sure he would do it for me and suggested that we walk over to the headquarters and see him after her school hours, some evening.

The headquarters, Mr. Harding’s office, was in the residence next door to his own home on Mt. Vernon Avenue, the former home of the Christians, George B. Christian being his private secretary. If Tim Slade ever exhibited a look of surprise over anything that he had witnessed up until then, or that he has known since, certainly it has never surpassed the look of surprise that registered upon his face when he beheld Nan Britton approaching the Harding Headquarters with Daisy Harding. He stood stock-still for a moment. Of course I did not appear to know him. We learned upon inquiry that Mr. Harding was with Mr. Will Hays, who had managed his campaign. “Let’s walk [Pg 153]around outside and peek in the window,” suggested Miss Harding. This we did, leaving the picture with someone in charge who said they would see that Mr. Harding autographed it for me in due time. Through the window we could see Mr. Harding at his desk in earnest conversation with Mr. Hays whose back was toward us. How we attracted the President-elect’s attention I do not remember, but Mr. Hays turned and looked out and smiled and Mr. Harding immediately came out the side door. We shook hands formally, and I thought Mr. Harding looked slightly annoyed; perhaps he was. Anyway I asked him if he would mind autographing the picture for me. It was a photograph he had found in his desk in the Senate office (so he told me in New York in 1917) and had said to himself when he found it, “I’m going to give this picture to Nan,” and Miss Harding and her family had agreed it was the best likeness they had ever seen when I showed it to them before taking it over for his autograph. “Where did you get that picture. Nan?” inquired Miss Harding, “I have never seen one like it.” I think I told her I had gotten it at the Republican Headquarters in Chicago. It is possibly one of perhaps a very few copies in existence. I have never seen one except my own.

After talking with us a few moments, Mr. Harding walked back into the office and Miss Harding and I went downtown. Frank, the chauffeur the Hardings had for so many years, was just ready to go down in the President-elect’s official car and he drove us.

A few days later I obtained from the headquarters my own special photograph of Mr. Harding, duly autographed in the handwriting which was so familiar to me. I remember Miss Harding inspected it closely and said, “Yes, that’s his writing all right,” indicating that he had not given it to a possible copyist to do for him. Could she have known of the thousands of words her brother had written to me! On the bottom of the photograph he had inscribed, “To Miss Nan Britton, with the good wishes of a Marion neighbor and friend, Sincerely, Warren G. Harding.”

[Pg 154]

Those were exciting days for Marion, Ohio. I remained in our home town visiting various friends of mine for about two weeks, long enough I remember to harm me physically, for I tried my best to be one of the “devils” into which it seemed that a good many of the younger society people had developed during the campaign period. I was almost back in the weakened condition I had partially pulled myself out of through early-to-bed hours in Chicago. However, I was determined upon proceeding to New York.

While in Marion, I kept the $500 bills in my silver mesh-bag, as I have already stated. This was, I must say, more money than I had ever received from Mr. Harding at one time, but I had told him that I wanted to buy a coat, and that one item might require a goodly part of one of the $500 bills. I remember one night when I was visiting Annabel Mouser Fairbanks, we had been up well into the morning, and when I retired I very carelessly, though not intentionally so by any means, left my mesh-bag downstairs on the chair where I had been sitting during the evening, “keeping it right with me.” Wilfred Schaffner and John Fairbanks, Annabel’s husband, remained up playing cards long after Annabel and I had retired. The next day John said to me, “Say, you are a fine one to leave a bunch of money around like that? You can see right through that mesh-bag! Don’t you know we never lock our doors? What are you going to do with all that money, anyway?” I explained it was money I was to invest for my brother-in-law in stocks when I reached New York.

About the middle of November I reached New York and stayed two weeks with a girl friend, whose apartment was at the Poinciana at Amsterdam and 120th Street, the apartment where Mr. Harding and I went to spend an afternoon in January of 1919.

[Pg 156]

Although I did look into the matter of positions while in New York, my enthusiasm about actually taking a position waned with my fading strength, and at the end of two weeks, thinking myself in no physical condition to remain in the East alone, and having consulted a doctor who confirmed my belief and ordered me back to Chicago to complete rest for a month at least, I took the train back to that city.

However, I did buy a squirrel coat and some Christmas gifts for my family and for Mrs. Woodlock and her daughter Ruth and Aunt Emma, which shopping expeditions took all my surplus strength.

It seems to me that Mr. and Mrs. Harding and some friends of theirs went South during the month of December, 1920, to visit the Scobeys, returning to Marion about a month later. Of the Scobeys I have already spoken. Mr. Harding and I had discussed them as possible foster parents for our baby who had not been born when we had entertained such thoughts. About the middle of January Mr. Harding wrote to me from Marion, suggesting that we endeavor to hit upon a suitable plan of action in connection with settling more or less permanently the all-important question of Elizabeth Ann. That question had been paramount in my thoughts. It was probably the main cause of my continued physical weakness; and I agreed with him that something would have to be done.

The latter part of January Mr. Harding sent for my sister Elizabeth to come to Marion to see him. When she returned to Chicago, she repeated to me his almost desperate concern about a final, permanent arrangement for caring for our child. She told me how they had discussed at length the advisability from many angles of her taking Elizabeth Ann, and how [Pg 157]Mr. Harding had paced the floor of his office (the same office in the Christian home where he had sat with Mr. Will Hays when his sister and I had beckoned for him to come out) and said, “My God, Elizabeth, you’ve got to help me!” She told me that he had said to her, “Nan is just a child in many ways and must be guarded and guided,” a statement I think I resented just a little because I felt I had thus far engineered our secret safely. Mr. Harding told Elizabeth, “I would not hesitate a minute to give you and Scott $300 or $400 a month to care for Elizabeth Ann if you would adopt her.”

My sister on this occasion had taken with her a picture of Mr. Harding to him to autograph for her. It was one of those for which he had posed at Moffett’s in June of 1920, after which sittings he had rushed out from Moffett’s to see me, and Elizabeth said that when she showed it to Mr. Harding he said he preferred it to all the others taken at that time. His autograph for Elizabeth is as follows:

Elizabeth reported to me very graphically that visit with Mr. Harding. I was so upset over the whole situation that I must have listened but dully to the things she said. The above statements are all I can recall now, with the exception of one other. This “one other” stands out clearly above everything else that was told me by Elizabeth. She said that when she entered his office he shook hands with her and remarked with his Harding smile, “You are looking very stunning, Elizabeth!” Knowing his charm when he said complimentary things, I must confess to a tiny bit of jealousy, though I was naturally proud that he found my sister so attractive. I loved Elizabeth very dearly.

[Pg 158]

Elizabeth and I discussed very fully after that visit the advantage of such an arrangement, both from Elizabeth Ann’s standpoint and from mine. It must have been about this time that Elizabeth told me that she had been obliged to tell her husband, Scott Willits, the truth. Although I resented this further confidence [Pg 159]on her part at the time, it was understandable in the light of many mysterious movements both on my part and on the part of my sister, and it was only natural that Elizabeth should take her husband into the secret.

I wanted so much to have the baby with me. To give her up completely through a legal adoption meant the greatest sacrifice of my life. Elizabeth presented the question to me in the light of my helping Mr. Harding at a time when he genuinely needed my co-operation. Of course I wanted to help my darling, but I loved our child with a devotion that was equal in its intensity to the love I felt for her father. I was so profoundly disturbed over the thing that my sleep became nightmarish; my nerves seemed to be gone completely.

Of one thing I was certain in my mind: I would not consent to Elizabeth Ann’s being adopted by anyone, not even my sister and her husband, unless I could have full control over her future, her education and her welfare in general. For some reason my brother-in-law took exactly the opposite viewpoint when we discussed it with him, and resisted such a plan, desiring, as I desired, to have full authority. While I could not understand then his attitude, I can more charitably view it now, for indeed a child with three parents means “a house divided against itself.” Scott Willits, my sister’s husband, was with the Chicago Opera Company then, and they were about to go on tour. Elizabeth and he and I talked and talked but what I agreed to did not seem to be what Scott would agree to, though Elizabeth loved me so much she would have done anything to make it possible for me to control my own child.

It must have been in early February, 1921, that Mr. Harding wrote to me, telling me he and his family were going to Cleveland to have some dental work done and that I should meet him at the Hotel Statler there. I did so, following his instructions [Pg 160]to await a messenger on the mezzanine floor who would bring me a note in his (Mr. Harding’s) handwriting so that I should know it was all right to accompany him to where Mr. Harding would be waiting for me. This messenger, whose name I do not recall, evidently thought I had considerable influence with the President-elect, for he talked to me very earnestly about certain things that Mr. Harding “ought to do,” all of which I listened to without much comment. Then at the appointed time he escorted me upstairs to the room which had been reserved for our interview. Mr. Harding joined me in this room almost immediately and we remained there for an hour or so. Outside the door a guard was stationed.

Mr. Harding looked worn and I asked him if he had had a trying time at the dentist’s, to which he replied, “I’ve been in the chair for four hours straight, Nan,” with a wry smile. I tried to kiss the memory of it away.

I told Mr. Harding how I felt about the adoption, and that I could not bring myself to give our child up to anyone. He said he understood how I felt, but that the time had come when we would have to devise some means of taking care of her and he did not feel the home of the nurse was the proper place.

“How about putting her in a Catholic Home, dearie?”, he inquired gently. I was sitting on his lap and at this suggestion I sat up very straight and looked at him, astounded. “A Catholic Home!” I repeated incredulously. “Why, Nan, they are not bad places—the surroundings are refined, and she would receive excellent care until such time as you or I might be able to take her,” he explained.

But the very idea of a “home” conjured up before me pictures too distasteful for words. I remembered the “orphans’ home” near Marion, which I occasionally used to pass when my father, who practised medicine twenty-five years in Marion, took me with him on calls into the country, and the memory of the pity and sense of fear with which I shrunk from going past that “home” was something akin to the feeling I experienced when Mr. Harding mentioned a “Catholic Home.” Once inside such [Pg 161]a place, perhaps one might have to remain—I didn’t know. And it seemed all out of proportion to the character of our own special case to suggest such a home for a President’s child.

I supposed I voiced these things aloud; I don’t remember. But Mr. Harding was entirely sympathetic. “I’ll agree to anything you suggest, dearie,” he said. Of course I had nothing to suggest. I would not listen to his repeated suggestion that he see Mr. Scobey, or even that he talk with his sister, Mrs. Charity Remsberg. I wanted Elizabeth Ann myself, and somehow it seemed to me I would never never see her again if I allowed either of these families to take her, even though Mrs. Remsberg was my sweetheart’s sister.

“I guess the only thing is to let Elizabeth and Scott adopt her,” I said resignedly. Then I could be with her at least. “See, here I have Elizabeth’s itemized statement of her expenses if we decide to follow such a course,” and I produced a small piece of paper on which my sister had entered her necessary monthly expenses. Mr. Harding slapped his Oxford glasses on his nose and looked at the final amount at the bottom; he was never much interested in my money items except as a whole. He agreed to the amount, saying if such an arrangement would make me happier than would an arrangement such as he had suggested, whereby later on I or he might take the baby as ours, he was agreeable to it. He tried to impress upon me how I would want to take the baby later on, but I could not see any future possibility of my being able to do so; and would he not be in the White House for four long years?—possibly eight. The adoption by the Willitses seemed to me to be the only thing in sight, regardless of how I deplored the arrangement.

Mr. Harding had met Scott Willits casually, immediately following his nomination in Chicago. This meeting was prearranged by Mr. Harding and me, and took place in the Florentine Room of the Congress Hotel. It was late afternoon when Mr. Harding appeared where others besides Elizabeth, Scott and I were waiting to shake his hand. He came in hatless and the June warmth was in his face. I have never experienced in Chicago, heat [Pg 162]surpassing the heat of those exciting days of the Republican Convention in 1920. My brother-in-law had been out of the hospital less than a week where he had undergone a slight operation, and his cheeks were sallow. How healthy Mr. Harding looked! His greeting for all of us was one of such natural cordiality and long-time friendliness that I am sure it did not go unremarked by others in the room. We chatted several minutes, then Mr. Harding said with his good-natured smile, “You know, we folks who run for office sometimes neglect a lot of things—I just happened to think, standing here, that I have had no luncheon!” I looked at the watch which he had given me three years before. “Why, it’s four o’clock!” Mr. Harding looked around cautiously at the others waiting to claim his time. “Yes, and I must go—” I interrupted him. “You’re going first and have some luncheon—please!” I pleaded as he turned to Elizabeth and Scott and held out his hand. I squeezed his fingers, and, as he turned away, called after him again, “Don’t forget to eat!”

Now, on the occasion of my visit with him in the Statler Hotel, he was recalling this meeting with Scott and assuring me that he thought everything would be fine if we decided to proceed with the adoption arrangement. I remember he said, “You love Elizabeth, don’t you, dearie?” And when I sobbed against his shoulder, “Y-e-s, b-u-t,” he said, “Well, I know she will do all in her power to see that you have Elizabeth Ann with you as much as you wish.” I told him then that she had indeed been a peach. “Yes,” agreed Mr. Harding, “I have never known a more beautiful love between two sisters than that which exists between you and Elizabeth.” He knew better than anyone else how I adored my sister.

Then, in an attempt at a gayer mood, which I am sure the work of the dentist and our serious considerations could not have genuinely inspired, Mr. Harding told me how he thought he could have me often in Washington. He promised to send for me just as soon after the inauguration as possible. He gave me sufficient funds to carry me over and to pay Elizabeth and Scott [Pg 163]in advance, and urged me to complete the adoption arrangements as soon as I comfortably could.

Then he kissed me goodbye and we parted again.

But Scott remained adamant. And so the controversy about where the authority should rest which would govern Elizabeth Ann in the future continued. However, Elizabeth and I did seek a lawyer, and I laid before him in confidence my problem, and the three of us—Elizabeth, Scott and I—had a long talk with him. He proved to be a judge—and a Catholic. He pointed out to me the advantages in connection with the Catholic “home” proposition, of course not dreaming he was advising me in behalf of a child that belonged to the President of the United States, or rather the President-elect. But I could not see that. The only thing that seemed to hold out the promise of being with my baby was the adoption.

When Scott left to go on tour with the Chicago Opera Company the final decision had not been reached. But after he departed, Elizabeth wrote to him, finally obtaining his consent to the adoption, which also provided a legal guardianship which would give me full authority over Elizabeth Ann. In this way was the matter consummated, and I wrote to Mr. Harding in Marion, telling him that final arrangements were being made and requesting the necessary $300 which the lawyer said would be his fee. Of course I had told the lawyer I wished the matter kept strictly confidential, and I gave him my name as Nan Britton Christian, though my name in the birth certificate registering our baby as Elizabeth Ann Christian had been Emma Eloise Britton (Christian). Mr. Harding sent me the $300 from Columbus where he was passing through on his way to Washington for the inauguration, enclosing the money in a note to me, the envelope being stamped only with a two-cent stamp and not registered.

The lawyer was very kind to me, though Mr. Harding said [Pg 164]upon my first visit to him in the White House that the charge for the adoption papers was exhorbitant. I have often thought that my statement to the lawyer to the effect that Elizabeth Ann might some day have some money, and that I wished to be in a position to take charge of all of her affairs, may have had some influence in the matter of his arriving at so large a fee. I know I did state to him that she would very likely have a small amount to her credit immediately, and he suggested my investing it in government bonds. However, in spite of the fact that Mr. Harding often spoke to me of such a fund, he did not tell me definitely that he had started it, and he died very suddenly, with an ocean between us.

[Pg 165]

I was distinctly given to understand by my lawyer that my legal guardianship over Elizabeth Ann really constituted me the sole parent in all but name. It was because I desired this statement in writing from the lawyer that early in 1926 I was prompted to write to him, recalling to his memory the circumstances surrounding the adoption and requesting to know my legal status and whether I was obliged to report back to the court in the matter. I told him I was under the impression that it had been fixed up for all time so that such a report from me was unnecessary. In his letter to me, dated June 26, 1926, he states, “Where the appointment is only for the purpose of consenting to her adoption and that having transpired and the accounting having been filed and you having been excused from further accounting and further duty by the court, there is no further necessity for a guardianship, unless she receives some property and if that should happen in Illinois, then you would be the legal guardian to control said property until she becomes of legal age,” a statement widely at variance with the positive one he made to me in 1921, viz., that by the arrangement then made I would be Elizabeth Ann’s legal guardian, fully empowered to act for her in all things, and that this arrangement would be final and for all time. In fact, it was for this service I thought I paid him the sum of $300. When I saw Mr. Harding for the first time in the White House, I told him I was sure my Chicago attorney had [Pg 166]been obliged to go outside the regular procedure in cases of adoptions in appointing me legal guardian for all time, thus endeavoring to explain away the charge of $300 which Mr. Harding had termed “exhorbitant.” The statement from my lawyer’s letter which I have just quoted—and the general information contained in the full letter, which is of course in my possession—does not point to the fact that I had at any time during the legal proceedings been made Elizabeth Ann’s legal guardian for all time as I fondly thought; though I may be wrong about this after all. I am sure my sister Elizabeth and her husband both would be very much surprised at this piece of contradictory information for they have never been told by me that I have received such a letter and are, as I was, under the decided impression that I am Elizabeth Ann’s guardian for all time. Whether or not the difference in names given—the birth certificate bearing my maiden name as Emma Eloise Britton (Christian) and the adoption papers made out in the name of Nan Britton (Christian) would in itself annul the adoption and make void even the action taken back in 1921, I do not know. I know little about the law and its intricacies.

In any event, the adoption cards announcing that Mr. and Mrs. Scott A. Willits had adopted Elizabeth Ann Willits were dated March 15, 1921, were mailed out by the Willitses at that time, and Elizabeth Ann (Harding) Christian became legally Elizabeth Ann Willits.

My brother-in-law had been during the war a private in the navy, and after the armistice he very much desired to be released so that he might get back to his musical vocation. He is a violinist, and the duties of a sailor had necessarily done much damage to hands which were entirely unused to manual labor. Through my appeal to Mr. Harding, who was then of course a United States Senator, Scott was given an honorable discharge which enabled him to return to his music. I remember his telling us how the other boys at the Fort sat up and took notice when it was learned that a United States Senator had intervened in his behalf.

[Pg 167]

Therefore, when Elizabeth Ann became legally a Willits, it was agreed that the story surrounding her adoption should be that her real father had been a friend of Scott in the navy and that her real mother was dead. On the whole it sounded plausible and seemed to “get over” admirably. I found myself unwilling however to state that the mother was dead, and found that in the instances I was approached for an explanation, it sufficed to say merely that the father was a friend of Scott, which was true in the main.

Before Scott had returned from his Chicago Opera tour, Elizabeth and I had begun to plan for a new apartment. They lived on the South Side in Chicago, which is not generally conceded to be as fashionable or desirable as the North Side, and Elizabeth and I agreed we would prefer to be on the North Side. I was to live with them, of course, and my room and board were included in the amount of money paid to them monthly. This money, Mr. Harding agreed heartily with me, should always be paid to them through me, and it always was, most of the time being all cash, except for a couple of months when I sent them my personal checks from New York. Outside of my board and room, as Mr. Harding stated to Elizabeth during the Marion, Ohio, interview, “I mean, of course, to take care of Nan in the matter of clothes, etc.” and he did, too, liberally. With the first payment to the Willitses which he had advanced, handing it to me in Cleveland upon my visit with him in the Hotel Statler, Elizabeth and I chose some additional furniture for the new apartment, and in a short time selected the apartment itself, which was at 901 Lafayette Parkway. It had a sun porch and a back porch, and even a real back yard, which we could share along with the other five families who lived in the apartment house. We thought the yard ideal for Elizabeth Ann to play in.

[Pg 168]

Mrs. Belle Woodlock shed real tears when we took Elizabeth Ann away in the taxi, never again to return to her. Only once afterward did I see Mrs. Woodlock, and it had then been so long since I had heard myself called “Mrs. Christian” that she had to hail me several times, on the elevated platform downtown, before I realized she was calling to me. The baby had been with her, you see, over a year, and one grows attached to a baby in that length of time even though the parents hover near.

My sister Elizabeth continued for several weeks to play in the theatre where she led the orchestra, but Scott’s work permitted him to be home on certain evenings. Scott’s father, a hardy farmer, was visiting the Willitses about a week after the baby had arrived to make that her home, and both he and Scott were home one evening when the baby exhibited unusual lung force and much temperament. The reason therefor was doubtless because she had begun to cut her first difficult teeth. I shall never forget how that night she cried herself to sleep in my arms, her cheek, tear-wet, against my cheek, her tiny arms wrapped about my neck. This, of course, excited wonder from Mr. Willits, Sr., who, not knowing of course that I was the mother, marvelled at my “way with babies”!

In the spring of that year, 1921, possibly in April when most people move, we went over to the North Side. Dr. and Mrs. John Wesener, the latter a first cousin of Mr. Harding, also lived on Lafayette Parkway, down the street in an apartment house right on Lake Michigan. I have forgotten how we discovered this; perhaps Daisy Harding told us in a letter after Elizabeth or I wrote to her giving her our new address. Lafayette Parkway is but a block or so long and runs from West to East between Sheridan Road and Lake Michigan. It was at the Weseners’ that Daisy Harding visited when she came to Chicago, and it was when she made such a trip—in the summer of 1921, I think—that she first saw her brother Warren’s child, her niece, though, of course, not known to her then as such.

I was at this time unable to walk a block without feeling the most inexpressible sensations of fatigue. I would waken in the morning, always being able to sleep all right—a sort of heavy, dead sleep—and could not stand on my feet unless I immediately had something to eat. At last I decided if I could but get into a hospital, anywhere, where I would not be allowed to get out of bed for weeks, and where I would be waited upon hand and foot, I might regain some of my lost strength. There was a minor operation which I had contemplated having for some time, and I thought I would go ahead and have it and thus get into a hospital. I consulted doctors about it and was headed definitely in that direction. I wrote to Mr. Harding. He sent me $450 for my expenses. He sent this of course in a plain envelope, as usual, enclosing it several times in smaller envelopes.

Elizabeth, however, who had tried all along to persuade me not to go to a hospital, finally did influence me to see her friend and family doctor, Dr. Frederic L. Barbour, a physician whom Scott had known for several years and who had skilfully treated Scott early in January of 1920, when the latter was seriously ill. Dr. Barbour had two offices; one on the South Side and one in the Marshall Field Building downtown. It was to the latter office that Elizabeth took me one noon. I shall never forget how I looked those days. My eyes were weak as a direct result of my general run-down condition and I wore tortoise-shell glasses most of the time. I was extremely thin, and I had no smile except certain times when I had been lying down for awhile and felt comparatively rested.

Dr. Barbour was young and cheerful. I think it did me good to look at him. He examined me thoroughly, took an X-Ray of my chest, and in the end told me I was in a very excellent condition to pass on under any anesthetic, refusing to treat me at all if I even so much as considered an operation of any kind. I [Pg 170]became Dr. Barbour’s patient at once, giving up all thought of an operation, and remained under his care for many months. And he became one of my best friends. He was obliged among other things to treat me for a very weak condition resulting from lack of recuperation after my baby’s birth, and he himself guessed intuitively the whole of my story with very little information from me, even to the identity of Elizabeth Ann’s illustrious father.

My sister Janet was living with us at that time, and my brother “Doc” was also in Chicago and at our apartment frequently. It was difficult for us to hear each other correct Elizabeth Ann, who was now approaching the age when she had to be told right from wrong. It annoyed Scott, my brother-in-law, fully as much as it annoyed me, I am sure, to suffer her to be reprimanded first by one of us and then by the other, though I felt I was naturally the one to give orders in her behalf and the one whom she should obey above all others. This created a state of continual dissension and superinduced an added nervous condition in me which I was trying desperately with Dr. Barbour’s treatment to overcome. Therefore, I determined the only thing for me to do was again to yield my baby to the care of others and return to New York for the oncoming winter, allowing the Willits home to regain normal composure. I am sure this must have brought a great sense of relief to Scott and I know it made things far easier of accomplishment for my sister Elizabeth, in regard to both the baby and Scott.

In June of that spring, 1921, I made my first trip to Washington. I had wanted so much to attend the inauguration on March 4th, but it did not seem wise for me then to undertake a trip which would doubtless prove physically detrimental to me; and there was much to do anyway, because my precious girl was with us; and, mother-like, I felt no one could handle her as well [Pg 171]as I. So this June trip was the first I had made to Washington since the President’s formal installation in the highest office of the land.

Up to this time I had for the most part sent my messages to the President through Tim Slade. The first letter I sent to Washington after Mr. Harding’s inauguration I sent independent of Tim, simply addressing it to my sweetheart at the White House, taking care, however, to enclose it a couple of times in inside envelopes, on one or both of which I had written, “This is a confidential and private letter and is to be handed immediately to the President.” I followed it with another, similarly addressed, in which I inquired if the first one had been received. My distress was very genuine when I had Mr. Harding’s reply that he had received but one letter, the second one I had sent. The first one had contained several snapshots of Elizabeth Ann and some of Elizabeth Ann and me. On the backs of these snapshots I had written explanatory messages, calling his attention to her eyes, or her expression, or something about her which resembled her father so strongly.

So, after this experience Mr. Harding advised me to send the letters in Tim’s care until he could think of another and better way. Which I did, of course, Tim delivering them in person to the President. And I had arranged through Tim, he fixing it with the President, for my first visit to Washington.

As soon as I reached Washington I connected with Tim on the phone. It seems to me he told me my appointment with Mr. Harding had already been arranged. In any event, Tim called for me at my hotel and escorted me to the White House.

Needless to say, I “took in” everything I could on that first visit. We entered the executive offices through the main office entrance, which is the entrance on the right of the White House portico, and passed through the hall leading to the Cabinet Room. Here we waited for Mr. Harding.

While we waited, I observed the Cabinet Room with less awe, I guess, than natural curiosity. There was a long table around which stood the substantial chairs of the twelve men who met [Pg 172]there every Tuesday morning and every Friday morning, each chair having the name of the particular Cabinet member engraved upon a little metal plaque which was fastened on the back. A fireplace, a clock on the mantelpiece, and a few pictures completed the furnishings. Mr. Harding’s chair at the head of the table interested me most, and I stroked the back of it and sipped stale water from a partially filled glass which stood on the table in front of the President’s chair. So this was where sat the leaders of the greatest nation in the world! I recalled articles I had read about this awesome office. One had recently appeared in The New York Times and was entitled, “At the Keyhole of the Cabinet Room.” But I was not at the keyhole. I was on the really-and-truly inside!

We had been waiting only a very few minutes when Mr. Harding opened the door, a door immediately behind and opposite his Cabinet Room chair. He greeted me cordially and instructed Tim to remain in the Cabinet Room. Then I preceded him into a very small adjoining room, a room with one window. He explained to me that this was the ante-room, and crossed over to another door which led into his own private office.

Once in there, he turned and took me in his arms and told me what I could see in his face—that he was delighted to see me. Not more delighted, however, than I was to see him.

There were windows along one side of the room which looked out upon the green of the White House grounds, and outside, stalking up and down, face rigidly to the front, moved the President’s armed guard. But in spite of this apparent obliviousness on the part of the guard, we were both skeptical and Mr. Harding said to me that people seemed to have eyes in the sides of their heads down there and so we must be very circumspect. Whereupon he introduced me to the one place where, he said, he thought we might share kisses in safety. This was a small closet in the ante-room, evidently a place for hats and coats, but entirely empty most of the times we used it, for we repaired there many times in the course of my visits to the White [Pg 173]House, and in the darkness of a space not more than five feet square the President of the United States and his adoring sweetheart made love.

I was tremendously interested in Mr. Harding’s private office.

First I examined his desk. It was very large and seemed to contain much drawer space. Mr. Harding told me that in one of the drawers he intended to keep my letters and anything that pertained to me, and that for this reason his private secretary, George Christian, had been instructed as at the Senate Office, to burn everything in that particular drawer if anything should happen to the President.

On his desk stood a miniature portrait of his mother, and I observed on my calls upon him at the White House that in her memory fresh flowers frequently stood upon his desk near her portrait.

There was a grate fireplace directly opposite the President’s desk. Here, Mr. Harding told me, he burned all the letters I sent him after he had committed their messages to his heart. In this connection we discussed the loss of the first letter and, deplorable as it was, Mr. Harding said it “was done” and all we could do was to guard against future losses. He begged me to write him much, actually mailing the letters, however, only occasionally and a number at a time. He said he would “sit right in that chair” (indicating his desk chair) and read my letters and think of me. And his expressions of hunger for worded love from me made me homesick in anticipation for the visits I knew could nevermore be as they had been in the past. I promised him he should have many love-letters, and I told him that after all, writing to him and being near our blessed child were the only real joys in my life, and to be separated from him for such long intervals was fully as great a hardship for me as for him.

I recall the dress I wore upon that occasion. It was of white silk crepe with a tiny black figure, a figure so small that from a distance the dress looked grey. It was trimmed with a narrow border of cerise and many-colored wooden beads. With it I [Pg 174]wore a rather large picture hat, also cerise, and grey suede slippers and grey stockings. The excitement had brought unnatural roses to my cheeks and, despite my physical weakness, I felt exhilarant and strong when I was with my darling sweetheart.

In the ante-room there was a leather couch, so dilapidated that I remember I remarked to Mr. Harding that one might think it had been there ever since the White House was built. We used to sit there a great deal, especially the times when Tim Slade would wait for me either outside or on the other side of the President’s office, in a large room beyond Mr. Christian’s office and far away from the sound of our voices. And sometimes, especially later on in Mr. Harding’s brief two and one-half years of service, it was wise that we should be away from everybody, for I took many tears down to the White House.

On this first visit we discussed the wisdom of continuing to send letters in Tim Slade’s care, and Mr. Harding seemed disposed to make a change. I imagine he didn’t want to impose too much upon Tim and didn’t wish to further arouse Tim’s curiosity. At that time Tim was out of the secret service, I believe, though for a month or two after Mr. Harding’s inauguration Tim said he helped George Christian until the latter “got onto” things in a secretarial way.

The most direct channel through which my letters could be delivered into his hands, Mr. Harding said, was to address them in care of his valet. Major Arthur Brooks, a light colored man, who was, in the opinion of Mr. Harding, entirely trustworthy and, what was better, so far as Tim was concerned, Major Brooks was always availably near to deliver them immediately without putting himself out to do so. Mr. Harding always referred to him as “Brooks.” So it was arranged: I was to enclose my letter to the President in another envelope, sealed, and then enclose the whole in an envelope addressed to Major Brooks [Pg 175]personally, with a short letter to Brooks instructing him to deliver the enclosure to the President immediately. I remember very well, because I wrote so many of those letters, that they always read something like this:

“E. Baye” was the name I used also when I wrote to Tim Slade, and was, if I remember correctly, suggested by Tim, as a result of his first trip to Eagle Bay in the summer of 1920, when he for the first time delivered a communication from Mr. Harding to me.

After my visit to Washington when we had decided upon sending my letters to the President in Major Arthur Brooks’ care, we never experienced any further losses, and up until June of 1923, when Mr. Harding left for Alaska and I sailed for Europe, I sent my letters to my sweetheart in care of Major Brooks.

I have already stated that there existed a mutual agreement between Mr. Harding and me to destroy each other’s letters, and as a result I have in my possession only certain formal letters (from most of which I have quoted near the beginning of my story) which I asked Mr. Harding if I might keep. In view of the fact that I was to destroy all love-letters from him, and these early letters contained no intimate allusions, being the first ones he ever wrote me, he gave his permission for me to keep them; otherwise, they, too, would have gone with the rest.

Two letters Mr. Harding sent me—one in 1918 and another in 1919, the first to New York, in care of the United States Steel Corporation office, and the second to Asbury Park addressed in error to the Hotel Marlborough instead of the Hotel Monmouth—were never received. They contained respectively $30 and $40 in cash. The third letter lost in the mails was the one I have spoken of as having been sent to the fictitious name of “A. Y. Jerose” and mailed from Chicago by me to Mr. Harding in [Pg 176]Atlanta, Georgia. So, with one letter sent to the White House which he did not receive, there had been four letters sent which had gone astray, two from Mr. Harding to me, and two from me to Mr. Harding.

As I have said, things occur to me which happened and may be of interest to the reader, but which I do not think of in chronological order, hence occasionally I must go back to them. Such an incident comes to my mind in connection with that first memorable visit to the White House. I expressed my delight to Mr. Harding that “we” had beaten his long-time Ohio rival, James M. Cox, so overwhelmingly for the presidency. Mr. Harding shrugged his shoulders, evidently recalling the following incident.

It was back in 1918, upon the occasion of one of my trips West when I visited my mother in New Philadelphia, Ohio, where she was living and teaching school, that I, doing up the breakfast dishes one morning, took a notion to do some extra cleaning, and forthwith began to wash the kitchen shelves and paper them with clean newspapers. I smoothed the lower shelf with the front page of the local paper, stopping to glance a second at the face which looked up at me. It was that of James M. Cox, then Governor of the State of Ohio. He had recently made a speech in New Philadelphia or thereabouts and his picture was appearing for that reason in connection with his speech.

Shortly after that I returned to New York and work. In leaving New Philadelphia, Ohio, I was obliged to go to a nearby town to catch the fast 5 P. M. train, and had to take a taxi because a severe electric storm had put the interurbans out of commission temporarily, and the ride over and my excitement in catching the train and the warm weather had inclined me to have some ice cream in the diner as soon as I boarded the train. I had previously dined with my mother before leaving. As I [Pg 177]passed through the Pullman from my seat about midway in the car, I noticed sitting in the end section a man whose face looked strangely familiar. However, I quickly forgot it and passed on to the diner.

When I returned I found that man sitting in the seat opposite my own, the porter being engaged in making up his berth for him. I took my bag and went into the ladies’ dressing-room, thinking I also would retire early, and assuming that upon my return the gentleman in question would have departed for his dressing-room.

However, when I came back, he was still there. I sat down opposite, cupped my chin in my hand, and gazed out of the window into the gathering darkness in which vagrant lights were flashing.

“Do you mind if I sit here until the porter has finished my berth?” I looked up. “Certainly not,” I replied.

“It is very warm isn’t it?” he continued pleasantly.

“Yes, sir,” I answered. Then I looked directly at him. “Do you know,” I said, as it suddenly dawned upon me where I had seen that face, “you look enough like the Governor of Ohio to be he?”

“I am he,” replied Governor Cox.

Being somewhat familiar with Mr. Harding’s natural dislike for the man opposite me, even though he had mentioned him to me but casually in the course of our friendship, I was not hasty to speak with him further. But he had evidently made up his mind to talk to me, and we gradually drifted into conversation.

He had known Judge Sinclair, Mr. Harding’s friend, at whose home I had been visiting when in Marion that trip, and of course I told him, with encouragement from him, of other people I had visited, not forgetting the Hardings on East Center Street. He asked me all about how I knew them, and I told him Miss Daisy Harding had been my teacher in high school. However, I did not, of course, even mention Mr. Harding’s name.

“I understand Mr. Harding is a great one with the ladies.” For no apparent reason Governor Cox fairly tossed these words [Pg 178]at me. I was infuriated, probably more at the plural “ladies” than at anything else. I replied as coolly as possible, “I don’t know anything about that; I know he is very lovely to his wife.”

He inquired where I worked in New York and I told him in the United States Steel Corporation. He asked me if they treated me nicely and I assured him that they did, indeed. He became very friendly, offering me a position in his own executive office in Columbus, Ohio, the State Capital, if I cared to leave the Steel Corporation. I saw here a possible opportunity to help my young brother Howard, and told the Governor how I myself wanted my mother to allow him to join the army or navy, but that mother would not give her permission and that Howard was under age. Governor Cox said I should send him to Columbus to see him and he would see that Howard got a commission. I was delighted with this promise. (After I returned to New York I wrote Governor Cox, reminding him of his promise and telling him it was a pleasure to meet him, and I have a letter from him, which was sent for Howard to use as a form of introduction, but which Howard never used and I retained.)

In the morning, I arose bright and early. I had not been able to secure a lower berth and Governor Cox had the previous night urged me to take his section, as it would, he thought, be more comfortable for me. To which I replied that if he could get along in an upper I ought to be able to, and I have a vivid recollection of mounting the ladder that night, the porter on one side and the Governor of Ohio on the other, assisting me into my upper berth. I was in the diner early next morning, but had scarcely been seated when Governor Cox appeared in company with another man who was obviously taking the Governor to breakfast. They found their table, and then Governor Cox immediately excused himself and came over and asked to sit a minute at my table. He inquired after my health and my sleep and expressed the wish that some time he would see me again.

When our train reached the Pennsylvania Station in New York, the red caps were all busy and I proceeded to pick up my suitcase and mount the stairs. But Governor Cox was on the [Pg 179]platform and very kindly offered to carry my bag. He said he was stopping at the Ritz-Carlton and had come to join his daughter, whose husband, Mr. Mahoney, was sailing the next day. He asked me to ride uptown with him. He said he would very much like to have me meet his daughter Helen, and invited me to dine with them at the Ritz-Carlton that evening. I was very frank to tell him that I had no clean blouse, and that I really didn’t think I would even dine with the King of England that night after my long journey to New York. He left me at his hotel and I went on uptown, but before he got out of the taxi, he put his hand on my knee and said, “Let me tell you, young lady, I’d trust you anywhere in the world.”

I could hardly wait to relate this to Mr. Harding—the entire episode I was sure would interest him. However, the knee business and Governor Cox’s reference to Mr. Harding’s being a favorite with the ladies infuriated him far more than it had me, and his letter in answer to mine was the first of its kind I had ever received.

“I never did have any use for that man,” he wrote, “but now I despise him.”

I could scarcely blame him, but why he should have scolded me I could not understand. At least I could not understand it then. I remember well Mr. Harding also wrote, “Perhaps Mr. Cox can assume all responsibilities toward you more capably than I have done.” This was cruel.

I slept little the night I got that letter and could not wait for the morrow when I could phone my darling. During those days I very often called Mr. Harding long distance. I usually called him at noon during my luncheon hour, and I went across the street to the Equitable Building. There was one particular girl who always got the call for me, and she grew so accustomed to getting it that as soon as I appeared above her at the switchboard, she inquired with a smile, “W. G. Harding—Senate Chamber?” Sometimes she was smiling broadly when I came out of the booth and I would not be surprised if she heard many interesting conversations.

[Pg 180]

But when I nodded to the telephone operator upon this particular occasion I just could not smile. I think she understood something was wrong. She put the call through quickly. I reached him, as usual, in the Senate Chamber. He was cool as could be over the phone and I apologized and apologized, though in truth I hardly knew what for! It grieved me to have him take such an unfair attitude. I was most disconsolate.

But the following day came his letter of forgiveness, yes, of humble apology, and his confession that it had been only his jealousy that had prompted him to write as he had and to speak to me over the phone in that way. He would never do so again, he was a “damned fool,” and so on, but he loved me so much. “And after all, dearie,” he wrote, “there is bound to be jealousy where there is love.” And I knew well he loved me greatly.

Curious that the only man who ever really caused Mr. Harding a moment of jealousy, on my account at least, should have been his opponent in the Presidential election of 1920!

This brings to my mind the little personal catechism I underwent upon that first visit to the White House. He had often in the early days questioned me concerning other, younger, men. Of these younger fellows he seemed not so much jealous as curious. But sometimes he pretended jealousy. He often said to me, “Nan, darling, I don’t want you to be a hermit maid.” And so I went occasionally to dinner or to the theatre with fellows nearer my own age. But I told Mr. Harding about them.

Now, upon this first visit in the White House I thought his interest in my social movements seemed almost pathetically curious. “Don’t go off and marry any of the fellows you meet, dearie!” he pleaded with me there on the dilapidated couch in the ante-room. As he spoke he blushed faintly. “I love you so much. Nan—and I don’t like to have you be with anybody else—that’s [Pg 181]the real truth!” he finished lamely. I could have screamed my delight at his concern. If he could only have realized that the liveliness exhibited there with him was for me only reaction to the stimulation I felt always when around him. Why, back in Chicago I felt weak, and ill. I hugged him and whispered soothing negations in his ear, denying emphatically that I should ever marry at all since I could not marry him. Free or not free, I told him, I preferred Warren Harding to all the other men in the world put together.

There would be opportunities for intimate companionship, he promised. I told him I was in no danger of being a hermit maid in that event. I was free to be with him just as in the old days. And I hoped he was going to be equally free. Yet somehow I inwardly lamented the personal restrictions I felt the presidency would impose. I think it took Warren Harding a few months to discover these restrictions.

After I returned to Chicago from my initial trip to Washington and the White House, I prepared to go to New York. Scott, Elizabeth and Elizabeth Ann were going down on a farm in Illinois, which is the home of Scott’s people, and I left Chicago for New York about the same time. That was in August. Scott’s mother and father adored the baby; she seemed to make everyone love her, and people outside of the family spoke about her “adorable smile,” which is the smile of her father.

[Pg 182]

On July 30th, 1921, I took Elizabeth Ann and went away for two days. I wanted to be alone with her for a little space, away from everybody. We took a lake boat and went across to St. Joseph, Michigan. Going over it was a lot of fun for me to speak to strangers openly as “her mother,” for Elizabeth Ann was too small to know things, and her affection for me was always the very natural affection of a daughter for her mother. We stopped at a hotel in St. Joseph, the name of which I have forgotten, and the next day some time I held Elizabeth Ann in my arms while one of those “tin-type” photographers snapped our picture, which eventually found its way to Washington. She was so small that we could not do much except walk about a bit and take a long [Pg 183]ride in a touring car which I hired by the hour. I remember Elizabeth Ann slept most of the rather uninteresting ride we took about the country, but we were at least together—mother and darling baby—and for two whole days!

When we crossed the gang-plank to board the steamer on our return, a gentleman asked if he might assist me with my bag. I carried the baby. I turned later to thank him and said, “Thank you very much, sir.” Elizabeth Ann, with characteristic mimicry, looked up at him and echoed, her Harding smile very evident, “Ver’ much, ver’ much,” which delighted the whole crowd.

I stopped at the White House enroute East in August. I went to see President Harding as soon as Tim Slade could make an appointment for me. It seems to me that appointment was in the late afternoon, though it is difficult to remember these details.

Leaving Elizabeth Ann had again thrown me into a state of mental depression I could not shake off, and I was far from normally strong and well in spite of the enormous good Dr. Barbour had done me. As he said, I had been “pretty far gone nervously.”

I told Mr. Harding I contemplated plans for combining work with a course at Columbia University that fall and winter. He heartily approved of this. I told him I had understood that secretarial positions were scarce in New York, but that if I could get a good all-day position I would take it and attend Columbia at night, unless the strain proved too great. He did not encourage me to take an all-day position, but he did make some suggestions with regard to obtaining work, and offered to give me a card of introduction, and to write a letter in my behalf, to the Collector of the Port of New York, Mr. George Aldridge, whose office was of course in the Customs Building, Battery Place. He told me Mr. Aldridge had been one of his appointees and that he did not hesitate to ask such a favor of him. The card Mr. Harding gave me [Pg 184]to present to Mr. Aldridge merely bore his name, Warren G. Harding, and, in his handwriting, “Introducing Miss Britton.”

Remembering Mr. Harding’s remark about making me White House stenographer, a remark made to me one night in the earlier days when we had dined at the Manhattan and I had lovingly prophesied the position he now held, I said to him, “Sweetheart, couldn’t you let me come down here and work?” I told him it would help to make me happier, inasmuch as it didn’t seem possible for me to remain in Chicago and be only a third parent to Elizabeth Ann. It was during that visit, I remember, that his woman stenographer came in. I was sitting in a chair near Mr. Harding’s desk and Mr. Harding was seated in his chair at the desk. The stenographer came across the room and Mr. Harding looked up and smiled and said, “Can’t read it?” She pointed to the words she couldn’t make out (in his handwriting so familiar to me!) and he read them for her. After she had gone out and closed the door, I said wistfully, “Oh, I wish I could work for you, darling!” Mr. Harding smiled—the old smile of indulgence and love I liked to think he smiled best at me—but shook his head. “It would never do, dearie,” he said. Then he went on to picture in the face of his refusal how he would love to have me, and how, if I were his stenographer he would give me all his dictation just to have me with him, and he feared the nation’s business would suffer! Thus it was that he would picture for me the things he would love to do, making their impossibility a thing of unspeakable disappointment to me, and causing me to exclaim more than once, “Oh, I wish you weren’t in this position!”

We talked over the situation with regard to Elizabeth Ann and I explained to Mr. Harding how difficult it had become to really work out the three-cornered parentage. He said, “Well, just wait, dearie. Some of these days I’ll take her myself,” but that prospect was at least four years off, which to me seemed an eternity.

I showed him snapshots of Elizabeth Ann we had taken, and particularly one which to me is the image of her father. He was delighted with everything. We had to talk so fast, too, in order [Pg 185]to say everything to each other; and even then I never failed to leave without realizing I had forgotten dozens of things I meant to say to him. It wasn’t at all as it had been in the days when he was Senator. And his statement to me, repeated substantially every time I went to the White House, only added to my sorrow after I had left him—“I find myself longing to take baby girls in my arms, dearie—I never used to feel so deeply moved,” he would say, and the lights in his eyes were divine.

Mr. Harding gave me several hundred dollars and admonished me to be careful in spending it so that people wouldn’t talk about me. Then I left him. I do not really know the usual length of my visits with Mr. Harding in the White House, but I do know that it is not possible for sweethearts to spend three-fourths of their time in making up for lost kisses and have much time left to discuss serious affairs. These visits were never satisfying in length of time.

I went down to the Custom House to see Mr. Aldridge almost as soon as I reached New York, armed with Mr. Harding’s card of introduction. The deputy, Mr. Stewart, took me in to Mr. Aldridge’s office. With Mr. Aldridge was another man whom he introduced to me, “Colonel William Hayward, another friend of the President.”

The letter which Mr. Harding had told me he would write to Mr. Aldridge had not as yet reached the latter’s hands, and so I was obliged to explain my errand. Mr. Aldridge assured me he would do all in his power to assist me, and Col. Hayward volunteered to do the same. I thanked them both and tried to make it clear to Mr. Aldridge, after Col. Hayward had gone out, that I needed the position from the standpoint of salary, thinking by so doing I would entirely disarm him of any suspicion as to why President Harding had taken the pains to intercede for me.

[Pg 186]

I have often wished I had asked him frankly in the days that followed to see the letter which Mr. Harding actually wrote to him. I imagine the President wrote that I was the “daughter of an old friend,” etc. But evidently what he did write was sufficiently strong. For two weeks there were a good many people down there working directly or indirectly to find a suitable position for the President’s friend! I am afraid they all thought I wanted something much finer than I actually desired. Mr. Aldridge early turned the onus of the job upon his assistant, Mr. Stewart. Col. Hayward interviewed me with (what he said was) a view to creating a position in his own office for me in case I found nothing that pleased me.

As a matter of fact, I did not obtain work at all as a result of the efforts exerted in my behalf by the Custom House officials. I took the civil service examination at that time, but, having used my shorthand only spasmodically since I left the Steel Corporation, my speed was cut in half and I fell down on the stenographic examination, though I passed creditably in typing.

The position I finally obtained came entirely through my own personal contacts with employment bureaus, and was with an advertising man who employed me mornings and certain afternoons during the week. The rest of the time I spent getting out work for my journalistic course at Columbia.

I located at 314 West 72nd Street, in a room on the top floor of a studio apartment building. This structure has since been torn down and one of the newer type of tall apartment buildings substituted.

Mr. Harding had always encouraged me to write as much as possible, praising me for my letters which I wrote to him and which he said were the most graphic letters he had ever read. He used to tell me how he kept them under lock and key until he had absorbed every line of them, often taking them to the Senate Chamber, where he so often wrote to me, sitting apart from the other senators. “I am writing to you within hearing of epoch-making speeches,” or “I am writing near the scene of important legislative events,” he often said in his letters to me. [Pg 187]And the knowledge that he had so often expressed what seemed to me was genuine pride in my writing encouraged me more than anything to strive for a certain goal that year at Columbia—that goal being a fair mark of excellence, of course.

In October of that year, 1921, I went again to Washington. I do not remember at which hotel I stopped on each occasion, but on my various visits to Washington I have stopped at the Raleigh, New Ebbitt, Harrington, New Willard, Capitol Park, and, I think, at the Washington.

It seems to me it was upon this visit that Mr. Ferguson, another secret service man, met me at the station with his Ford coupe. I do not remember very distinctly whether it was after or before my conference with the President that Mr. Ferguson asked if I would like to occupy some of my time by driving. I thanked him and he took me for a drive out along the Potomac. He seemed curious about me and endeavored to “draw me out.” It gave me the keenest pleasure to pretend to misunderstand his questions and to be naively ignorant of the motive behind them. I am sure he must have despaired of being enlightened as to my identity, even though the President had given him my correct name.

I told Mr. Harding at that time that I felt he was very foolish to allow anyone but Tim Slade to meet me. I voiced my own faith in Tim’s trustworthiness and put it up to him direct.

“Don’t you trust Tim Slade, sweetheart?” I inquired.

I remember right where Mr. Harding stood, beside his desk, when I asked him this. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows as he answered, “Oh, measurably!” He told me he had tried to get Tim on that occasion, but he was either busy or out of the city—probably out of the city, for it always seemed to me Tim was at my beck and call, and I am sure he must have been more so at the President’s. But I managed to convince Mr. [Pg 188]Harding that every new man he sent to me was just “one more,” and he agreed we might better stick to Tim. “I like Slade all right,” he conceded when I pressed him for an opinion. In fact, as time went on, I was sure an element of affection in Mr. Harding’s attitude toward the man who was our confidential intermediary. In any event, that was the one and only time that Mr. Ferguson met me in Washington, although he did come on one occasion to Chicago with some money when the President was unable to secure Tim Slade’s services. Tim himself reminded me of this in one of the many talks we have had during the past two years.

The President listened eagerly to the latest news I had received from my sister Elizabeth concerning our child, and upon these visits to Washington I would invariably take with me pencilled scratches from Elizabeth Ann, these constituting the “letters” she would occasionally send to me. Naturally the enthusiasm with which I began these recitals ended in tears for me, for I could not talk long with her father about her without crying. And Mr. Harding’s eyes would grow heavy with sadness as he turned the conversation into other channels and pulled out a ready handkerchief to dry my eyes. He would try so hard to bring a smile to my face!

“What did you say to Woodrow Wilson that made him laugh when he rode with you the day of your inauguration?” I inquired of him upon one such occasion of weeping.

“Why, dearie, I don’t know! Did I make him laugh?” he asked, himself deeply amused at my query. I told him he must have done so because it was in the papers. He smiled whimsically, seeming to get quite a kick out of my credulity as to the accuracy of newspaper accounts.

Mr. Harding wanted to know whether I liked my work, and intimated that he either had already spoken to another steel man who was a friend of his or he intended to speak to him—J. Leonard Replogle. I know Mr. Harding played golf with Mr. Replogle and two other men some time that fall on Long Island. But I did not encourage him to use his influence in getting me [Pg 189]into another permanent position, for my movements were too uncertain those days.

During that visit I asked Mr. Harding if I might be taken through the rooms in the White House. We discussed the possibility of my running into Mrs. Harding, and Mr. Harding said it was possible, though not probable. It didn’t seem to worry him, and I was confident I could handle such a situation, anyway. The only time I had met Mrs. Harding, since the time back in 1915, when I went to their home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion to congratulate Mr. Harding upon his election to the United States Senate, was one day in Chicago shortly after Mr. Harding’s nomination for the Presidency. I had a friend with me who was interested to meet Mrs. Harding and we waited in the Florentine Room of the Congress Hotel, where we knew Mrs. Harding intended coming to hold a brief reception. I was entirely at ease with her when she finally made her appearance. And, if I may be permitted to so assume without seeming presumptuous, there was in her manner toward me almost an affection as I took her arm and led her over to where my friend stood who wished to meet her. And so, there in the White House, I felt entirely free from any apprehensions regarding Mrs. Harding’s attitude toward me should we meet there.

“Sure, go along, Nan, and see the place!” said Mr. Harding when I was ready to leave, or rather when he told me it was time for me to go. As I look back upon that visit now, it is as though he might have said to me, “Sure, visitors are allowed to go through the prison! Go along!” for as a prison he soon regarded the White House.

[Pg 190]

That was the first time Mr. Harding had seen my squirrel coat and he remarked that it was very beautiful. “But, Nan, darling, do be careful! How in the world do you explain these expensive-looking things?” I assured him I had not been approached for any explanations and I was sure I could handle the situation if I were. As a matter of fact, later on, when I went to school at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I did feel obliged to make certain explanations, and I simply named my sister as the [Pg 191]donor of all things beyond reasonable possibility of my own acquirement.

And so this particular visit ended with Mr. Ferguson, of the secret service, taking me through the White House reception rooms, the private dining-room, and many others which I was told were usually barred from public view. We made our exit by the entrance which is on the left of the portico as one enters the White House.

I was growingly introspective those days and especially after a trip to the White House. I would ponder morbidly a future, four years of which (Mr. Harding’s presidential years) seemed unalterably mapped out beyond hope of change, wherein I seemed to be shut out from the happiness I so longed to share with the two people I loved more than all else. I was selfish to the point of forgetting that the man down in Washington whom I loved and who loved me, as he kept writing me, “more than the world,” was also bearing a burden of loneliness such as he never dreamed would be his lot. So far he had not complained to me, though I felt the presence of much unrest and unhappiness even as early as the visits I made to him that fall. His was an attitude of constant hopefulness; mine of constant regret for the conditions of our entire situation.

Already I could not measure the regret I was experiencing as a result of the steps I had permitted to be taken in order to protect Elizabeth Ann “legally,” that she might have a name and home. After all, would I not have to undo all this when I revealed to her her real identity, which I certainly expected to do? What, then, would be the good of having provided her with a protection which was utterly false fundamentally, notwithstanding the fact that I could not doubt the kindly intentions of my sister and her husband? Where was the justice of a law which would deprive a mother, worthy to be a mother, of her child [Pg 192]simply because that child was born a “love-child”? Should not all children be love-children? But were they? I remember once a girl friend of mine said to me when I charged her with insincerity in her marriage, “Well, you know, Nan, a woman has to marry if she wants to have children!” She herself was no more in love with her husband than with the telephone pole outside her very beautiful home, and was in truth later on divorced. But she had “protected” her child! Mr. Harding was not free to offer me such protection, though he loved me, avowedly before God, far more than he had ever loved any other woman.

I have often wondered whether I would have been tempted to act in defiance of social conventions in taking my child openly myself, had her father been a man of lesser rank. I only know that during the period of which I am speaking, within the early months of Mr. Harding’s presidency, I was rebelling with all my heart at the situation as it existed, blame for which seemed to rest upon “the law.” Only my daily work and conscientious efforts to make good in my journalistic course at Columbia kept me from being unfair to everyone and upsetting a legalized regime.

And my rebellion was as fiercely directed against the law as it affected Mr. Harding as it was against the law as it affected myself. His attention to and love for little children during his tenure of office as President was marked sufficiently to prove, even to one who preferred to doubt, the sincerity in his heart when he voiced to me his longing just “to hold little girls.” Bless him! By all the laws of God and man certainly Warren G. Harding was entitled to nurture this spring of hidden father-love! Other little girls he could fondle openly, but his own dear child he dared not acknowledge, nor bestow upon her the love he felt, before a narrow-minded and censorious public.

In my Harding book of clippings I have a most appealing photograph which was published, I think, in The New York Times. It shows Mr. Harding holding a little girl in one arm and the little girl’s dog in the other, and a picture more expressive of his feelings I have never seen; I think this particular [Pg 193]child is the daughter of Edward B. McLean—unfortunately, I have cut away the inscription below the picture. Another half-tone is inscribed, “A proud daughter of New England is kissed by the President of the United States, at Crawford Notch, New Hampshire,” and shows Mr. Harding holding close a shy little girl, his face buried in what seems to be the fur of the child’s coat. Another pictures Mr. Harding with Norma and Levett Sweig of New York, who, according to the words below the picture “were tickled pink” when they asked the President to pose with them at the White House and he agreed. All of these children look to be about three years old. Still another picture shows Mr. Harding leaning far out of his executive office window to buy Christmas seals from a little girl whose name is Sally Le Fevre, and, the paper says, she “was greeted by a real Harding smile.” Even up in Alaska this love for children was evidenced, and I have a picture which shows Mr. Harding shaking hands with school children, the two in this picture also being little girls. I have other pictures of Mr. Harding with groups of children, and one where he is shown (The Saturday Evening Post of July 2, 1921) with two boys; but for the most part he chose to show his preferment for girls, and very naturally so, since his own and only child was a little girl.

Enrico Caruso, so another clipping goes, was struck with the likeness Mr. Harding bore to George Washington, and, with his deft artistry, took a picture of Mr. Harding and touched it up so that the resemblance to Washington is marked. But the heading above the picture which reads, “Harding becomes Father of Country,” struck a note of deep longing in my heart, for my yearning was not that he be known as the Father of His Country, but that I might proudly say to the world, “He is the father of my child!”

Thus the longing to claim Elizabeth Ann as mine battled with the tortuous plans already existent, and regret for past steps and worry over future ones were my constant mental companions. It is very possible that out of this bitterness was born my prayer for strength to ultimately set right a grossly wrong condition. [Pg 195]Though at that time little did I know of the pathways of suffering my feet would tread before I could bring myself to claim the child of Warren G. Harding as mine before the world! This I now do in this book, The President’s Daughter.

Scott Willits, my brother-in-law, planned to sail for Europe the latter part of January or the first of February of 1922 to study with Professor Otakar Sevcik, whose music colony is in Czechoslovakia, near Prague, where I think he is head of the Music Department in the Conservatory. Shortly before his arrival in New York (my sister Elizabeth and the baby accompanying him East) I made another trip to the White House.

If I am not mistaken, I was to first meet Tim Slade in a waiting room which is on the left as you enter the executive offices. Evidently the imposing-looking doorman in uniform who stands inside the entrance to the offices had been advised of my coming, for I was immediately conducted to the waiting-room. I observed with great interest a portrait of Mr. Harding which stood in one corner of this room, obviously unfinished. And I was examining the portrait when a gentleman, unknown to me, entered. He was a foreigner in appearance, and, I thought to myself, probably the artist in the case. It occurred to me at the same time that he might have been persuaded to come in and obtain what information he could with regard to my identity and the nature of my visit to the President, for he had been standing with the reporters who, as usual, were lined up just outside the President’s door.

The foreign gentleman spoke. “I think I have seen you somewhere,” he said. Utterly stupid, I thought. “I’m sure I have seen you in Los Angeles. Have I not?” he inquired with an ingratiating smile.

“Oh, very likely,” I answered him, going on with my inspection of the unfinished portrait of Mr. Harding. I have never been West of Chicago.

[Pg 196]

My tone must have conveyed sarcasm, because he ceased abruptly and turned with me to the portrait. I informed him frankly that the artist had given our President a very weak chin, and I think I made other uncomplimentary remarks about the painting which I discovered was actually his own work. I have often wondered since where that particular portrait hangs. I am sure my suggestions, if the artist followed them, have improved it immensely!

I had received an announcement from Tim Slade, a printed card which informed me that he had been made manager of a brokerage firm in Washington. I went there to see him, before meeting him at the White House later. I remember distinctly how I cried when Tim told me how they were “putting it over” on “the Chief,” as he often called Mr. Harding. He said it was a pity, and Mr. Harding ought to know some of the crooked work that was going on all around him. Of course my tendency then was to cry at the least little thing, I was so nervous. (I remember glancing out of the large window in Tim’s office—I called him Mr. Slade during those days, but have called him Tim for the past two years—and commenting upon the beauty of a car which he said was his.) And I determined to say to Mr. Harding upon my visit just what Tim had said to me. It didn’t seem possible that those around my darling sweetheart would dream of taking advantage of him—but, anyway, I thought I would say something to him about it. I felt confident that if I just told him that some of his associates were getting the best of him that he could immediately stop it!

So, after my friend the artist had left me, and Tim Slade had piloted me through certain difficult rooms into the President’s private office, I said to Mr. Harding, almost immediately after the door had been closed, “Sweetheart, Tim Slade says they are doing things behind your back down here to hurt you....” He smiled to note the concern registered in my every feature, and said, “Say, you darling, don’t you worry about me!” implying that I had enough to do to attend to my own thoughts and problems. “I’m all right,” he added, and smiled broadly to see the [Pg 197]look of relief that must have passed across my face. I said I really couldn’t see what anyone could do to “double-cross” a President, but I did wish he would be watchful. It may have been this time that he told me that he was surrounded by friends, and knowing what a true and loyal friend Warren Harding was it seemed reasonable to believe that he would inspire in others equally loyal friendship toward himself.

I had with me some character sketches which I had written in my course at Columbia University, one of them about his very own self, and which my professor had read aloud to our class. I put the rather bulky package of manuscript in his hands with a request that he read the contents when he found time. “Found time!” he agreed was a good expression. “Gee, Nan, they watch every move I make. Why, I even have to steal the time I take to write to you.” I said I thought it was perfectly horrible, and I wished to goodness he were out of it. And a full year had not yet elapsed since he went into office! The months seemed fettered with some ball and chain, so slow they moved.

Of course we talked of Elizabeth Ann and I told him that I thought I had made a terrible mistake in allowing our baby girl to be adopted, even as much as I adored Elizabeth my sister. And again he told me how he would love, if he were free to do it, to take Elizabeth Ann and “make her a real Harding.” And the wistfulness of his smile when he said this was precious to me.

[Pg 198]

Enroute to New York, Scott Willits, my brother-in-law, my sister Elizabeth and Elizabeth Ann, stopped in Washington. They went almost immediately to the office of Mrs. Heber Herbert Votaw, youngest sister of President Harding whose husband, Heber Herbert Votaw, had been appointed by Mr. Harding as Superintendent of Prisons. Mrs. Votaw was prominent in welfare work of some kind. Mrs. Votaw, or Carrie Harding [Pg 199]as you may recall, was my sister’s favorite among the Harding sisters back home in Marion. In her office they were introduced to Colonel Forbes who, my sister told me, took quite a fancy to Elizabeth Ann. Mrs. Votaw entertained them at the Senate Dining-Room for luncheon, where, Elizabeth said, Vice-President Coolidge sat across from them at the next table. In the afternoon Mrs. Votaw took them through the White House, and, Elizabeth said, voiced her regret that her brother, the President, was attending a conference. Otherwise, Mrs. Votaw told them, they might have gone in to see him. And also otherwise, I have often thought wistfully, he might have seen his own little daughter whom he never once saw in the almost four years she had been living at the time he passed on in San Francisco. A queer topsy-turvy set of circumstances—the President’s own sister escorting the President’s own child, unknown to her as such, through his home and grounds!

I almost devoured Elizabeth Ann when she landed with Scott and Elizabeth in New York. She was but two-and-a-half, and the best-natured child imaginable. I shall never forget how she became sleepy during our gaddings, and actually walked along the street so asleep that the sympathetic interest of pedestrians was drawn to her. I would take her on my lap every chance I got, hugging her to me, and worshipping the little face which bore to me such a pathetic resemblance to her father. And, oh, the joy of taking her to bed with me, and of doing the little things for her which she told me in her baby way she wanted done—her back rubbed or her “pidda” fixed this or that way. I think there is nothing comparable to the pleasure it gives a mother to wait upon her baby, though in the extreme it may possibly be poor training for the child.

Scott sailed for Bremen on the America (1922) and I gave up my work at Columbia, having completed the first semester with a B grade, and returned with Elizabeth and the baby to Chicago to remain the year Scott was to be abroad. That spring and summer I resumed my treatments with Dr. Barbour and in the fall, feeling much stronger, sought a suitable secretarial position. [Pg 200]I did some part-time work during that summer, but for the most part I remained at home helping as I could with the house work and taking care of my precious darling.

On the afternoon of June 8, 1922, Elizabeth, my sister, had gone downtown and Elizabeth Ann and I were alone in the apartment. I had been taking a bath and had gone into my bedroom for something, and when I came back to the bathroom I found the baby had locked herself in. She was always at my heels, but I did not know that she ever even so much as touched the lock on the door. As the door could be opened only from the inside, and as the baby could not open it, I became frantic. She was then only two-and-a-half years old.

I called in to her, telling her what to do to release the lock, but it was a difficult one to turn, more easily locked than unlocked. There was a note of fear in the tiny voice when she inquired “How do I do it?” I called down from the back porch to the lady who lived on the first floor and she suggested that I call the fire department. I put the call in immediately. Between the time the baby had locked herself in and the time the fire department arrived, I played “post office” with her, sitting outside the door on the floor and pushing innumerable envelopes, papers, blotters, etc., under the door which she in turn would push back with a giggle. I had quieted her and that quieted me somewhat.

Evidently the fire department didn’t often have calls to rescue babies who had locked themselves in bathrooms, and the fire chief was quite annoyed. However, they hoisted the ladder, and a fireman climbed through the open bathroom window, unlocked the door, and allowed a very calm and undisturbed Elizabeth Ann to walk forth.

This proved to be too unusual a thing for the ubiquitous newspaper reporters to pass up, and within ten minutes after the [Pg 201]rescue the doorbell rang. The Chicago Tribune wished to take my picture and that of the baby together! Yes, perhaps right there before the bathroom door would be the best, the reporter said.

I was so nervous that the possibility of any publicity frightened me because I knew what Mr. Harding would say. I refused flatly to allow them to take any pictures at all. “All right, madam, then we’ll make up our own story!” the reporter threw back at me as I closed the door upon him. I opened it again and called him back, explained that I had been ill and that things like that made me very nervous. In the end he promised not to make a great ado about it in his paper, but Elizabeth, my sister, came up the stairs almost simultaneously with another more persistent reporter, from the Hearst headquarters. “They want my picture and the baby’s” I cried hysterically. Elizabeth turned calmly to the reporter. “Can’t you come back in the morning?” she smiled, after she had learned what it was all about. They consented. Elizabeth promised that they might snap the baby’s picture alone if they would return in the morning. And so it was.

I have the picture clipping which appeared in the Hearst daily on June 9, 1922; it is headed, “Fireless Rescue.” It shows the side of the apartment building, with ladder, faked in pen and ink, against the apartment, and a child’s arms extended from the window above toward the rescuing fireman. Below is a good-sized picture of Elizabeth Ann Willits, a very excellent likeness of her, quite Harding-like.

My baby was ill. As I try to recall now the exact time of her illness my memory fails me—even to the month. But the memory of the terror of that experience shall stay with me forever.

[Pg 202]

I had not been home long from a sojourn in the hospital, where I had a slight throat operation, when I began to notice that Elizabeth Ann was not as lively as usual. Then one morning I looked at her closely. Her eyes drooped unnaturally. The circles under her eyes, too, which are a Harding facial characteristic, were darker than usual, and she dragged her dolls and books through the hall with listlessness.

Scott was still abroad and Elizabeth and I were alone with the baby in the apartment at that time. How can I forget how I hung upon every word that fell from Dr. Barbour’s lips, every expression that crossed his face when he came to see Elizabeth Ann! To this day I do not know what Elizabeth Ann’s trouble was. I doubt if I asked Dr. Barbour at that time. I was a coward. I felt her life was in my doctor’s hands and I looked to him. But whatever the trouble, it was serious. She slept most of the time—a heavy, dead sleep from which she seemed scarcely able to open her eyes. Each hour, when medicine time came, I prayed she would swallow the liquid, and when she opened her eyes I demanded of her sharply that she take it. It was like nothing that I have ever known—that sickness of my child. I held her in my arms. Her lips were dry, almost colorless, it seemed. Her eyes always closed. The doctor had ordered that her chest be covered with a white paste-like stuff and then swathed in flannels. She submitted to this treatment with closed eyes and a limpness of body that sent my heart racing with terror. All day I would lie beside her. Often when I awoke in the middle of the night she would be talking. I knew the fever made her talk aloud. God! What days those were! I myself was such an invalid that through the day Elizabeth, my sister, alternately tended me and the baby. But like nervous people, I felt improved as evening came on, and this made it possible for me to care for Elizabeth Ann through the night while my sister slept.

What joy to watch her recover! What sweet pain in my heart to see her sit up in a chair! What gratitude I felt to Dr. Barbour for his excellent ministry! And how often I sobbed myself to sleep, out of sheer thankfulness to God for sparing her to me! [Pg 203]And, as a normal two-and-a-half does not require many weeks to regain lost baby plumpness and pink cheeks, soon Elizabeth Ann was opening sparkling eyes in the morning and closing play-tired ones at night. Elizabeth and I would stand over her crib. We needed not the spoken word to read the great relief and gratitude in each other’s eyes.

When I was a child, even before I had reached the age of ten, my flights of imagination in picturing my future self always took one of two directions—toward being an actress or a writer. It was said of my mother that she possessed considerable dramatic ability when she was a girl, and I know my father wrote extremely well. Neither mother nor father realized the glories of these talents developed, except in amateur, local settings. Doubtless, mother’s Quaker grandmother, with whom she lived a great deal of the time, would have thrown up her hands in holy horror at the mere mention of a stage career for her granddaughter, Mary Lee Williams. So this love of the drama took with my mother an entirely safe form, and she became known among her friends and the townspeople as a monologuist of more than usual ability.

I am frank to say that the dramatic appeal of my own life-play, which had passed the climactic stage with Elizabeth Ann’s entrance into the world, greatly appeased the instinctive hunger for self-expression which I likely inherited from my mother, and indeed I was finding the drama in which I held the center of the stage to be fast developing into a tragedy. A tragedy because it was failing—yea, had failed—to provide the satisfying denouement which I had looked forward to with hopeful heart at the rise of the curtain. This sense of unfinishment had begun to prey upon my mind even before our baby came, but I had banished it rather successfully with the full buoyancy of my nature and had clung to visionary hopes and to Mr. Harding’s oft-repeated statement [Pg 204]to me that in his “sober judgment” he felt that our relationship was “predestined.” And surely, I thought, predestination would naturally slate lovers for the perfect fulfillment of their desire in every direction.

But Life, stark with dire realities, confronted me now, and the romantic illusions upon which I had fed were meeting with pitiful destruction on many sides. Enforced separation from my beloved, submission to an arrangement whereby I forfeited the glory of being known as my own child’s mother, and continued ill-health, sufficed to precipitate the unhappy disillusionments I was experiencing. And the process of introspection and introversion constantly indulged, more pronouncedly after a visit to Washington, seemed sometimes to leave me momentarily in a terrifying state of inability to think at all, so intensely did I think.

It was this state of mentality which inclined me again to consider the stage, and I began anew to see in it an outlet for “suppressed emotions.” I had in the fall of 1920 succumbed to an advertisement and taken some desultory instructions from a man who had his studio in the Auditorium Building in Chicago, but it had seemed for many reasons an unworthwhile investment and I had given it up. Now I pondered it seriously. To live another’s vicissitudinous experiences might, I thought, take my mind from my own mind and prove an emotional boon.

A very dear friend of mine, who knew the whole of my story, listened sympathetically to these arguments and agreed it might help enormously to relieve me both mentally and physically. She took me to see a friend of hers who had long been a leader in the motion picture world, but, after hearing from him and his wife that they would prefer to see their daughter “scrub floors in the Boston Store” (that being considered a low-priced department store in Chicago) than to enter upon a career in the movies, I felt less inclined to view it with approval myself, and this in spite of the fact that the motion picture magnate cordially volunteered to allow me to act in the next film he produced, and offered a camera test to see whether or not I screened well.

[Pg 205]

[Pg 206]

Still harboring a hope that this character of activity might benefit me, and feeling disinclined to return to secretarial work, and, moreover, firmly convinced that I ought not to remain at my sister Elizabeth’s entirely unemployed except for my preferred occupation of being with and caring for our darling baby, I took my problem in early June, 1922, down to Washington and laid it before Mr. Harding.

I remember how he smiled, the smile of an indulgent parent to a spoiled child perhaps, when he said, “Why, sure! Go on! I think that would be fine!” smiling at my tearful attempt to explain what must to him have seemed like a wild idea. “Then I’ll become a movie fan!” he added merrily, having only been twice to the movies in Washington, he told me. He said he was sure I could do as well as any actress he had ever seen(!), and he also said he could understand how the partial outdoor activity might do me good.

However, later on he wrote me, almost upon the heels of my departure from Washington, asking me not to consider going either into the movies or on the stage, saying he had thought it over and was “afraid” of it. No doubt he was thinking of possible publicity and ultimate exposure. At any rate, I gave up the idea altogether and have never been so tempted since. How I could have thought it possible to undergo the hardships to which even the moderately successful screen or stage artist is subjected—the rehearsals, travel, hours, etc.—is incomprehensible to me now, when I remember that I was then making two trips a week to the South Side to Dr. Barbour who was administering iron hypodermics, and who even found it necessary to recommend that I spend about half of my time in bed.

It was upon the occasion of this last-named visit to the White House that I showed Mr. Harding the picture of Elizabeth Ann’s “rescue” which had appeared in the Hearst paper in Chicago. I remember we were sitting at his desk, and I can just see his face twitch and the impatient gestures of his hands as he laid the picture upon his desk.

“Oh, Nan, why did you allow it? Why did you allow it?” he exclaimed over and over. I failed to see why it should cause him so much distress, and said so frankly. However, I told him in the same breath that I tried to stop them. I wondered as I looked with him again at the picture whether the headlines immediately above, which referred to another column and read, “INTIMATE CHAT AT WHITE HOUSE,” added to his disconcertion in seeing his daughter’s picture below. When I asked him he did not reply; he only shook his head, his expression betraying the perturbation he felt.

However, he had the happy ability to come out of things, and he picked up the picture and looked at it again. This time he studied it and a slow smile lit his face. It was Warren Harding, the man, the father, who spoke next.

“Really, Nan, she’s much like you!” he said softly, as he folded up the picture and handed it back to me. “Oh, darling, she’s much more like you!” I insisted. “Why, just look at her eyes!” I exclaimed, holding the picture up again for us both to look at. He smiled and nodded acknowledgment of the resemblance so strikingly caught by the Hearst cameraman. “Well, if she’s as sweet a baby as her mother is a woman....” Mr. Harding concluded, leaving his desk and walking over to the leather couch, where he was evidently not intending to sit alone.

This was on Sunday morning. A tall vase with pink roses stood upon his desk, in memory of his mother. Mr. Harding himself was dressed for church, and, as we dropped down together [Pg 208]upon the couch he asked me suddenly, as though it had just occurred to him, if I would care to attend his church that morning. “Have Tim Slade drop you off there,” he suggested, when I told him Tim was waiting for me outside with his car. I was delighted. Mr. Harding seemed to be, too. We could at least be in the same building for another hour!

We talked, as usual, of many things and he urged me to tell him everything of interest that had happened to me since he last saw me. Somehow it really was like bringing the outside world inside the prison bars to the one shut in; he seemed so happy to hear of my doings. I remember so well how back in ’17 or ’18 I used to relate to him my experiences, usually after we had retired and I could lie close in his arms, and, when I suddenly realized I had been talking steadily for quite some time I would interrupt myself and apologize, and he would say so adorably, “Why, Nan, I love to listen to you!” Here in the White House our time was limited, and I gradually learned that if I wanted to touch upon all topics I must jot them down upon a card, and scratch them off the list as I spoke of them to Mr. Harding. Which I invariably did. I told him at this time of a diary I had begun—it was to contain accounts of my visits to him in the White House, as well as the many little cunning things Elizabeth Ann was saying those days in her sweet baby way. Again Mr. Harding shook his head. “Oh, dearie, you mustn’t keep such a book around. You must destroy it as soon as you return to Chicago. Promise, Nan, that you will destroy it immediately!” I promised readily, though, of course, presented healthy arguments to disparage such a program. “Why, honey, I paid $11 for that book at Dutton’s in New York last fall, and I have it almost over half full now. I didn’t think you’d mind a diary!” But he pleaded with me to keep nothing around, in my trunk or elsewhere, that would be evidence of our relationship, and, of course, I said I would not from then on. I felt hurt about having to destroy the pages of that beautiful lavender diary. I have retained the cover and the blank pages that were left. I remember writing him after I returned to Chicago, and telling him that it had been [Pg 209]destroyed and that now there existed nothing that could be taken as evidence of our dearness to each other—nothing save my first letters from him, my autographed picture of him, and my Harding book of newspaper clippings to which he never seemed to object because the material was public anyway.

We talked about the baby, about his cousins, the Weseners, who lived scarcely half a block from Elizabeth’s and many things, all hurried discussions, but still discussions. Then Mr. Harding stood up to take me in his arms.

“Honestly, darling,” I exclaimed as I held out my hand for him to pull me to my feet, “You are the best looking thing that I have ever seen!” His smile was the smile of the little snapshot I have of him, the smile he knew I so adored, the smile our daughter gives me occasionally which stirs me so deeply and moves me to tears, it is so sweetly reminiscent of her father’s smile. “Well, dearie,” he replied, “that’s something I just can’t help, you know!” And then for a brief space of time—all too brief—we became oblivious to our surroundings, to his identity as President of the United States, and to all the world. “Why don’t you tell me you love me, Nan darling,” he coaxed, and I told him over and over again, as I had told him a thousand times, “I love you, darling Warren Harding, I love you.”

In low tones Mr. Harding told me again how he dreamed of having me all night with him, which prompted my usual query, “How is Mrs. Harding now?” He lifted his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders and replied in the usual way, “Oh, all right!” There was, as I have said, always a certain deprecatory attitude which he seemed to reserve for Mrs. Harding. I remember in one of my very early letters to him back in 1917, I expressed some concern over the possible greetings he might have for his legal wife when he met her again after his absences from home, and in his reply letter he had written, “You need give yourself no concern over that, sweetheart. My kiss for her is most perfunctory, I can assure you!” Indeed, I have often thought with the pardonable vanity of one who is conscious ever of priority in her sweetheart’s thoughts, that likely Mrs. Harding was, [Pg 210]as Mr. Harding had stated to me concerning another woman whom we both knew, as safe with him “as though she were in jail, Nan!” And I think his affectional interest in his wife had ceased long, long before Mr. Harding and I met in New York in 1917.

These mental dips back into the recent past occurred as he touched upon possible plans on Mrs. Harding’s part which would make possible for us a night together somewhere in Washington. It seemed to me he did not even value her casual companionship. As we sat there that morning on his couch in his private office, I expressed a wish that instead of going to church we might go off somewhere to be alone. “Gee, I do, too, dearie!” was his enthusiastic rejoinder. “Will Mrs. Harding go to church with you?” I inquired. He nodded. “Yes, and I have another appointment this morning before church, and am fifteen minutes late for it now!” I arose. I’m sure that he, too, had forgotten that he was the President of the United States.

He walked over to his desk and selected a lovely pink rosebud for me. Then he unlocked his private drawer and took out the bills he wanted to give me—mainly the money due Elizabeth and Scott for our baby’s care. I had tried hard not to complain too much of arrangements then existent in view of the fact that Elizabeth, the baby, and I, were living happily together then, but these partings always stirred up the feeling of incompleteness, and made me long intensely for a happy fulfillment with him whom I loved. I felt the urge to say to him that we must make a change, rescind existing plans for the future, allow me the happy restitution of motherhood, frankly acknowledged, and solve a problem that was becoming growingly more complicated and difficult of permanent solution.... But I only kissed him back in purest passion, and to his query, “Are you happy, dearie?” I whispered “Yes!” against a soft lapel.

When I joined Tim Slade outside in his handsome car my eyes were still wet and I fondled the pink rosebud reminiscently. Tim asked me if I cared to drive, and I said yes, but that I intended to go to Mr. Harding’s church later on. He directed the [Pg 211]chauffeur to take us out along the river, and Tim and I talked. Tim knew so many things of interest to me then because they had a direct bearing upon the President and his tremendous problems, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to him.

Our drive lasted too long, for I was unable to secure a front-row balcony-seat, from where Mr. Harding had told me I might see best all over the church. However, I found one three or four rows back and could look over the balcony and down upon the fast-whitening head of the President. It was all strongly reminiscent of the early days in Marion when I, as a child, was wont to go anywhere and everywhere just to be close to my hero. For a whole precious hour my eyes were riveted upon him, and I was unspeakably happy just to look at him. My heart was full of tears. If only I could have him forever—even at a distance like this—just to worship him! I loved him so.

The official car stood outside the church and I hastened down so that I might watch him pass out. He did not see me, because I had to be careful, as he had instructed, that Mrs. Harding did not see me, but I watched him nevertheless from a point of safe vantage. Then I walked slowly back to my hotel, had luncheon, and went to a movie, where I sat through two shows in order to see twice the news event which pictured my darling welcoming delegates, from somewhere, on the White House lawn. Mr. Harding always seemed to know which was the best train to take out of Washington, no matter whether I might be returning west or east, and he had that time told me of a very good train for Chicago which I could get if I wanted to wait until late that afternoon or early evening. That was why I filled in my time going to a movie, when I more naturally would have hastened to leave the city which held him after his disappointing statement that he could not see me again that visit.

[Pg 212]

It was July 5th, 1922, when I next saw President Harding, about a month after the visit which I have just related. But this time I saw him along with thousands and thousands of others. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city of Marion, Ohio, his home town and mine.

I went down to Marion from Chicago on the night of the 3rd, arriving about 7:00 on the morning of the Fourth. Every family in Marion had crowded homes, “filled up” with extra guests, for it was reported that Marion accommodated about 50,000 extra people for that homecoming event. Inasmuch as I had advised no one of my coming, I was obliged, even with a host of friends living in Marion, to go to a hotel, and I secured a room there only through my knowing the wife of that particular hotel proprietor.

President Harding spoke at the Marion Fairgrounds on the afternoon of the 5th. I drove up to the grounds with Mrs. John Fairbanks, of whom I have spoken before. She had been Annabel Mouser, my chum, daughter of former Congressman Grant E. Mouser, the then Judge of the Common Pleas Court. She and the others in the car, seeming indifferent as to whether or not they heard Mr. Harding, threw themselves down upon the green while I alone went over nearer the grandstand to listen to his speech. Annabel Fairbanks always treated with pretended disdain my adoration of Mr. Harding and his sister Daisy.

“Oh, you and your Hardings weary me!” she said, “Go on over; we’ll wait right here for you.”

It seemed to me always that Mr. Harding was more than human. In my Harding book I have the following clipping from a March 4, 1921, paper, the day of his inauguration:

[Pg 214]

He was, to me, almost divine. I remember once, in 1920, the first time he came out to see me at my sister Elizabeth’s (6103 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago) in June of that year, that we were “talking things over,” I on his lap. My elbow accidentally struck his ribs. “Ouch, dearie!” he exclaimed. I apologized and asked if I had hurt him. “No, you just poked me in the ribs!” he laughed. “Ribs!” I echoed, “Have you those things?” I shall never forget his low laugh as he hugged me.

It seemed to me I had never heard Warren Harding speak so feelingly as on that afternoon when he addressed his home town people and the great throng of visitors who had come from miles over the country to hear him. I well remember how he ended his speech, with a quotation from a piece my mother often used to recite. It was the concluding verse of Will Carleton’s poem, “The First Settler’s Story,” and goes:

He must have been inspired by knowledge of all the gossip that had surrounded his campaign, and I wondered, standing there in the bright sun, bare-headed, again adoring my hero from afar, how there could live one who would open his lips unkindly about Warren Gamaliel Harding!

In front of me stood Lois Archbold, as I shall call her, a neighbor and former teacher of mine. She had been a life-long friend of our family and my sister Elizabeth and I had each experienced the school girl “crush” on her which we usually developed upon our teachers. She and her sister were probably as strong Democrats as lived in Marion, and I was surprised to see Lois there in view of all the severe things I had been told by Miss Harding had passed her lips during the recent campaign—things so unkind that even Daisy Harding, who had up to that time been a friend of Miss Archbold and her sister, and had accepted their politics good-naturedly, ceased to speak to both of them on the street. And even I had been tempted to follow suit [Pg 215]when I was in Marion in November of 1920 and Daisy had repeated to me these things when I went to visit with her during her luncheon hour at the high school or at her home.

Miss Harding had told me how her brother Warren had been instrumental in helping the Archbold sisters to better positions, and she had related how he had jocosely inquired of them on the morning of the Presidential election which way they intended to vote! Politics never stood in Mr. Harding’s way where friendship was concerned. Still, both the Archbold sisters had been frank to sponsor the cause of James M. Cox, Democratic candidate for President in 1920, and there is every reason to believe that they cast their votes for him. And now to see Lois Archbold right in front of me listening to Mr. Harding speak! I was amazed.

There was all about me the sound of clearing of throats and blowing of noses, and my own eyes were wet when Mr. Harding ceased speaking. But you may be sure it was by far the greatest surprise I had received for a long time to behold Lois Archbold’s eyes streaming with tears when she, unconscious of my presence in the immediate crowd, turned to walk away. It was to me only another triumph for my beloved Warren.

When we returned to Judge Mouser’s the judge was sitting on the porch, and his remark to his wife was, “Dell, one of us ought to go over to Dr. Harding’s and say how-do-you-do to President and Mrs. Harding.” Dr. Harding was the President’s father. His home was the social headquarters for the presidential party. After considerable discussion, Mrs. Mouser decided she herself would go and convey the Judge’s compliments to the President and his wife.

“But you must come along with me, Nan,” she said turning to me.

[Pg 216]

I insisted I did not care to go, fearing Mr. Harding might disapprove for some reason, but Mrs. Mouser naturally could not see why I objected to going.

“You adore Mr. Harding so, Nan, and always have, so I can’t see why you object to going over—it’s just a matter of form, anyway.” So it did seem up to me to accompany her and in the end I consented.

Annabel, or else young Mrs. Grant Mouser (I have forgotten which), drove us over but would not go in with us.

We found that Mr. Harding had gone off with the Dr. Carl Sawyers, Sr. and Jr., and Brigadier-General Charles G. Dawes to play golf, but Mrs. Warren Harding was receiving informally in the living-room of Dr. Harding’s home. With her we found Mr. and Mrs. “Ed” Uhler, and it seems to me another person whom I cannot recall now was there also.

If I had any personal misgivings as to the spirit of Mrs. Harding’s greeting they were entirely without foundation, for, after shaking hands with Mrs. Mouser, she held out her hand to me with a smile. “Why, how-do-you-do, Nan? How are you?” she inquired pleasantly. If I had ever had reason to doubt that Warren Harding’s love for another woman was suspected by his legal wife, I was with this meeting disarmed of all further semi-pleasurable apprehension that I was the person Florence Harding would name! As a matter of frank truth, it was never that I particularly cared whether or not she did discover it, but Mr. Harding’s statement to me that “she’d raise hell, Nan!” had been my cue for guarding well a situation which Mr. Harding had termed his “greatest joy.” In the past year and a half, Tim Slade has stated to me that if Florence Harding had known the love Warren Harding and I bore to each other, the qualities latent in her temperament would not have released him but might very possibly have sought some form of retaliation. What a strange love, I thought, that would hold the happiness of one’s husband in a vise! But my solicitude for Mr. Harding’s peace of mind insured every cautionary measure on my part.

[Pg 217]

There in the familiar atmosphere of Dr. Harding’s home, it occurred to me that perhaps now Mrs. Warren Harding might drop her patronizing manner and become natural; certainly the Uhlers, genuine people, inspired such naturalness, for I knew them to be as good friends as the Hardings had in Marion. In my Harding book I have a clipping which says of Warren Harding, “President Harding has one of those rare temperaments which can keep aloof and cool at close range,” and I know that even from my own experience of greeting him in public places where it seemed wise for us to maintain a certain dignity, I was ever conscious of his “close range” and felt the sincere warmth of his smile and hand pressure sufficient to assure me that he was not above, but one with, me. Mrs. Harding was looking particularly well on that occasion and I am sure that her general hauteur of manner was felt by her to be in keeping with the position in which she had found herself.

“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Harding continued what had become a monologue, “I keep Warren the best dressed man in Washington.”

I could not help remembering how happy Mr. Harding was when he could just lounge around in his old clothes. Moreover, Mr. Harding had said to me, “Brooks is my valet; responsible for my clothes,” when we had discussed him in connection with sending my letters to Mr. Harding through Brooks.

“That’s right, Florence!” laughed Mr. Uhler, “don’t let anyone get ahead of you!”

The afternoon following Mr. Harding’s speech at the Fairgrounds was an exciting one also. I was visiting that day with Ellen Lucile Mezger Stoll, whose brother, Roscoe Mezger, was married to Florence Harding’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Esther DeWolfe. Ellen Lucile’s little twin girls were about five years old and Ellen and I took them with us, it seems to me, [Pg 218]when we went down to witness the program scheduled for that afternoon in honor of President Harding. It was to include a parade of many organizations, which would file past the Presbyterian Church at the corner of Church and Prospect Streets, where a temporary grandstand, gayly beflagged, had been erected for the President and his party.

Ellen Lucile, the babies, and I found a good place to stand on the steps of the house next door to the church, and cheered lustily with the crowd as President Harding, Miss Daisy Harding, and other members of the President’s party descended from their automobiles and mounted the steps of the grandstand. President Harding looked stunning, and Ellen Lucile turned to me and said, “Isn’t he just the sweetest thing?” I told Miss Daisy Harding afterwards that she was beautiful, too, and it seemed to me a real pity that she, who typified everything lovely in American womanhood, could not grace the social throne of the First Lady of the Land, instead of Florence Harding. She had once written to me about her brother, “He looks like a real President, Nan,” and I simply extended that expression to her when I hold her she herself looked like a real First Lady.

One segment of the parade consisted of a number of Civil War veterans, and I observed from my post where I stood on tiptoe that the President was shaking hands with these dear old fellows. When they passed where Ellen Lucile and I were standing I suddenly spied my own Grandfather Williams, whom I had not even known was in town for the celebration. I broke through the ranks of people and ran out into the street to greet him. The dear old darling! I thought. He was probably as staunch a Republican as there is in the United States. The day was exceedingly warm and the heavy military belt Grandfather was wearing had become irksome and he had removed it and was now carrying it over his arm. He kissed me before the crowd and said, “Did you see me shake hands with the President? He even remembered me! He said, ‘Oh, yes, I know you all right, you needn’t tell me your name!’” Grandfather beamed his pride. I thought to myself as I patted affectionately the arm of this proud [Pg 219]member of the G. A. R., “Probably my sweetheart was thinking, ‘This is Nan’s grandfather. I’d like to be especially nice to him!’” That would be just like my sweetheart.

I returned to Chicago after that trip just as soon as I knew Warren Harding was enroute to Washington. I had not seen him in private at all, nor even attempted to advise him of my presence in Marion, but somehow I cannot tell anyone how inexpressibly happy it always made me just to be near him. I did not need to be sharing with him an embrace or kiss in order to feel ecstatic happiness. Just to be near him satisfied me.

In my next letter I told him all about my visit to Marion, how I had listened to his speech at the Fairgrounds, and even in detail of how I had gone with Mrs. Mouser to Dr. Harding’s to call upon him and Mrs. Harding and had found him gone, but had talked briefly with Mrs. Harding. But, as I felt, letters didn’t amount to much those days. Washington was such a long way off!

In August of that same year, 1922, I accepted a position as secretary to Walter Dill Scott, President of Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. With the exception of severe spells of weakness I felt much stronger, even equal to the daily trips back and forth on the elevated to work. There were several girls under consideration for the position and I, feeling always a certain sense of independence, because I was not really leaning financially upon any position, grew impatient with President Scott for not deciding immediately upon one of us. Finally he narrowed his selection to two of us, and we both were requested to take the famous psychology Scott Test. This we did one morning sitting on either side of Dr. Scott’s desk, and, though my grade was below the other girl’s, we were both considerably above average, and for some reason President Scott chose me. I enjoyed being out there. The natural beauty of the campus comforted me. And I think it pleased Mr. Harding immensely [Pg 220]to have me there. I remember he wrote, “Gee, Nan, I think that’s just fine!” when I had apprised him of my new job.

But even with this comparatively perfect arrangement—living right with my baby and working in a congenial atmosphere—I was not happy. The constant shock of realizing that I must do something immediately if I would claim Elizabeth Ann as mine fairly dogged my mental footsteps. My mind was ever at work trying to formulate a plan whereby I might cancel the adoption altogether and proclaim my rightful motherhood.

I was, however, willing that the present regime should, while I thus meditated upon a course of action, justify itself, though I knew that when my brother-in-law returned from abroad the resumption of a three-cornered parentage would leave me still unsatisfied.

Elizabeth lovingly approved of Elizabeth Ann’s calling me “Mamma Nan,” which she did for quite a while. I never encouraged or approved of her calling me “Aunt Nan,” because I am not her aunt and do not wish to be so called by her. She calls me plain “Nan” now, which is better than prefixing it with “Aunt.” Often during those days when Elizabeth Ann called me “Mamma Nan” someone would remark about it and I would have to brush it aside with an explanation. This never failed to cause a wave of weakness to pass over me as I faced the blunt truth that practically I had made myself her aunt by submitting to an adoption by my sister and her husband.

People remarked her fondness for me, and my most unnatural fondness for her who was not supposed to be related to me. Elizabeth had taken in two girls as roomers, finding it difficult even with Mr. Harding’s generous allowance to keep up the expenses in connection with the household, send Scott a specified amount monthly for his expenses abroad where he was studying, and keep her own piano lessons paid for. Both of these girls were very fond of Elizabeth Ann. I remember I was jealous of their attention to her, not wanting anyone to have her but myself, fiercely resenting references to her as my sister’s “daughter,” even with the love I bore my sister. My daughter was a passion [Pg 221]with me and I simply worshipped her. She and I would retire early, nearly every night, even as early as six-thirty sometimes, immediately after dinner, and I would have her in my bed with me until seven o’clock or so when she had to go to sleep in her crib. Oftentimes I kept her with me all night, and I lay awake thinking, planning, my face against her silken hair, her hand in mine, long after she had gone to sleep.

During the summer, Grace Cunningham, who had been my eighth grade teacher back in Marion, Ohio, came to Chicago to attend normal school. My sister Elizabeth, who had always been particularly fond of Miss Cunningham, entertained her at our home for a couple of days. Miss Cunningham occupied my bedroom while she was at our apartment. One whole side of my wall was devoted to photographs of the Harding family. On the other side hung a picture of me as a child, the picture Vail’s had taken when I was five and which Mr. Harding had published in his paper, The Marion Daily Star.

“Nan,” remarked Grace Cunningham to me one morning, “I wouldn’t know whether this picture was of you or of Elizabeth Ann—which is it?” Which was certainly eloquent proof to me that she had recognized in me the mother of the baby, even though she had not said so in so many words.

I wondered how she would react to the actual truth. I had always felt that Grace Cunningham, though a maiden lady, was thoroughly romantic, and she had given me during that visit reason to feel she would view broad-mindedly certain situations not condoned by the general run of people.

[Pg 222]

However, I was forced to conclude to myself that perhaps what people might think of the child of Warren Harding was not the usual opinion held in regard to the children-of-love-alone. As the days passed, I was beginning to realize, from sententious remarks of certain people, that in no wise would there [Pg 223]be universal condonation where Elizabeth Ann and I were concerned if the situation were not protected legally. Mr. Harding’s statement to me when I went to Asbury Park, “Pay your way, Nan; money is power,” seemed not to appear so all-inclusive to me now as then.

In other words, in my own case, not being able to divulge the identity of my child’s father, which might place her above the ordinary run of love-children, the great love I had for the man himself whose child I had borne would be self-stamped with the brand of commonplaceness—yea, of a monstrous sin committed against society! And all the money in the world could not blot out the significance of such expression. And millions of safely married women nightly deplored the indulgence which threw them into an intense state of worriment from month to month! Love-children! The very words are beautiful and rightly belong only where the impulse itself has been lovely.

But even though I myself were willing, for the sake of having my child, to bear the stings such a stigma would inevitably carry, could I, in fairness to my little girl, suffer her to be placed in a position where she would receive at best more of critical sympathy than understanding love? Of her love for me I was as sure as I was of that of her father, and never for a moment entertained the idea that she might turn against me, as was suggested to me by certain ones to whom I dared to confide my longing to proclaim my motherhood. My own case was simple, and when she grew older she would understand. I had, before I gave Mr. Harding the full measure of love, loved no man in a degree even approachable to the love I had for one smile from Mr. Harding. As his sister, Mrs. Votaw, had laconically said to me upon the occasion of one of my visits to Marion, though she knew not whereof she spoke: “You never really loved anybody but Warren, Nan.” Therefore, to be relegated to the list of possible wrong-doers would be to impute wrong motives to the one beautiful impulse of my life, and the only impulse I had ever experienced which carried with it the sacred instinct to which my mind had given birth under the breath of Warren Harding’s love long before [Pg 224]my body had known its realization in motherhood. Knowing so well my own heart, it would have been but the crowning glory of my experience to tell the world that Warren Harding was the father of my child, to dwell with others in open admiration upon her smile which is the smile of her father, or upon her lovely eyes which are lighted with the lights of his eyes.

But, if my sweetheart, the father of my child, had been of lowly estate, what then? Ah, then indeed, from what I could see of the hypocrisy of mankind, I would suffer the unjust criticism of slanderous charges—that I had “sold myself cheaply,” or, indulging an unbridled passion, had been unable to escape the penalty. This would be the inevitable result, and might in a measure attach itself to human opinion even if a frank declaration from her father revealed his fatherhood. But in either event, the stains of ignominy would attach themselves to the child and mother—and why? Simply because that mother did not seek to strike his existing legal bonds asunder. As Warren Harding said to me the last visit I had with him in the White House, “If you had been born earlier, Nan!...” If I had been born earlier Warren Harding would have undoubtedly chosen me for his legal bride. But I was never even so much as tempted to try to destroy a legal yoke which had existed thirty years merely for the sake of bending my head under a similar one, thereby legalizing with man-made law that love which was already God-given.

In her own way Florence Harding may have loved her husband, and I am glad today that I do not have upon my conscience the remembrance of marital interference which would have added not a whit to the love Warren Harding and I had for each other and might possibly have succeeded only in precipitating sordid gossip. Yet I say this with the full knowledge of my own influence over the man I loved and who loved me, and had I exerted that influence selfishly in my own behalf I might early in our sweetheart days have solved the problem which remains unsolved and which has led me to write this book.

How then, I pondered, could I save the good name of my child if I acknowledged my motherhood? Where lay the possibility [Pg 225]of a continued sharing of sweet intimacies with her father? And where, oh, where, lay my own peace of mind? Certainly no good result could come from my constant mental pandemonium!

My sweetheart, in the very nature of his position, had sacrificed what would have been to him and me the culminating happy years of our love, by the political victory which would doubtless eventuate in claiming four or eight years of his life. Could our present personal regime survive over a period of eight years? It could not, I decided, if I were to keep my right mind and continue ever-alert vigilance in Mr. Harding’s behalf. No human being, I argued to myself in despair, could withstand the devastating mental effects of a problem so seemingly unsolvable, so shattering from the very method in which a solution had been effected. A cowardly, covering adoption of the daughter of the President of the United States!

And so on and on ... and the days passed, and months were behind me, and still my mind continued to go round and round, evolving no workable plan, however, and I continued to support to the best of my ability the regime as it stood.

But I never for one moment ceased searching for a plan, and I wonder now as I write just when the plan which I decided definitely to follow after Mr. Harding’s death, really took form in my mind. It may even as early as that summer—1922—have been latent within my consciousness, and my subconscious thinking might very possibly have directed a course of action which would have received vigorous opposition from my conscious thought.

I began to perceive the easy way out was to find myself a husband. It would be comparatively easy then to take Elizabeth Ann, give her my married name, and, having her thus legalized as mine, confess to the man that I would never love him except [Pg 226]for the fact that he had made it possible for me to have my child with me. Some may think that this was a most unworthy contemplation, even as it was admittedly a subconscious consideration, but it must be remembered that my child was growingly dearer to me than life itself, and I did not even so much as dwell upon the sacrifice of mind and body which such an arrangement would mean to me. Somehow, I thought that was possible of working out by “paying my way,” and I would choose to marry someone whom I could easily dominate, with whom my secret, if I elected to tell him my secret, would be safe, and who withal had sufficient worldly goods to put up a front consistent with being Elizabeth Ann’s father. I was even willing for the sake of having her myself to eliminate certain demands I had made when submitting to the adoption by my sister and her husband, viz., that Scott attain for himself as soon as possible music prestige which would becomingly fit him to fill the role of foster father to Warren Harding’s and my child. I would dispense with this requirement in any man I might choose to marry because I did not mean, down in my heart, that he should fill much of a role in that way. Who knows? Maybe I intended to leave him after I had taken his name for myself and my child! I know I would then have been capable of just such procedure had I determined to act upon it. Or perhaps those same fates which had so generously guarded Warren Harding and me during our earlier days would intervene later on to make possible the great miracle of our own marriage!

Thereupon, with provisionary intent, I began to consider this one and that as a husband possibility. My acquaintance among men was limited. I dabbled unhappily however in friendships, trying to see this one or that in the role of step-father to our child, and recoiling ever unless my subject of concentration seemed to display conspicuous ability in the matter of winning Elizabeth Ann’s affection; this at least, I thought, would be desirable.

I even went so far as to confess to Mr. Harding, upon my next trip to the White House, that such a course of action had suggested itself to me, and the memory of the disappointment and [Pg 227]hurt in his expression should have been sufficient to cause me not only to immediately abandon further thoughts along this line as unworthy, but to be heartily ashamed that I had ever voiced such thoughts to him.

But my confession was made only because I sought, in mental desperation, a way to make my child my very own. I even mentioned one man who at that time seemed logical for my own peculiar marriage purposes. Mr. Harding faced me on the couch in his private office.

“Don’t you think he would be a safe person to marry?” I asked him earnestly.

“Well, Nan, do you think you could love this fellow?” Mr. Harding inquired of me gently. I did not look directly at him, though I answered him quickly.

“Of course not, but that wouldn’t matter!”

Mr. Harding’s voice was firm and I knew he was looking at me searchingly.

“Oh, yes, dearie, it would!” It was as though he were reasoning with a small child, I felt, one who did not know what was good for her to do.

“That would be grossly unfair to the man, Nan darling,” he went on very gently, as I continued to avoid his eyes, looking down at my hand which played with my “wedding ring” from Mr. Harding.

“Well,” I said finally with emphasis, raising my eyes now to my sweetheart, “You know I never shall love anybody but you!”

What relief and joy overspread his face! The exclamation that escaped his lips seemed almost a sob as he crushed me to him. How I loved him for wanting me so! But how I also loved my child and wanted her!

During the interim between this and my next visit, which must have been in late August or early September, Tim Slade came to Chicago to deliver a package from Mr. Harding which contained money and a letter to me. Tim Slade came several times to Chicago, and I always met him at the Congress Hotel. He was frank to express to me his feeling toward Mrs. Harding, which amounted to much more than mere dislike, and on one occasion revealed his resentment toward her which had been aroused by the occasion of one of his visits to me. He said Mrs. Harding, knowing he was going to make a trip to Chicago, but not of course knowing why, had said to him, “Tim, where are you going?” His resentment because of her curiosity prompted a reply which Tim said simply enraged her, and she demanded to know why he was going to Chicago. He said he told her it was to meet some member of his family who was to be in Chicago on the day he planned to see me. It was Tim Slade himself who recently reminded me that Mr. Harding had one time sent another man to Chicago because he, Tim, could not go, and I recalled then that I did meet someone other than Tim, at our usual meeting-place, the Congress Hotel. I did not, you see, go to Washington every time Mr. Harding would have liked to have me come. There were times when he could not have me, and I went only when he wrote that it would be all right. Mr. Harding’s letters expressed more and more his fear about our situation, and more and more cautioned me to be guarded both in speech and action. And my perturbation and dissatisfaction grew apace with his concern.

It seems to me it was the fall of 1922 when Miss Daisy Harding came again to Chicago to visit her cousin, Mrs. John Wesener. She had visited there in 1921, but at that time I was in New York. This time her father, Dr. Harding, was there (with his wife by his third marriage) and it so happened that [Pg 229]my Grandfather Williams was visiting at my sister Elizabeth’s at the same time.

Dr. Harding, Daisy’s father, and my grandfather were both Civil War veterans and therefore old friends. So I took my grandfather to call upon his friend, Dr. Harding. Grandfather Williams was usually careless about his appearance, and I knew Dr. Harding had been kept carefully groomed ever since his son’s election to the presidency, so I tactfully suggested to Grandfather that he have his shoes shined, and upon that occasion I myself brushed his coat and prepared him otherwise for his call upon his old friend, the President’s father. My grandfather’s pride was his uniform, and this he wore then, though I am sorry to say it was sadly in need of cleaning and pressing, albeit he reserved this dress for his G. A. R. encampments and other state occasions.

I remember I had not seen Dr. Harding except briefly since his son had been made President, and it occurred to me he looked far different from the man I used to see back in Marion driving around with his “horse and buggy.” Then his shoes were as dusty as my grandfather’s, and I have been in his home when it was futile for his daughter Daisy to urge him not to pin his coat together with a safety-pin. He just would do it.

The two dear old fellows had a lovely confab over the Civil War, while I, off in Miss Harding’s bedroom, visited with her. I have often recalled that visit, for to me Daisy Harding was not quite the same Daisy Harding I had known in high school. But perhaps this was only natural. The world’s spotlight had fallen upon her, and she talked about how she had to avoid the reporters who, as she said, literally camped about wherever she went. I could readily appreciate this, but I could not understand the change in her otherwise; and when one is sister to the President one naturally takes for granted that one’s friends know that one is subjected to reporters and even false news items.

[Pg 230]

One reason why Miss Harding had come to Chicago was to purchase some new clothes and these she showed me upon that visit with her. They were lovely, but she needed nothing elaborate, [Pg 231]in my estimation, to accentuate the natural loveliness which was hers.

I could not help deploring the change in her which was not a becoming change. I remember when I was a child, in Grace Cunningham’s eighth grade class, I was given a poem by her to recite upon Lincoln’s birthday. It was known as Lincoln’s favorite poem, and begins, “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!” The changed Daisy Harding brought this poem to my mind. I thought of the visits with her brother Warren in the White House—the President of the United States—yet to me he had not been changed a whit by this great honor; rather had he been made nobler and more humble. And it grieved me to see this instance of woman-change in Daisy Harding. But I loved her none the less.

I remember a passing remark which Miss Harding made to me upon the occasion of that visit. We were talking about my sister Elizabeth and Miss Harding remarked her surprise that Elizabeth and Scott with their music careers ahead of them (Scott a violinist and Elizabeth a pianist) should have taken a baby. It occurred to me then, as it has occurred to me dozens of times since in the distress of my own dilemma, that a more admirable thing they could not have done, even though the baby were taken from an orphan’s home, even though they had taken a child as a means of preventing their too deep engrossment in themselves and their “careers.” However, perhaps I am prejudiced in favor of taking care of the babies in this world.

Winter—the last winter Warren Harding was ever to know on this earth—was fast coming on. My letters from him spoke his disappointment that he had not seemed able as yet to have me with him intimately in Washington. Around Christmas time he wrote and sent me $250 with which to buy my own Christmas present, besides having provided [Pg 232]me liberally with other Christmas money. With $225 of that $250 I bought myself a little diamond and sapphire link bracelet, having indulged again in the erroneous belief that a new trinket might help to make me forget—at least while its newness lasted. This idea had become somewhat of a mania with me. Whenever I found myself eaten to distraction with too much thinking I would go out to purchase a gaily colored gown or a hat or a pretty pin, eventually giving it away perhaps, but easing myself at least during the moment of buying. I used to drag my darling baby around with me on these mad hunts for happiness, which, alas, never sparkles for the desolate even in caskets of diamonds and rubies.

I surfeited Elizabeth Ann with toys; there was nothing she wanted that I did not immediately buy for her, often to my sister’s disgust. But somehow I felt that my sorrow must also be Elizabeth Ann’s and that I must assuage her grief, in advance, by heaping frivolous toys upon her then, for I was sure she would be ultimately saddened by the knowledge that I could not have her for my own. It is easy to see that my mind was not functioning normally. I was becoming unable to view things evenly, and the slightest mental upheaval brought on magnified mental distortion, and a pronouncement of inevitable disaster; I rushed madly about to find a method of forestalling the doom which seemed to impend. But it was all so vain. Happiness for myself and my baby could not be bought in stores. I could not escape the thing that was to come.

[Pg 233]

In my position at Northwestern University, as President Walter Dill Scott’s secretary, which position I filled for six months, I was being thrown into a social element I might have enjoyed had it not been for my preoccupation in my own trying matter. Acting on impulse, I decided to give up my work with President Scott and go into the University as a student. I set about to gain [Pg 234]Mr. Harding’s consent and approval. I wrote him I wanted to see him on a matter, and he set the date of my coming. It was in January, 1923, and the second semester of school would begin in February.

Mr. Harding’s latest letter had inclined me to think that perhaps we might be able to have more than a formal visit, and so I invested in a lovely orchid neglige and ostrich-befeathered mules. These I hoped I might have occasion to need upon my visit to Mr. Harding, and you may be sure this intimation from him had set my heart beating wildly. Perhaps I needed this intimate nearness to re-affix a certain sanity I seemed to have lost; perhaps he needed me to help banish the harassing fears besetting him on all sides.

Mrs. Warren G. Harding, wife of the President of the United States, was a very sick woman. According to the bulletins she was still in a critical condition at the time I saw Mr. Harding, despite the fact that she had, I think, passed the crisis of her illness. Brigadier-General Sawyer, personal physician to Mrs. Harding, headed the list of doctors in attendance upon her. But Mrs. Harding had, as far back as I could remember, been ill or ailing most of the time, and one time in particular, when Mr. Harding was Senator, he had come over to New York to see me during her illness and told me very calmly that they had been “sure she would die.” So the credence given by most people at that time to the unusual severity of her illness was somewhat discredited by those of us who knew the chronic character of her sickness. And when Mr. Harding wrote thus hopefully to me in very early January, I felt sure that the papers had grossly exaggerated the First Lady’s illness, and that likely by the time I reached Washington she would be on her way to Florida, or some other place, for a period of recuperation.

I recall for many reasons that visit to the White House in January of 1923. Sometimes it recurs to me with such vividness that I long with all my heart to be able to forget it. Mr. Harding’s letter conflicted greatly with the situation as I actually found it, and I had not been long with him when I saw that what I had taken literally as high hope on his part to be able to have me as of our old sweetheart days was really a dreamy lapse on his part into contemplation in writing of what he would love to do, rather than what he could do.

My reaction to his unwitting deception was such as to sink me immediately into a state of weeping, a bitter railing against fate, and complaint such as I had never allowed myself to voice on any previous visit to the White House no matter how low my spirits had been.

My preparations for this visit had been quite elaborate and extended not only to the purchase of a new neglige, but also to a lovely hat and dress and slippers. The dress was a stunning grey thing, and with it I wore a hat which I had purchased at Joseph’s and for which I had paid $55. My slippers were high-heeled patent leather trimmed with grey suede. Mr. Harding helped to remove my squirrel coat and, as always, remarked in an adorably off-hand manner which was really intimate, “That’s a very good-looking outfit, Nan!” Then he looked at me and said almost fiercely with that look which I always knew foretold a tremendous hug and many kisses, “You pretty thing!” But I did not feel in a dressy mood now that I knew the real situation with him.

We sat first in his private office, on the leather couch. I had brought with me, to show to Mr. Harding, a cunning doll which I had bought myself for Christmas, in company with the many dolls I had bought for Elizabeth Ann. It was really a doll’s head mounted upon a stick, and for the doll’s bodice there was a [Pg 236]round music box, covered with a frock which came down nearly to the end of the stick. When one twirled the stick the frock stood out very stiffly and the doll appeared to be dancing and humming a tune. The tune was a little German folk-song, and it was this rather mournful melody which had attracted me; it somehow chimed in with my spirit of persistent melancholy.

“What ’ave y’ got there, dearie?” asked Mr. Harding, looking down at the doll. The day, I remember, was not particularly bright, and he strained his eyes to look. I stopped crying and smiled wanly as I slowly twirled the dancing doll. The sweet sadness of the music seemed to fill the silent room. Mr. Harding smiled and took the doll out of my hands. “Sh! darling,—they can hear out there in the hall.”

I suggested that we go into the ante-room. There Mr. Harding sat in the corner of the couch and faced the window. I could observe his face here, and I exclaimed, “Why, honey, what a terrible cold you have!” His eyes and nose were red from it, his face was deeply lined as I had never before seen it, and his drooping body expressed a dejection which was shocking to see. “Believe me,” I told him, “if I had my way I’d see that you got into bed until you are rid of that cold.” “Can’t do it, dearie,” he said briefly, “got to keep going—why, right now I am the cynosure of the whole world—‘the President of the United States, with a sick wife’!”

“How is Mrs. Harding, anyway?” I inquired. But, though the First Lady of the Land lay not a block away, the subject of discussion, as Mr. Harding said, of the whole world, in my world her fate did not even seem to touch me. You see, my own problems eclipsed those of anybody and everybody.

“About the same,” Mr. Harding replied to my query.

“Oh, dear!” I exclaimed, “I do hope she gets better and is able to go to Florida!” Mr. Harding smiled and bent over to kiss me. “I do, too, dearie!” he replied with an attempt at cheeriness. But the attempt was a failure. In truth, the whole atmosphere of that visit was one of finality. I felt a presentiment of much evil. I could not shake off the uncanny feeling I was [Pg 237]experiencing. And I know something of that feeling communicated itself to Mr. Harding, if indeed he had not already experienced it with me from the beginning of our visit.

“Nan,” Mr. Harding took my hand, “our matter worries me more than the combined worries of the whole administration. It is on my mind continually. Why, dearie,” he continued with something akin to shame, “sometimes in the night I think I shall lose my mind worrying over it.” Strange as it may seem, I could not then see why it should worry him so much. Had we not passed through the most critical stages of possible exposure? And had I not engineered the thing to the point of safety thus far? I asked him, with rather a spirit of resentment. I worried, too. I told him, but it was not from fear of exposure, but from the daily ghostly fear of living the rest of my life in such unhappiness as that adoption had brought to me. It harassed me almost to the point of insanity. I wanted my baby, I told him, bursting into tears.

Seeing me so distressed, Mr. Harding again tried to get hold of himself.

“Why, listen, darling, you are foolish to worry on that score. I have told you that after I am out of office I myself will take her—you’d give her to me, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?” His attempt at a smile was pathetic. I crept over closer to him, heedless of the stalking guard outside the window.

“Oh, if you only could!” I breathed. But, I hastened to remind him, how could he when Mrs. Harding....

“You must remember, dearie, that Mrs. Harding is older than I, and very probably will pass on before I go, and if she goes first, remember, I myself will adopt Elizabeth Ann and make her a real Harding!” But, I argued, Elizabeth and Scott had already adopted her. Would they? ... could he?... I was anxious to have him banish all my doubts.

“You leave that to me, Nan! I’ll manage all that when the time comes. And in the meantime, you are to have ample funds, for them and for yourself. I expect to provide amply, in any event, for you and our little girl as long as you both live.”

[Pg 238]

“Honey, why do you have Dr. Sawyer?” I asked him, as he used his handkerchief. “My father used to make fun of him, really!” I informed him frankly. Mr. Harding’s mouth twitched and registered a faint smile. Seeing I had not offended him, I continued. “I don’t see why you have to consult the same doctor Mrs. Harding consults, anyway. If he were much of a doctor, he would put you to bed!”

“You’d take good care of me, wouldn’t you, Nan?” he asked fondly. He bent over to kiss me. “I’m selfish to kiss you with this cold,” he said, drawing back. “I don’t want to give it to you!” and the semblance of a smile lighted his dear, tired face.

I kissed him very long in reply. “Say, sweetheart, I never got anything from you that wasn’t good!” I told him, kissing him again. He stood up and took me in his arms in the corner away from the window. He used to draw his mouth into a certain shape when he made ready to kiss me, which somehow gave him and me the fullest rapture of the kiss. I have never read or heard of anyone else doing it. After we had returned to the couch he turned again to voicing his troubles.

“Nan,” he confided to me, “I’m in debt right now $50,000, and I just can’t seem to get out!” It occurred to me even then that this was a small amount for a President to owe, but I simply said how sorry I was, and that I would economize, and help a little bit that way. Somehow this promise seemed to amuse him, and his tone indicated that what he gave me was the least of his worries. “I don’t care how much I give you, dearie,” he said, with a caressing smile, “so long as you can account plausibly for it. I want you to have everything to make you comfortable. I only tell you these things that you may know what I’m up against down here.” He rose and paced the little room. Somehow I had a feeling that he was not telling me the whole of his troubles. “Really, dearie,” he said, slowly coming back to the couch, “my burdens are more than I can bear!” The tired face was lifted to the window and the tired eyes gazed wearily at the wintry vista outside.

The misery of that picture! The haggard face, the bent figure, [Pg 239]the white head! Surely this was not the man who had come, at the call of a nation, to serve, and to “give all of heart, and mind, and abiding love of country to service in our common cause.” My heart ached for him. Plainly, the disillusionments suffered in the Presidency of these United States were cruel. I said that I wished he might get out of it, resign, anything that would get him away from his worries, anything that would relieve this darling man who was being tortured with the slow stabs of disappointment and disillusionment. And they called this the greatest position in the land—this nerve-wrecking, energy-sapping job,—the Presidency of the United States!

President Harding shook his head sadly. “No, I’m in jail, Nan, and can’t get out!”

He opened wider the door leading into his own office and we went in there again. The darkness of the day made our figures less visible over near the grate fireplace than they were in the ante-room, which was small and therefore quite light. Mr. Harding said his stenographer was at liberty to come in and ask about anything, but we’d “take a chance,” anyway.

“Oh, sweetheart, sweetheart,” I cried in his arms, “tell me, what constitutes happiness for me? What constitutes our happiness, darling?”

He kissed me tenderly.

“Work, dearie, work!” he whispered.

“But I do work! I want you! And I want our baby as mine! And I don’t believe I can ever have you again in the same way. I can’t stand it, darling! It is breaking my heart. My baby lost to me, and the world has my sweetheart!”

Then something within me suddenly rebelled at the irony of a fate which would give us so much and then make us both suffer with separation and denial. And I saw more clearly than ever before the real depths of my heart, and the real urge of my subconscious mind.

“There have lived some men who have given up everything for their sweethearts!” I challenged, standing away from him with head held high.

[Pg 240]

A cruel thing to say! And a cowardly demand! He had given everything he could, everything, in fact, I had asked him to give within reason and within his power, and it was not now immediately within his power to give me our baby and to take me for his wife. And he had promised what he would do in the future. I was only making it very difficult for him, for him whose burdens were already, as he said, “more than he could bear.” I began to regret that speech as soon as it was uttered. Even as the words escaped my lips, there flashed into memory the picture of my sweetheart, when he spoke at the Fairgrounds in Marion the previous summer, and warned a nation against this very sort of thing in words made immortal to me by him:

I am sure I did not imagine it; there was rebuke in his tones when he answered.

“Nan, I’m tied. I can do no more. And I cannot desert my party!” Then, in a softer tone, he added, “We can’t retract—if you had been born earlier, Nan!” he sighed. I loved him for that and put my arms around his neck again. “Nan, darling, you must help me; our secret must not come out. Why, I would rather die than disappoint my party!” were his words. Then, seeing he had hurt me a bit by emphasizing his loyalty to a political party instead of to his sweetheart there in his arms, he smiled sadly and pleaded brokenly, “Oh, dearie, try!”

We went back to the couch.

I told Mr. Harding about my wish to quit working for President Walter Dill Scott and to go to school at Northwestern University instead. He said, “Fine!” immediately. “You like to study don’t you, Nan?” he asserted rather than asked, and nodded his head approvingly. He said he’d keep me in school all of the time if I thought I could explain it satisfactorily. “What will your mother say, for instance?” he queried. I told him I didn’t even try to explain things to mother. She was busy [Pg 241]teaching, and I thought it would be entirely safe. “All right, you’re the boss!” he said playfully.

Mr. Harding was in knickers, and I told him for about the dozenth time how stunning he looked. He smiled and said he thought maybe getting out into the open air after luncheon would help him to get rid of his cold. I told him it would very likely do him much more good than Dr. Sawyer’s prescriptions. “Oh, well,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders, “he doesn’t doctor me much, you know; Mrs. Harding has lots of faith in him. Gee, Nan,” and he shook his head in the I-give-it-up-it’s-too-much-for-me-to-solve way, “they bother me to death as it is, looking at my tongue and feeling my pulse; why, a fellow can’t be alone a minute! Now, what I really need is your treatment!” and he finished with a big hug and kiss.

Mr. Harding said it was time for him to go to luncheon and time for me to go, anyway, and I, pouting as usual when I had to leave him, rose with reluctance. For some reason which I do not remember, I was to meet my secret service escort on the conservatory side of the White House instead of outside Mr. Harding’s office. So Mr. Harding said I could walk over with him, down the passage known as the “secret passage,” I believe, and under the pergola. We lingered long inside the closed door, however, before we left the executive office. Little would I have actually believed, in spite of the chills of premonition I had experienced during that visit, that never again would we stand thus together upon this earth. Perhaps that was why we clung so to each other in our farewell embrace. And Mr. Harding’s eyes, as well as my own, were wet. I shall never forget how he looked down at me, in the dim light of that room, and asked, as he so often did, that I say to him that I was happy now. “Are you happy now, dearie?” he asked softly, and with quivering lips and brimming eyes I bravely lied, “I am happy, sweetheart!”

We went out. Several feet behind us as we passed through the pergola came Brooks, returning evidently from an errand to the offices. I asked Mr. Harding who he was and he told me. In my brief glance backward I saw that his valet was a very good-looking [Pg 242]light colored man. This was the one and only time I ever saw the trustworthy servant in whose care I addressed so many letters to my sweetheart.

Laddie Boy came bounding out to meet his master as we reached the entrance to the White House proper, and Mr. Harding stooped to pat him. It seemed this was the kitchen entrance. Just inside the door a guard was stationed. The kitchen maids peered through the partly opened door upon us with curious glances. Mr. Harding indicated that his private elevator was on the left and turned to shake hands with me. I thanked him for the “conference” in quite audible tones and he bowed slightly over my hand. Then he left me and I proceeded to the conservatory.

That was the last time I ever saw Warren Gamaliel Harding, my sweetheart.

I returned to Chicago on an early train. The following day or so after that President Walter Dill Scott was confined to his home with a severe cold, and sent for me to take some work. It was up in his den that I told him of the change I intended to make—to go to school instead of being his secretary. He expressed himself as glad that I wished to attend the University, but said he would be sorry to lose my services, and suggested that I try to combine studies with secretarial work. But this I knew I could not do, for I was still under Dr. Barbour’s care, making two trips to him weekly for iron inoculations. This President Scott knew nothing about and I explained it to him and said I knew I could not undertake to do both things.

My brother-in-law, Scott Willits, returned home from abroad about this time and I changed my residence to one of the girls’ dormitories in Evanston. This was on Sherman Avenue, Evanston, and Mr. Harding wrote me at that address during the next [Pg 243]six months instead of at my sister’s. He kept me well funded, also, during that spring, and I found my studies more absorbing than I had found the secretarial work with the President of the University.

But I was far from happy. I had Elizabeth Ann out at the dormitory with me many times, and frequently stayed in the city all night at my sister’s. Elizabeth Ann was the most lovable child imaginable. The girls at school adored her and I never saw a child who could adapt herself more quickly to playmates than Elizabeth Ann, even though those playmates were, like the girls in the dormitory, eighteen and nineteen years old. Of course, I was much older than the others there, being twenty-six years old.

It was, I think, about the middle of March, when I, one day, called up my sister’s apartment from Evanston to learn from my brother-in-law that she had taken the baby and gone to Ohio. I had exhibited my growing dissatisfaction with the arrangement as it stood, and to Elizabeth, my sister, I had not hesitated to express, in all the fierceness of my desire, my opinion that matters would have to undergo a change. I might even have intimated that I myself knew of one way which would give me my child, and in moments when the bars were let down entirely I probably told her very bluntly how it hurt me to hear Elizabeth Ann call Scott “daddy.” I never had as strong feeling about Elizabeth Ann’s calling my sister “mamma,” although I objected to her calling her “mother.”

Things as they stood were not harmonious. It all affected me like a poison, and I am sure was the direct cause of my so slow return to normal health. And when I visited the baby at my sister’s and heard Elizabeth Ann speak of what “daddy” or “mamma” did, even her manifestations of love for me only made me the more unspeakably miserable. I used to want to pick her up and fly away with her. And, oh, how I longed to shout to the world, “She’s mine! She’s mine!”

The knowledge of this state of affairs and of the equal dissatisfaction on the part of Elizabeth and Scott, experienced as a result of my unrelenting attitude, told me, even as my brother-in-law [Pg 244]was informing me of my sister’s departure for Ohio, that she had really also gone on to Washington. My high-strung nervous system made my perceptive abilities all the keener, and I had scarcely hung up the receiver when I saw very plainly the whole picture. Either Mr. Harding, his greater fears aroused by my first frank confession to him in January of utter dissatisfaction with the present adoption arrangement, had sent for Elizabeth, or she, tossed about mentally by the hurricane of my own expressed sentiments and then by the more direct tornado of refusals by Scott to longer suffer interference from me where the baby was concerned, had written to him and asked for an appointment. To this day I do not know how it came to be arranged that Elizabeth went down. In any event, I knew intuitively, without being told, where she had gone.

When Elizabeth returned from Washington, she told me she had talked with Mr. Harding, and I learned that she had left the baby at my mother’s in Athens, Ohio, while she went on to the White House.

But what passed between Mr. Harding and my sister Elizabeth is to this day almost a closed book to me. I was shaken with fury to think that she would go to see him and not advise me of it beforehand. And I was wroth with him I loved so dearly for inviting or permitting an interview without my knowledge.

I will admit the possibility at that time of actual mental impairment on my part where Elizabeth Ann was concerned, and perhaps it would not be too much to say, that only by offsetting the effect that my too-concentrated thinking wrought in me physically, by vigorous mental application to my studies, was I able to appear the normal, fairly healthy individual I had to be in order to keep going. But I so powerfully discounted the wisdom and right of a mother’s having to give up her love-child simply because stupid convention held a Damocletian sword over her head, that I had developed a decided complex on the subject, to apply the modern phrase.

And, instead of pressing Elizabeth to tell me what had been said by Mr. Harding to her and what she had said to Mr. Harding, [Pg 245]I sat down and poured out to my sweetheart in a letter, which I fain would have recalled as soon as it was mailed, my angry resentment at what I termed being “double-crossed.” I wrote unkindly, I wrote hysterically, I wrote intolerantly, I wrote pleadingly.

And, as always, my answer from him was characteristic. He wrote kindly, he wrote calmly, he wrote tolerantly, and he, too, wrote pleadingly.

And, as always, my subsequent letter to him was one of apology for a hasty temper indulged. I remember back in 1917, when I had shown anger for a moment over something, Mr. Harding wrote to me afterward, “I love you, Nan, darling, as much when you are angry as any other time.” Indeed, I have never had anything but love displayed by him toward me.

And even in late years when my sister has intimated to me that “Mr. Harding was not as loyal to you, Nan, as you were to him, believe me!” I have recognized that whatever Mr. Harding said to my sister Elizabeth in that interview, he said not because he didn’t love or trust me, but because, as he told me so often, he “couldn’t be expected” to trust anybody beyond or outside of me, because he knew that in all the world nobody loved him as devotedly or as passionately as Nan Britton. And when he talked to Elizabeth, even though she was my own sister, he was talking to a comparative outsider.

And so there continued to be dissension in the Willits household whenever the mother of their adopted daughter appeared on the scene, and I continued to cast about in my mind for a plan which would make it possible for me to take my daughter. As the spring advanced, and I realized another summer was drawing near, I grew more panicky than ever. In June my school would be out and I knew Elizabeth and Scott intended to go down on the Illinois farm that summer as early possibly as [Pg 246]July. That meant Elizabeth Ann would be away from me for one month, two months, and perhaps longer. Oftener than ever, as a result of contemplating another whole season away from her, would steal over me the old, sinister suggestion of taking a husband. “Get married and you can have her, get married and you can have her, get married and you can have her.” The wordy little demons danced in my brain like mad until sometimes I wanted to scream, “Stop! Stop!” But in the dead of night, when I could reason more sanely, the idea itself would recur and it seemed to grow less and less obnoxious in proportion to the recompense it alluringly offered.

I grabbed at the following unexpected straw which was suddenly floated before my sinking mind. In late April or early May I received a letter from Helen Anderson, who was my teacher in New York when I took my secretarial course.

“You have a way of getting things you want, Nan, why don’t you go to Europe with me? I’m sailing on June 21st with the Armstrong Tour, and enclose circular,” Miss Anderson wrote.

My unhappiness inclined me to try anything that would, even temporarily, take my mind off the situation as it existed, and, knowing that soon my sister, her husband and my baby would be gone, and having made no plans whatever for myself for the summer, the trip to Europe seemed a real Godsend. I had never been abroad, and the novelty itself would surely occupy my thoughts and relieve me mentally, as well as doubtless improve me physically. According to the circular the entire trip, including six weeks of university study in Dijon, France, would cost but $525. I had been studying French at Northwestern University that semester and looked with favor upon continuing my study abroad and at the same time, as was contemplated in the tour, seeing various parts of France.

[Pg 247]

But the deciding element was that it gave promise of getting me away from myself, and from the too exhaustive thinking about my baby girl. It was certain I could not continue to survive the present mental maelstrom. The get-a-husband program was not as easy at it had seemed, and though I was accepting casual [Pg 248]attentions from two or three young men, one an instructor at Northwestern, I could see in none of them enough of the desirable qualities needful in the enactment of the program I had been considering.

I wrote Mr. Harding immediately upon receiving the letter from Miss Anderson, and told him exactly why I thought the trip would benefit me. He himself was to be away in Alaska, I reminded him, which would mean that I could not see him at all, and the baby would be on the Willits farm most of the summer. I told him it would help to make me a little bit more happy if he could let me go to Europe.

Mr. Harding had met Helen Anderson, you will remember, when he first came over to New York, and he knew her to be a gentlewoman. Therefore, in his reply he endorsed heartily my plans and enclosed $200 or $300 as a deposit to be placed with the Armstrong Tour people. He advised me to go ahead immediately and get my passport.

I remember very well that, even as enormously busy as he must have been, he went quite into detail, telling me how I would have to have my picture taken for the passport, and so on, and every succeeding letter I had from him until I sailed contained advices. Advices and expressions of how he “would love to be going” with me! “I would love to see your face when you see London, Nan!” he wrote, and though our plans did not contemplate London, I knew that Miss Anderson who had been abroad about a dozen times, knew London well, for she often visited a friend there, and I thought we would probably break away from the regular tour and go for a brief time to London. Mr. and Mrs. Harding had been abroad but once, I think, during their entire married life, but evidently London had impressed Mr. Harding beyond Paris. He wrote, “I wish I might take you, dearie; I wish we might make the trip together; I wish we might make it our second honeymoon trip!” Instead, he said, he would be journeying in the opposite direction, to Alaska. But not in spirit, for he would be thinking of me every hour, he wrote. And I! Ah, he was never out of my thoughts, try as I did to forget things.

One night I had Elizabeth Ann with me out at the dormitory. It was about two weeks or so before I was to leave Chicago. We went to bed and I talked things over with Elizabeth Ann. I would talk with her as though she were an older person, and I swear I do believe she understood many of the serious things I used to talk about. I don’t know that I had mentioned to her up to this time that I was going away. She was lying very close in my arms when I said, “Sweetheart, Nan is going away for a little while—on a big boat!” There was silence for a second, then she uttered a scream; it was not the scream of a child except as an older voice might speak through a child. How often have I thought of it! It was a cry of alarm, of premonition.

“No, no!” she cried. I had explained it to her so quietly and in what I thought was a cheerful voice that her cry seemed almost to presage tragedy. And all through the days of preparation following, that cry sounded and resounded in memory.

She was so adorable that year—just three and a half years old. She had all of her mother’s impulsiveness with periods of her father’s reserve, and she was the most affectionate child I have ever seen. A true love-baby like Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother.

In this connection I am reminded of an incident which occurred during Miss Daisy Harding’s first visit to her cousin Mrs. Wesener, in Chicago, in the fall of 1921, I think. I was in New York, but my sister Elizabeth related it to me. Miss Harding had come to call upon Elizabeth. During her visit, Elizabeth Ann, who had been presented to Miss Harding, walked up to her and, with charming frankness and with the Harding smile, said, “Miss Harding, I jus’ love you!” Elizabeth said that her husband remarked after Miss Harding had left, “Well, blood certainly tells!” Elizabeth Ann may possibly have felt that here was her kin, at least in spirit, for she immediately decided that she loved Daisy Harding.

[Pg 250]

So again I parted from my baby, and a few days before the 21st of June, 1923, I was in New York. I stopped at the Bretton Hall Hotel. This was right around the corner from Helen Anderson’s apartment, on West 86th Street.

I had met, when I was going to Columbia University in 1921, and living in the studio apartment building on 72nd Street, a Norwegian sea captain whom I shall refer to in this book as Captain Angus Neilsen. According to the girl on my floor who had introduced him to me, Captain Neilsen had until recently been a very wealthy man. She said he had lost heavily through Charles W. Morse, in ship matters, but even so he was reputed to be substantially wealthy if he could convert his properties into cash. The girl who introduced me to the captain told me, in a grandiloquent manner, that she had known Captain Neilsen when he lived in his apartment on Central Park West and had a couple of cars at his disposal. She claimed to have helped him enormously mentally to recover from the terrific shock it had been to him to lose his money through Charles W. Morse. He was at that time very lovely to me and I judged him to be a fine man.

We remained friendly, and Captain Neilsen even came to Chicago during the spring of 1923 to see us, staying at my sister’s. I spared a little time from my lessons at Northwestern to come to Chicago from Evanston to see him. When Scott had sailed for Europe the captain had been greatly in evidence, taking us all, including Elizabeth Ann, who had taken quite a fancy to him, to the theatre and so on, and helping me to box some of my belongings when I returned later on with Elizabeth and the baby to Chicago. He had quite a way with children.

Now, before I sailed for Europe, he helped me with last-minute errands, and, in fact, took Helen Anderson and me down to the boat on the morning of June 21st, 1923. It was much like having [Pg 251]a big brother around, and I could not help being sympathetic toward a man who showed, as Captain Neilsen had always shown, such a deep regard for me.

Helen Anderson and I sailed on the Roussillon, of the French Line, the same day, if I remember correctly, that the Harding party set out upon its ill-fated Alaskan trip.

I had received several letters from Mr. Harding at the Bretton Hall Hotel, in which he continued his advices and his wishes that he were going with me. I tried to be happy. Now, at least, he could relax and recuperate. I had retained a very vivid picture of him as he looked in January, and I knew that the strain of Mrs. Harding’s illness had greatly worn him.

In a letter from him, received Tuesday (I sailed on Thursday), he wrote, “Don’t spend any money in New York, dearie; there will be many things you will see in Paris which you will want to buy.” But already I had, as a matter of fact, bought clothes, and I was indeed taking very little of the extra $400 or so he had provided, in addition to the regular tour expense of $525. When Captain Neilsen asked me frankly if I was taking plenty of extra money, knowing all about how money goes on the Continent, and I replied “not much,” he offered to lend me some, and I accepted an extra $50, telling him I would repay him upon my return. When Scott, my brother-in-law, returned from Europe the captain had met him at the dock, as I had written and requested him to do, and Scott, being broke, had accepted a loan of $100 from the captain then and was grateful for the offer. This brotherly consideration on Captain Neilsen’s part did not go unappreciated by me, either.

Mr. Harding had told me in his letter of Tuesday, which came to Bretton Hall, that he would send me a steamer letter, and no sooner was I on board than I sought the mail department in search of my message. I found Mr. Harding’s letter and about twenty other pieces of mail—letters, telegrams and specials. I hugged my sweetheart’s letter and put it inside my dress next to my heart. Then I joined Helen Anderson on deck, and bade her nephew and Captain Neilsen goodbye.

I think the sensations experienced when one leaves the shores of America for the first time are indescribable. I stood alone at the railing and looked back at the skyline of New York, gradually becoming hazy with lengthening distance. Soon the Statue of Liberty was shrouded in mist. Miss Anderson had gone downstairs for her luncheon. To leave New York was, for her, an old story. I still had in my arms some American Beauties I had received from the Northwestern University instructor, as well as gorgeous flowers from Captain Neilsen. In my hand I held my packet of letters, and next to my heart was my farewell note from my beloved. I took my flowers into our cabin, and went back to the rail to read my letters. Even as I drew out Mr. Harding’s letter and gazed fondly at the familiar handwriting, I felt a shock. I could not account for it, but it was the same uncanny feeling I had experienced upon my last visit to him, which had been the January before—six long months ago. Mr. Harding’s own preparations for his Alaska trip had made it inexpedient for me to stop in Washington, and we had in our letters spoken of the grand reunion we would have in the fall when we both returned from our respective journeyings.

“Nan, darling,” Mr. Harding wrote, “how I wish I might be going with you! To think of spending the days in glorious idleness with you, lolling in comfy deck chairs, holding you all through the nights in my arms, seeing strange lands with you, Nan!” Then, more fatherly, he wrote, “Try to save out enough money so that you will not be entirely broke when you land back in New York, because it may be difficult for me to see you immediately upon your return.” His farewell letter had contained no money. It was just full of love. “Darling Nan, I’d love to go to the end of the world with you,” he wrote, and the old oft-written message, “I love you more than all the world,” was repeated in [Pg 253]that letter. The postscript was sweet, and fairly long, and for me alone. I could not, however, help feeling an inexplicable tone of finality, of foreboding, unconsciously expressed by him. Was it all over? How could I know?—then!

In September of 1923, about a month after Mr. Harding’s death, when I went to Marion, Miss Daisy Harding told me that Carrie Harding Votaw had passed through her brother’s office in the White House shortly before the Harding party started for Alaska, and Mr. Harding had called out to her, “Carrie, I’m making my will!” “Your will, Warren! Why, what for?” asked Mrs. Votaw in amazement. “Oh, I don’t expect to come back from Alaska,” Mr. Harding replied in a semi-offhand manner. I have often considered the last letter which he sent me when I sailed, in connection with that statement my sweetheart made to his sister about his will.

I kept Mr. Harding’s farewell letter several days, loath to part with the latest and only love-letter I then possessed from him. But, finally, one evening, just before dark, when the deck was almost deserted and the passengers in their cabins dressing for dinner, I took my letter to the railing. I read it over slowly, then kissed it and tore it into bits. I tossed the bits out upon the billowing waves and watched the little white floating pieces as our boat sped along. I foolishly thought to myself, “They may be here when I come back and I shall pass them again.” It reminded me of the summer of 1919, when I was in Asbury Park awaiting my baby’s coming and used to take Mr. Harding’s precious love-letters over to Spring Lake, a resort town near Asbury, to a favorite grove where I spent many an afternoon. There, after reading and re-reading the latest letter from Mr. Harding, I destroyed it, scattering the tiny bits all through the grove. To know that his letters were strewn all through that wood made it a very sacred place to me. I would sit down and write him from there, and sometimes I would stoop to pick up a wee scrap of the letter destroyed perhaps the previous day, and find written there parts of the word “darling” or “bliss” or “ultimate,” and often they would recall his entire sentence of endearment to me. Now, [Pg 254]as I dropped this last letter into the sea, I thought that hereafter the sea, like the grove, would always seem sacred to me, would seem almost to belong to me—even as he did belong to me!

On board the Roussillon, and subsequently when I reached Paris and Dijon, I tried ardently to plunge into gaiety. I summoned all the light-heartedness I could muster. After all, I had come to lose myself, to try to find a temporary new existence, even to briefly forgetting, if possible, the problem of how to obtain my daughter for myself.

I had gay clothes and plenty of them, and I put wine in my water as everyone else did, and tried to act the part I suppose I actually did look—a modern flapper. Certainly with the short skirts everybody wore then, and with bobbed hair, I could not have looked as old as I was—twenty-six.

But all the superficial gaiety in which I indulged could not make me forget the problem paramount in my mind, and I found myself actually reverting to the study of this man and that man, and wondering whether I would consider him fitted for the role of foster father, in name only. However, the men on board were for the most part very young, and there was but one who looked fairly good to me in this respect. I found out he had a responsible position in a bank, and from his own remarks he evidently had known wealth all his life. He might do, I thought drearily. Then I would shake myself out of this mood and join the young people in their games or talk. But when we landed at Havre, the one man I had quietly been making a study of proceeded to follow his own divergent itinerary, and I forget all about him as a husband possibility.

There were about twenty-five in the Armstrong Party, in which Helen Anderson seemed to be the star traveler. Being with her, [Pg 255]I always had the best accommodations. In Dijon, therefore, after ten days in Paris and its environs, we were given separate rooms at M. and Mme. Lachat’s very picturesque little home. We were to be in Dijon for several weeks, attending the University of Dijon, and going on sight-seeing trips into the adjacent mountain country. The Lachat home had a perfectly charming little garden, shut in all around by a high wall common to many French neighborhoods. Our rooms overlooked the garden, that of Miss Anderson being on the second floor and mine on the first.

Everything thus far had been of absorbing interest to me, and I found Dijon none the less so, with its quaint, narrow streets, quainter homes and smugly contented people. The inhabitants were more than willing to talk French with us struggling foreigners, and I managed to learn more of their language during the few weeks I was there than in the previous six months at Northwestern University in Evanston.

And I was gradually learning other things I had not known well when I landed—for instance, the value of the franc, both to them and to me. At Havre the porter had been bold to ask me for “an American dollar bill, s’il vous plaît,” and I had handed him one, for I really felt he meant to give me back some change. But he did not, and I determined that if that was what they charged us Americans for carrying a bag down one flight of stairs, I would do the tipping in my own way after that! I found that the servant class over there was more than Americanized in this respect, and I gradually “caught on.”

Miss Anderson and I, as well as several of the other members of the Armstrong Party, were assigned for our meals to the boarding house of Mme. Daillant, a rosy-cheeked woman whose husband dealt in wines and who herself kept up the expenses of the home, I perceived, chiefly by taking boarders. Around our table sat an interesting group: an Italian avocat, several Norwegians, four Americans, including Miss Anderson and myself, and M. and Mme. Daillant, their attractive young daughter of about eighteen, and one other, a French lady. The Italian and I struck up a friendship, and often we took long walks, carrying [Pg 256]our own dictionaries and consulting them quite frequently along the road to make ourselves understood to each other in the French language.

The latter part of July, having grown quite a bit bored with Dijon and not taking seriously the course offered the students at the University, I, as well as others in the Armstrong Party, decided upon going into Switzerland. Miss Anderson remained in Dijon, saying she did not wish to incur the additional expense inasmuch as she had been many times to Switzerland.

Geneva was our destination, and there was rare beauty in the mountain scenery enroute there from Dijon and later in the city itself. I stopped at the Hotel de la Paix, and my room, from the small balcony of which I could view the lake and afar off the snowy-capped Mt. Blanc, was both French in artistry and American in practical comforts.

I had noted in the morning paper, which was a Paris edition of a New York paper, the progress the Harding party was making through Alaska. I felt here in Switzerland, almost by myself, as though I were in another world. I felt as though I were walking through a picture-book. Even the friendships I was making seemed of the picture-book sort. I was more real to myself when I dreamed, for when I dreamed I was invariably taken back to more familiar surroundings, oftentimes spending whole nights either with my sweetheart or with our daughter.

I had promised my sister Elizabeth I would try to get fat, and she had made her appeal on the ground of keeping my appearance, telling me I was not at all presentable when so thin. So I had endeavored to eat as much as possible and the traveling around had not made it difficult. And the food here at the Hotel de la Paix was fine, par excellence. Mr. Harding used to tell me [Pg 257]that to him it was a real pleasure just to sit and watch me eat when I was hungry, for I seemed to so enjoy my food. He used to order things he thought perhaps would tempt me or things I told him I had never eaten; I remember he taught me to eat artichokes, things I had never heard of until then. I was quite a hick. Mr. Harding himself could with ease carry considerable weight. He was very tall—fully a head taller than I. Nevertheless, I used to tease him, when, upon observing that he was not eating as heartily as usual, he would confess that he was on a self-imposed diet, “to keep his stomach down.” “Why, you’re not too fat to suit me, darling,” I would say. “What d’yuh mean, ‘keep down your stomach’?” Then, with head on one side and the adorable smile I loved, he would lean over the table and whisper, “So I can hold you closer, you darling!”

I remember it was on a Saturday, the 28th of July, that I went, by myself, up Lake Geneva to Territet. The others had planned a mountain trip to Chamonix, but I preferred the water trip. As our tidy little white steamer glided slowly away from Geneva it scattered before it flocks of snowy pigeons that find a welcome home, there along the lake front, and from my chair against the railing I watched dreamily their fluttering escape far away on the turquoise surface of the water. There was the delightful coolness of mountain air and the clear blue of the skies to make it a day among days for sight-seeing.

In my English Literature class at Northwestern I had, that spring, been studying Lord Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon, and I was looking forward eagerly to seeing the Chateau of Chillon, which is at Territet, the last stop our tiny steamer would make.

Some of the seats on the observation deck were arranged so that they faced each other, as in a train, and my heart suddenly jumped as I stared at the front page of a foreign graphic sheet which the man opposite me held at a visible angle. Mr. Harding [Pg 258]was pictured on his trip with some Indians, and the pose was so natural, with his straw hat, and cane in his hand, that I felt the hot tears come in my eyes and a great heaviness in my throat. The man lowered the paper just in time to find me straining toward it, and thereupon offered it to me. But I shook my head and thanked him. I determined, however, to buy a copy immediately upon my return to Geneva.

At the Chateau of Chillon I strolled through the maze of big stone rooms, and finally found myself down in the dungeons where stand “the seven pillars of Gothic mould.” I met very few other tourists in my roaming, and the sense of mediaeval days crept over me realistically there in the stillness.... I imagined I was the daughter of an indulgent but uncompromising father, living there in a great lonely castle, shut off from the whole world. The room of the Duchess So-and-So was my own room now, and it was my window which gave out onto the glassy waters of Lake Leman. Here, tonight, my Prince Warren would come to get me! I would jump from this window into his arms, into his boat which would carry us both away, away forever, where my beloved prince and I could live happily ever after! Then, finding myself in the tower, I planned my escape in case my angry old father should imprison me. But this escape was difficult to devise and so I dropped out of the make-believe world and my roving mind took me back to the newspaper picture I had seen a few hours before on the lake steamer. He had looked a little tired, and I hoped they would not drag him all over Alaska to speak and to shake hands with people. I wondered if he were not perhaps thinking about me at that very moment, and the great love I felt for him surged through my being. How good it would be to get back to him! Already it seemed to me I had been away from him and from my precious baby girl an eternity. And it was still three weeks until we should sail on our return to America!

I shall never forget that night in my room at the Hotel de la Paix. It was yet early when I reached Geneva from my day’s trip, and after I had eaten my dinner and bought the paper containing Mr. Harding’s picture, I retired to my room for early sleep. But my thoughts were too full of Mr. Harding and I could not sleep. His face seemed very near to me, and I switched on my light again and studied the picture in the graphic sheet. The more I studied it the more tired he looked to me, until I thought in terror, “Heavens! I wish they would let him alone!” I slipped into my negligee and walked out upon the tiny balcony and drank in the loveliness of a moonlight night on Lake Geneva.

Across the lake, beyond Mt. Blanc Bridge which connects the two sections of the city, sounded the gay laughter of late diners. “Winers” I thought, absent-mindedly. There is considerable difference in time between Alaska and Switzerland, and I wondered where Mr. Harding was then and what he was doing. It was nine o’clock by the little watch he had given me in 1917. Perhaps he was thinking of me, too, and that was what brought him so vividly before me.

I stood there thus meditating, when over the waters, clear in the mountain air, floated to me a familiar song, an old-time favorite from a musical comedy, “The Prince of Luxemburg.” The words, which I remembered quite distinctly, at first seemed a reassuring answer to my fears, and I mentally fitted them to the air as it was played and replayed by the little cafe orchestra:

But instead of happy “Say not” negations the lines seemed to sing themselves into positive affirmations of ill, and I struggled [Pg 260]vainly to banish the prophetic sadness that pervaded the atmosphere of my thoughts just as it had during my last talk with Mr. Harding in the White House in January. Persistently this line haunted me, “Cruel fate will redeem perfect joy with pain,” until it seemed like a sinister night-song as I lay in my bed longing for merciful sleep. I had come over here to forget, certainly not lugubriously to anticipate a future which, in spite of every unfavorable circumstance, held promise of much happiness. “Perfect joy with pain, perfect joy with pain—perfect joy—perfect pain—perfect joy—pain”; the words droned themselves into my drowsy consciousness until at last I must have fallen asleep. When I awoke it was very early morning. I remembered with a sense of shrinking terror my own thoughts of the night before, and the haunting imaginings from which I fain would flee before they gripped me hard again. Something told me I should have prayed for Mr. Harding instead of spending my time in worry, and it seemed strange I had not thought of it the night before. So I turned my face toward the pillow now and tried to ask God to protect him from all harm and take good care of my baby and him for me until I returned to both of them. Then I slept a while longer.

I wakened to find a brilliant day awaiting me, and I was to spend it with my Italian friend who was to arrive in Geneva that morning. We hired a taxi and drove up through the mountains, listening with amusement to the very informative guide as he pointed out this estate or that peak with all the flourish of a proud possessor. He spoke alternately in English to me and in French to both of us. We viewed the Rhone and Arve Rivers from a topmost peak and marvelled how they retained their own colors of brown and turquoise blue even as they flowed far out into Lake Geneva.

[Pg 261]

It occurred to me that this fellow, this guide, seemed almost too typical of other loquacious guides I had observed, and after our return to Geneva, I said to him as we got out of the taxi, “You speak very much like an American.” He answered with embarrassment, “Well, I am kind of an American. You see, I was born in St. Louis.” Unfortunately I could not repeat this to my escort in French accurately enough for his full appreciation.

During my stay in Geneva, remembering that Mr. Harding had assigned Angela Arnold’s husband to a post in Switzerland, and that they were supposed to be living in Geneva then, I endeavored to locate Angela. I could not remember her husband’s name, however, and the American consul with whom I talked over the telephone said there were so many attaches there that it would be almost impossible to locate them unless I could definitely identify them by the husband’s surname. So I did not get to see her. The following day we all returned to Dijon.

I heard very rarely from my sister Elizabeth about Elizabeth Ann. This worried me quite a bit, but then, I thought, impatient with myself, worry was my very mind’s shadow, and likely she was fine and having a good time on the farm. My mother was a faithful correspondent, however, and I was continuing to correspond with other friends, even keeping up a desultory sort of correspondence with the Northwestern University instructor, so I hung around the little apartment of the Dijon University concierge almost hourly to get my mail. As a matter of fact, Elizabeth had a good reason for not being able to write oftener, for I learned afterward what I had not known before I sailed, and what, if I had known, would have kept me from sailing at all. That was that my sister had undergone in my absence a severe operation in Chicago, and had entrusted the baby to her husband’s father and mother on the farm while she was in the hospital.

[Pg 262]

I had promised Mr. Harding that I would write to him. Indeed, he did not have to ask me, for I knew I would want to anyway. Letters were a medium of expression of my love for him which I could not lightly abandon. But I could not, obviously, mail any of them. I kept them in my trunk, adding a little each night to what I knew, from experience, he would term a veritable feast when I gave them to him in the fall. Little wonder, staying so close to him in this way, and being unable to banish fears about him, that I was torn mentally in what had been my serious resolve to forget!

The Italian was very attentive and, I discovered, was highly intelligent. How would it be, I thought, if I married him instead of an American, and made him the convenience-father of my child? He spoke often of coming to America, where he might very likely settle permanently. He was manifestly fond of children. And he was a gentleman. It was a thought, anyway.

In Dijon, Madame Daillant’s little garden behind the house provided a gathering place for her boarder-guests as they dropped in for meals, but the evening of August 1st, 1923, it was conspicuously deserted. I found it so when I, going on ahead of Helen Anderson, entered; so I threw myself down into one of the empty chairs and picked up a newspaper. It was very warm and I fanned myself with the paper before opening it. A curious country this, I thought, looking around at the graveled walks, the rickety benches, and the walls surmounted by overturned glass jars on sticks. In parts of the country where I had been it was very beautiful, and it had proven rather diverting. But oh, where could one find a country to equal our own United States! How really shabbily the middle classes here lived! The daughter of Mme. Daillant, a pretty girl, with abundant dark hair and creamy skin, and cheeks pinked by nature to an enviable glow, a pianist, too, of marked ability—what prospects had she in [Pg 263]this place? An American girl of her class might rise to fame with like beauty and equal talent. But, it seemed to me, I could see this pretty creature growing old and fat like her mother, with nothing save a drab fate awaiting her. One of the young men in our Armstrong party who also dined at Mme. Daillant’s pension had pleaded with me to stay close by when Mlle. Daillant was in the vicinity for, he said, she attached herself to him with leechlike persistency, and he knew how these French people tried to rope one in. Poor girl! No doubt my American friend provided for her the most romance she had ever known.

I opened the paper. My heart stopped; then pounded. My head swam and I went limp. “HARDING HAS PNEUMONIA, BUT WORST FEARS ALLAYED.” I read the headlines over and over—over and over again. As the words gradually sunk meaningfully into my consciousness an indescribable terror seized me. I crushed the paper in my hands and let myself out the little gate into the wider, freer space beyond the garden. My lips were dry; I put my hand to my forehead to steady myself. I wondered why I did not faint. I never fainted, no matter how badly I felt. I have never to this day fainted. So I did not faint then. I only paced up and down, experiencing a mental anguish I had hitherto never known. A thousand suggestions of action came to me. They tumbled about in my poor brain in utter confusion, but from among them I was able to choose the first to be acted upon: I would rush back to Paris immediately, and thence to America by the first boat.... No, that would not do.... I must “act natural” before these people and get out of the city without arousing any suspicions. “Now is the time to summon all your courage, Nan,” Mr. Harding had said to me over the telephone when I pleaded with him to see me in New York shortly after the baby’s birth. I seemed to hear him say it now. I tried to shake myself into common sense; to tell myself everything was all right; he was ill but he would recover!

I seemed to go over, during those brief moments, my years with Mr. Harding—our whole love-life together, even up to the time I had seen him last, suffering from a terrible cold and looking, [Pg 264]oh, so tired and miserable. I remembered hearing Mrs. Harding one time tell how “Warren” was pathetically afraid of pneumonia, above all other ills. I remembered so dearly the things that had seemed to throw such an atmosphere of finality over our last visit in the White House—his little parting advises, our lingering kisses, his general despair. And vividly did I recall my forebodings just five evenings before in Geneva. And the memory of each dark thought added terror to my heart.

Miss Anderson found me a few minutes later, having followed the lead of the open gate. I read the headlines to her through dry lips and held the partially crushed paper up for her to see. “All paper talk,” she said shortly. She bade me come in, as dinner was being served. I could not tell her why I was so vitally concerned over the illness of the President of the United States, and she, of course, thought it was but natural sympathy for a man who had been a family friend. “You’re silly to take paper talk so seriously,” she reproved. I followed her into the house and found my place at the table. “‘Just paper talk,’ as Helen says,” I told myself in desperate hope. “Now go on and eat your dinner or you’ll be ill yourself from worry and lack of food.” So I forced food down and passed dishes to and fro and listened to voiced speculations from those around the table, particularly those in our American party, about the probable severity of President Harding’s illness.

Mlle. Daillant was endeavoring as usual to dazzle the American at her right with charms and conversation, and part of me listened apathetically to this babble of French while the other part continued the contemplation of the newspaper report and an advisable course of action ... the Italian shot solicitous glances my way throughout the meal, but I could only raise dull eyes to him ... maybe I ought to marry him, I thought ... he was a nice fellow ... maybe if I married him, or somebody, it might relieve Mr. Harding’s mind of much worry even though we both would suffer in other ways as a consequence of such marriage ... the Norwegian professor’s wife looked as though she had been weeping, though her eyes were always red, [Pg 265]I thought ... a cold, maybe, for she kept wiping her nose ... what did these people know of tears, anyway! Mlle. Daillant’s laugh rang out and she repeated in rapid French to the rest of the boarders something her American had said which had amused her.... I wondered how it would seem to have no care beyond an ardent wish to capture an attractive blond American boy.... Good heavens! I hadn’t even enough money left for a passage!... I would borrow ... yes, I must go ... these meals were interminable.... I looked at Helen Anderson and she understood. I excused myself, and I even had enough presence of mind to nod to my hostess and murmur the customary “Bonsoir, Madame; à demain!” as I passed out.

It seemed good to be able to walk fast, and as I directed my steps toward Mme. Lachat’s, I tried to reason sanely with myself. Why, Mr. Harding had a superb constitution! It was only the physical drag of responsibility and worry which had overcome him. Maybe he did not even have pneumonia! When he was inaugurated Brigadier-General Sawyer, Mrs. Harding’s personal physician, had issued a statement something like this: “President Harding represents the finest there is today in America—morally and physically and mentally.” Although I did not credit Dr. Sawyer with being a particularly good physician, I knew that Mr. Harding’s general health had been excellent before he went into the presidency, except for a few minor ailments now and then. I remembered how strong he was, how he used to pick me up and carry me about the room in his arms. I remembered how I grew to think he was made of iron and was surprised if he expressed a wish to sleep occasionally! I expected him to stay awake and talk with me all night.

I remembered one night how he had come into New York from a speaking engagement up in New England somewhere and had closed his eyes almost as soon as he touched the pillow, and how I, piqued to tears, had lain away from him, silently, wordlessly, hurt, until he whispered, “Nan, darling, come close to me! Why, Nan, you’re not crying?” And how sweetly he had gathered me into his arms, and how ashamed I had been when he [Pg 266]confessed, with his usual embarrassment over indisposition of any character, “I have a ripping headache, dearie; please forgive me!” And I had rubbed his head with my finger-tips until he went off to sleep, and then I had stayed very close to him and just looked at his dear face and worshipped him. Oh, God, how sweet he was! How I wished now I might fly to him over this hopeless space between us, and take him away from everybody, and nurse him to strength and smiles again!

That night I dreamed fitfully. I arose in the morning, unrested, and hastened immediately to the Dijon railroad station, where I knew I could obtain the latest papers from Paris.

The papers dated August 1st, which I bought on the morning of the 2nd, caused me to take hope. The headlines were reassuring. “PRESIDENT MUCH BETTER; GIVES PREPARED SPEECH; HIS SECRETARY HANDS TO PRESS HIS ADDRESS HE PREPARED FOR DELIVERY IN SAN FRANCISCO.” That was more like news, I thought joyously. I hurried back to Helen Anderson with the paper. My Italian friend met me on the way. I translated into French as best I could the good news. Helen Anderson had explained to the people at the boarding house the evening before that I had come from the President’s home town and had known him from childhood. My Italian friend smiled broadly. Now would I go to the theatre with him that evening? he asked. Yes, I said, I would go.

I felt as though I ought to be gay. Mr. Harding would want me to. Maybe my prayers were of avail, after all, and I breathed another prayer, this time one of thankfulness. I went to school that day. I laughed with the others at the funny mistakes we all made. I could have shouted all the day long, so relieved did I feel, and so thankful.

That evening my friend called for me and we dined together, and drank more wine than usual, and afterwards laughed with [Pg 267]sheer joy at strange French comedy which I did not at all understand. We sat in a box. My friend was most agreeable; his face reminded one of some of the heroic bronze faces on plaques. He called me “Ninon,” which he informed me was French for Nan. I giggled to myself when I reflected how funny it would really be to marry a man who knew but two or three words in my language. Yet when I thought about it I decided this very fact might prove an important factor in making him desirable for my peculiar marriage purposes. But he was, after all, a very likable man, and some girl might marry him for love of him alone. On our walk home after the theatre, he proposed marriage to me again, for the severalth time, and, as he bent to kiss my hand, I said to myself audibly in English, “It would be a crime when he seems so genuinely fond of me.” He looked up at me pleadingly. “S’il vous plaît, Ninon, parlez en français!” I smiled softly and shook my head. “Je vous a dit, simplement, ‘vous êtes un bon ami.’”

That night, Thursday, the 2nd of August, 1923, I dreamed a strange and terrible dream. I had retired about twelve; I had not been long in bed, and surely had not even closed my eyes, though when I seemed to come to my senses I realized I must have been dreaming. My room, in the corner where my bed stood, was dark, and when I realized what a horrible nightmare I had experienced, I sprang out of bed like a shot and over to the wall to turn on the electric light. I looked at my watch. Why, I had been in bed for three whole hours! Seven o’clock in America—Elizabeth Ann’s bed-hour. My heart was beating violently and I shook all over. I passed an icy hand across my hot forehead. Yes, I was awake, all right, now. God! What a ghastly dream! I opened my shutters and breathed deeply of the sweet-scented garden air. A million stars blinked down at me.... Peace, peace, there was peace everywhere but in my heart. I turned off [Pg 268]my light and crept back into bed. Strange how really cold it got here at night; I should not have stood those few moments at the window. I was trembling like a leaf; my teeth chattered and my heart was still pounding up into my throat. My mother had taught us children at home many things to repeat before we fell asleep and mechanically I whispered these things now to myself—the Lord’s Prayer, the 91st Psalm, the 23rd Psalm. I repeated them all, over and over, but I knew not what I was repeating. My conscious mind was reviewing my dream in minute detail for the morbid satisfaction of the mental devils which seemed to possess me. I was conscious again of a something above me, to the left. It seemed to be floating through the air. It was shrouded about with white clouds which seemed not to hide it from view but rather to protect it in its slow mount upward. What was I seeing! God! A coffin! A coffin draped with, and trailing about it, American flags, and heaped with red, red roses! A coffin, ascending on my left, rising so slowly that it seemed suspended in mid-air, yet ever moving upward and away from me. How blood-red were the roses! And the crimson stripes of the trailing flags stained the clouds! The whole, mounting majestically, lifted by an invisible force, upward, onward, protectingly shrouded by white, white clouds!

So he had come to me! He had come in this way that I might be the first to know he was leaving this earth! He himself, tired unto death, lay hidden beneath the folds of the crimson-striped flag he had so loved, revealing to me only the symbol of his going, the beautiful cradle of his last restful sleep! Perhaps he had been too tired, too tired to bend over me, too tired even to murmur before he went away, “I love you, dearie!” But I knew. I understood. He meant to waft me sweet kisses in his sleep. Yet later he would come back, come back to hold me close, and I would feel his presence, even as we were wont to waken to sweet consciousness in each other’s arms, realizing with keen morning wakefulness the bliss of reciprocal touch ... yes, now he must sleep.... How beautiful the roses! They hung in tangled masses over the edge of the coffin, mingling their blood-red with [Pg 269]the crimson and white stripes ... how gentle the Hand that steadied the coffin ... a Hand that sensed his weariness and guarded well his slumber ... going upward, heavenward, away from me—away from me! Oh, God! No, not away.... I stared, wide-eyed, fearfully fascinated, knowing, yet not daring to move, feeling instinctively the futility of lifting human hands in an effort to stay the coffin in its slow flight heavenward.... Even as one transfixed I lay, moving only pitifully frightened eyes to watch the coffin fade slowly out of sight, protectingly enveloped in the white, white clouds...!

With a shock I came back to conscious thinking and sprang from my bed to switch on the light. God! what a horrible nightmare it had been, I thought as I lay in bed now reviewing it and mechanically repeating the Lord’s Prayer ... the Psalms ... over and over.... “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters”.... Oh, God, how glad I was that it had been only a dream! I thought as I fell asleep.

When, on the following morning, August 3rd, I arose, pale-faced, to rush down to the Dijon station for my paper, I wept for joy to read the headlines. He was much, much better! There, I thought, that proved that dreams “go by opposites” as I had often heard people say, for I had dreamed that he was dead, yet he lived! How good was God to keep him safe for me! In spite of dreams and heavy heart I had found him alive and getting better each minute. Tears of gladness streamed down my face.

This was Friday. I remembered there was to be a dance that night for the foreign students. I would attend that! I would buy a new dress of brightest color and I would be gay indeed! I would evidence my gratitude by banishing from this moment all apprehensive thoughts. I would possess myself of a new spirit, [Pg 270]a spirit of happiness born of gratitude for my beloved’s recovery. He was all right now. He was so strong, how foolish for me to imagine ... how we would talk about all this after I was back in America and made my first visit to the White House! And I would tell him of all my fears and he would smile and hug me and say adorably, “You do love me, don’t you, dearie?” Oh, how I loved him!

I smiled at passers-by as I skipped along to buy “something new.” The lady in the dress shop was eager to please me. “Je desire une robe, madame, avec beaucoup le coleur jolie!” I informed her gaily in my best French. I selected one with cerise predominating. I had a large evening hat which would do finely, and I would wear my black satin slippers and sheerest black stockings.

Next I must have my hair washed and cut. I was wearing it straight that summer. I went into what appeared to be a well-conducted beauty parlor. “Je desire ma cheval coupé et laveé!” I informed the attendant, a man, at the desk. He looked puzzled. I repeated my statement, taking off my hat and running my hands through my hair. I had noticed that the several ladies who were being either curled or combed had turned to look at me in undisguised amusement, but then people were always amused at my French. So I repeated the statement the second time more loudly, generously enabling the amused ladies and attendants to have another smile at my expense. They didn’t know how happy I was. What did I care if I provoked their laughter. Everybody should laugh. Everybody should be gay. The President of the United States was fast recovering. He was sick, but he was getting well! My sweetheart! My darling!

“Certainment,” I said, smiling, “cheval—laveé—coupé!” He burst into unrestrained laughter. The attendants burst into unrestrained laughter. The ladies who were getting curled or combed burst into unrestrained laughter. And I laughed, too, though I knew not what had so greatly amused them.

“Cheval—cheveaux——,” explained the attendant between spasms. “Oh, I know!” I said in English, then I laughed with [Pg 271]them. Mistakes we traveling Americans had made in plenty, but never, I am sure, had anyone topped this one, and never, I am sure, will that attendant forget that he one day received the strange request from an American woman to “have her horse washed and cut!”

Smelling much too strongly of cologne, which my attendant had insisted was the proper thing to sprinkle on one’s hair after a shampoo, I flew home to show Helen Anderson my new dress. She came into my bedroom. “Mr. Harding is much better,” I told her with a smile. “Didn’t I tell you,” she answered, “that was probably all paper talk?” I nodded, glad to acquiesce. We talked about the dance that night and both planned to go. “I have a few more things to do downtown,” I said, “and will run and do them now—or, rather, immediately after luncheon,” I decided, seeing by my watch that it was almost time to go to Mme. Daillant’s.

By one-thirty that afternoon I had finished my purchasings, having found at the last minute some gaily colored handkerchiefs which I felt I would buy right then for gifts when I returned to America. My money was low. I had wired Captain Neilsen once for $200, which he had sent almost immediately to me by cable, having cabled him in Paris of my anticipated need. This fund was fast diminishing. I would have to cable him for more. I was glad I felt free to do so, because it was impossible for me to cable Mr. Harding or for him to cable money to me. On my way home I stopped at the patisserie for some ice cream. These afternoons in southern France were very warm. Some of the girls who were in our Armstrong Tour were there and I sat down with them. We talked about the party that night and our school work.

“Oh, by the way,” one of the girls remarked casually, “did you [Pg 272]know that President Harding was dead?” Like a knell, afar off, I heard a clock strike two.

I never saw that girl afterwards, so I do not know what she and the others thought of my conduct. I felt momentarily that I should faint. “Where did you read that?” I demanded. (To myself I was saying, “God! These varying reports will kill me! Why do they print such things!”) “On the bulletin board in the Square,” she answered.

I gave the waitress some change, picked up my parcels with trembling hands and rushed out into the street. I made immediately for the bulletin board. It was several blocks away. I was suddenly so tired I thought I could not possibly walk so far. The sun was very warm. My heart pounded and my cheeks felt strangely hot. And I kept trying to wet my dry lips with an equally dry tongue. Aloud I was saying to myself as I ran along, “Oh, that could not be, that could not be; of course it is a mistake; oh, God, that just could not be!”

Two university boys tried to stop me as I ran, calling after me something about the dance as I shook my head and ran on. I did not stop until I reached the bulletin board. I was tense and faint when I got there and was clutching my little packages in hands that shook. The glare of the sun was in my face as I stared up at the bulletin board and tried to decipher in French much too difficult for me the news about President Harding. A good many people stood about, also reading. I turned to ask one of them, but remembered that they could only tell me in French what the bulletin board said, and I could as well make it out myself. I steeled myself and laboriously translated the bulletin. The word mort I knew, of course, meant death. Oh, God! Yes, that was it. I translated words meaning eighteen hours. Yes, that was it. He had been gone now for eighteen hours! Eighteen hours dead! “How does it read, really?” I asked in a strained voice of a man beside me. But he only shook his head. “Je ne comprends pas,” he said.

Oh, it is difficult for me to bring this picture back to my mind! I can remember it as plainly as though it were yesterday, and all [Pg 273]the horrible sensations of the shocks I experienced come over me anew. The world seemed without bottom. Things suddenly lost their meaning. The world, people, life itself, were like a horrible nightmare. I felt, like the coffin, as though I were balanced in mid-air. I could not ground either myself or my thoughts.

I turned away from the bulletin board and walked blindly up the street. The fact that I was conscious of the direction in which I was going seemed to me an assurance that I had not yet lost my mind. But it would go. Yes, I was sure of that. I could not, after I had realized that my beloved had gone away from me, live on. But indeed even to this day it has seemed to me that I have not fully realized the reality of Mr. Harding’s passing. He had been to me not mortal but immortal; he just could not die.

Strangely enough, I did not cry. I could not cry. My head thumped mercilessly and it seemed to me I was conscious of passers-by looking at me, but I could not see wherein I was misbehaving. I was sane. I was maddeningly sane. I knew that in my hands I still carried the little colored handkerchiefs, and that I was on the main street. And I wondered why I had not thrown the handkerchiefs away. All the way up through the long street that is the main thoroughfare of Dijon I walked. What was there to do? Where was I to go? What did it matter? How strange that this should happen to me and I could not feel it within my heart to cry!

I remember a street car coming alongside of me in that narrow street. It seemed to bring me back partially. It was a long walk home, and I was very, very tired. Yes, I was so tired I might faint. And people might then find out, if I fainted and lost my mind and talked, that I was President Harding’s sweetheart. I could not afford to faint. I would take the car back home and I would be safe, once I was with Helen Anderson.

[Pg 274]

God, what torture to sit in that car! There were five or six blocks to ride, and they seemed interminable. The man called my stop—it was Place Octobre 30th—queer name for a street. October 30th! It was the 22nd of October that Elizabeth Ann was born—the 22nd of October just four years ago that fall. Elizabeth Ann! Our daughter. His daughter, and he had never seen her! And he was gone! Oh, no, no! It must be a mistake! I was asleep again and it was a horrible dream. If he were dead I would be crying. I pinched myself very hard and felt the hurt keenly. I could not remember ever having felt such queer pressure around my heart or such heaviness in my head. I reached our garden gate and mechanically let myself in with the great key I carried.

I entered my room. On the bed lay the cerise dress. Was it possible that I could actually have enthused over a mere dress? Was it I who had entered this room less than three hours before in high spirits? Good God, how meaningless everything seemed! How blank! I tried to ponder the meaning of death as it now affected me. But my mind was in a daze. I could not pin my thoughts to contemplative consideration of anything save the sickening emptiness and gnawing pangs I was conscious of within. The effects of the bulletin-board statement were very real; but the full significance of the statement itself I could not grasp. The possibility that I should eventually awaken to the full import of my sweetheart’s passing seemed remote, for to me he continued to live. Only the world-void and the dullness of an inactive mentality seemed real then.

Helen must have heard me turn the key in the garden door, for she now called downstairs to me. I answered her. I even went to the foot of the stairs and called up to her in a voice that seemed strangely detached from me, “He is dead, Helen!”

She came downstairs to my room. I was sure that something would snap within my brain and I would be wholly without power of reason. So I must tell her. In incoherent fashion, and in a strange, hollow voice, I related to Helen Anderson how Mr. Harding was my sweetheart. As I listlessly revealed to her fragments [Pg 275]of my strange story, Miss Anderson’s face grew flushed from shock. I wondered vaguely at her changing expressions. I was puzzled that she should utter an exclamation when I told her that the Elizabeth Ann I talked so much about was President Harding’s child—and mine!

I remember distinctly, even in my state of mental lassitude, that I was secretly amazed at her first question. “Well, how did you ever do it, Nan?” “How did I ever do it?” I repeated. “Why, yes, how could you ‘get away with’ having a child?” It was inconceivable to me, who had loved Mr. Harding for so long, how anyone could primarily feature the obstacles in mentally digesting my story, for love such as ours could encounter no insuperable obstacles to the full expression of its divine nature. But Helen Anderson had never married, and she was a conventional woman.

I stumbled through explanations, and as I reminisced aloud about Elizabeth Ann I found myself quivering anew from head to foot and the hot tears in my eyes. I was now really crying! It eased me. It was not so difficult after that to go on. The tenseness of my body gave place to violent paroxysms of shaking, but the relaxation I felt from talking with someone was great relief to me. Helen directed me to get to bed immediately. I was very tired, I thought, as I crept into bed. Helen stayed with me through the evening, reading to me, comforting me, until I told her I felt perhaps I could sleep. But I was too shaken to be alone, and that night, when I decided I could not stand it one moment longer, I crept upstairs and into Helen’s bed, where I lay shivering in the dark, crouched close to my friend, like a hunted creature.

My interest in France, in Europe, in the whole world was over now. All I wanted was to get back to America and to Elizabeth Ann. I wondered if Mr. Harding’s funeral would be held before I reached home. I did hope everything was [Pg 276]safe so far as our love-story was concerned, for my sweetheart’s sake. Miss Anderson calmed my fears on this score when I spoke to her about it. She said of course nothing would “get out” about a President who had just passed on. But I was afraid, anyway, and I was anxious to get back to take care for him that nothing was said. Of course if anything were said about him, I would lie for him. I could always say Elizabeth Ann belonged to someone else. And he was protected—unless he had left some of my letters or some of my pictures in his desk. But probably his private secretary, George Christian, would obey him and burn those things in his private drawer without looking at them. I feared for Elizabeth Ann. If they did find it out, what might they not do with her! Kidnap her and worry me to my very death? Oh, yes, I must get back immediately.

I did not have sufficient funds to go on any boat outside of the one our Armstrong party was scheduled to return on. And only the day before I had spent about $40 on the cerise dress and other foolish things. I told my Italian friend that my sister “was very ill” and he came to my rescue with a loan of 1,500 francs ($90). Helen Anderson had offered to cable her sister for extra funds, but I did not wish to await the return of her sister’s cable. The $90 would suffice to secure for me a change of cabin in another boat on the French Line, in addition to the amount I was allowed on my regular return passage. The boat, the France, would sail the 11th of August. Yes, they would have buried him by the time I reached America, I was sure. My thoughts never ceased. They ran on and on, and sometimes I felt that likely it was the ability to think that had kept me from losing the ability to think.

Miss Anderson, saddened over Mr. Harding’s death, and having had enough of Dijon anyway, left with me, as did a young man who had been with us a good deal on the tour. He accompanied me, in fact, to Havre, at Helen Anderson’s expense, and put me on my boat. I had secured a double cabin all to myself because the clerk saw that I looked ill. And never was I so glad to leave any place in my life. I saw the shores of France recede and turned my face toward America.

The feeling of unreality which I had been experiencing in connection with Mr. Harding’s death continued, and it seemed to me those days on the ocean enroute home that I possessed two distinct entities: the one, myself, who suffered constantly, underneath her comparative calm, and another who seemed always to be looking on. This second self watched me, I might say watched over me, observing that I did necessary things in a normal manner—that I dressed, breakfasted, talked, read, dined, and even slept. This second self seemed also to approve of my companionships on board, especially with a Swiss Frenchman who sat at my table and who seemed to appreciate that I had been through some kind of ordeal. He thought it strange that I didn’t care to dance, but walked with me and sat with me on the deck and gave me interesting books to read.

The passengers, at my table and elsewhere, very naturally talked about Mr. Harding’s death. I had grown used to hearing him discussed anywhere I might go, and this fact may have helped to make it possible for me to listen to their talk until I could quietly excuse myself or otherwise slip away unobserved.

My funds were almost exhausted. I had cabled Captain Neilsen to have money awaiting me in New York, having received a radio from him that he was soon to leave for an indefinite period. And he had wired me back, “Call for funds at American Express Office.” I had scarcely enough money left to tip the stewards.

Each day there was a pool won by the passenger who guessed the final numeral in the mileage made by the steamer at the end of a certain hour. My Swiss friend, seeming fond of sports of that kind, always bet on some number. I did not know that one who bets must also deposit $6 of the $60 which went to make up the pool and, when he said to me one day, “Put your name down against a number,” I chose 5. Unknown to me he had put $6 into the pool for me. The following day I was informed I had [Pg 278]guessed the lucky number. It was long afterward, even here in New York, that I discovered he had made the necessary deposit for me. He seemed at the time I won to be much more pleased than I, saying he “loved to see girls win things.” Inasmuch as I had about $5 left you may be sure the $60 lucky cash came in handy!

Mr. Harding’s generosity had made of me a far more extravagant girl than might have been the case had he not made me feel that I needn’t be so saving. I remember one time when I went to the White House, he said to me, “Nan, darling, do you know how much I have sent you since such-and-such a date?” He added, “Not that I am complaining, dearie; I want you to have everything you want within reason, so long as there is no comment.”

Another time, when he was hugging me so tightly, sitting there on the dilapidated leather couch in the ante-room, I said, “Oh, sweetheart, you are tearing my blouse!” He did not loose his hold of me; simply answered in a voice I knew was smiling, as he sought my lips, “Well, if I tear it, I’ll buy you another one!”

This reminds me of an incident in our first sweetheart days of 1917. It was early fall. We were taxi driving, and were crossing the viaduct at 125th Street and Riverside Drive. I knew I would need a winter coat; in fact, at the Carter’s the winter before I had had no winter coat; I had worn the heavy suit the friends in Chicago had bought me and a rather heavy raincoat over it, and very often Miss Carter’s fur piece and muff. I now needed a winter coat badly.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “if I can save $20 toward a new winter coat, will you give me $10?” How can I forget how he looked at me! Or his answer, “Say, you darling, if you save $10 I’ll give you $20!” And, as a matter of fact, he sent me $50, out of which I bought a coat for $38.

It was Saturday, August the 18th, 1923, when we sailed into the New York harbor. I had little trouble with my baggage, the only thing of any consequence which I had bought being a big doll for Elizabeth Ann for which I had paid $11 in Geneva. I had early christened the doll “Ninon,” and Elizabeth Ann treasured it.

I went to the McAlpin Hotel. Along the street I observed with aching heart the many signs of a nation’s mourning, and when I went to the window of my room in the hotel the last touch was added; outside hung a huge American flag, at half-mast. The cumulative reaction was too much, and with a sense of mingled anguish in bereavement and relief for my return I flung myself down upon the bed and wept.

I had lived only to get back to Elizabeth Ann, and I could scarcely wait to hold my baby in my arms. My first impulse was to leave immediately for the West. However, I did not know the lay of the land out there, and did not want to take any false steps which would indicate the state of my feelings and lead to exposure of Mr. Harding in any way. It was an absurd thought for me to entertain, to think that after we had been able thus far to keep our love a secret it should come out at this time of all times. But I was so nervous that I suspected everybody of knowing that there was a story, and was as circumspect in my behavior as if I personally had the responsibility of the nation in my keeping.

I immediately wrote to my sister Elizabeth in Chicago to be very careful, and I bought up all the newspapers previous to and following the President’s illness. My purpose in buying them was two-fold. First, I wanted to satisfy myself that there had crept out no breath of scandal during his late days in Canada before he started for San Francisco; and, secondly, I wanted these clippings [Pg 280]for my Harding book which I was keeping for Elizabeth Ann.

Having pored over the papers in my room at the McAlpin, and finding no evidence that Mr. Harding had been subjected to worry on account of our secret love, and still awaiting a letter from Elizabeth, I turned my attention to the finance question. I went to the American Express Office and found $200 which Captain Neilsen had deposited for me, awaiting my demand. Captain Neilsen was mighty nice, I thought, to do this for me, and just as soon as I had received the money I was sure Mr. Harding had left for me, I would repay him. I wondered how Mr. Harding had arranged it. Bless him! It hurt me unspeakably to ponder this question. I was absolutely certain, however, that we had been taken care of, our precious baby and myself, and I put the how of it out of my mind.

I felt I should buy a dress for myself which would be in conformity with my mood. My winter coat, the squirrel coat Mr. Harding had made it possible for me to have, was in storage, and so I decided to buy one of lighter weight, a black one, for early fall wear. I spent one afternoon, therefore, choosing a black dress, black coat, black hat and black gloves.

Finally word came from my sister Elizabeth. She wrote that my brother-in-law, Scott Willits, had planned to study with Professor Otakar Sevcik, who was to teach in New York that winter, and it was too late for them to alter their plans. They were, therefore, coming East as arranged, and would stop at my mother’s, in Athens, Ohio, where I could meet them. Scott had been studying with Professor Sevcik for some time, having been with him in Europe a year, a season in Ithaca, and a season in Chicago.

So I went immediately to Athens, Ohio, to await their coming. Mother surely sensed the grief I had experienced, and set me to [Pg 281]work cleaning house for her and getting meals and otherwise trying to occupy my mind. She was teaching in the Training School of the Ohio University, was busy every minute of the day, and it was a relief for her to come home to prepared meals, she said.

In early September I went to Marion. I had become unbearably nervous waiting for Elizabeth to bring my baby, and anyway I felt if I could see and talk to Daisy Harding it would make me feel a shade better. I telephoned Miss Harding immediately upon my arrival. She still lived with her father on East Center Street. It was from this house that the funeral of President Harding had been conducted. Daisy Harding was surprised to hear my voice and invited me to come out immediately. The last time I had seen her was when she had visited her cousin, Mrs. John Wesener, in Chicago, in the fall of 1922, and I had taken my grandfather there to call upon Dr. Harding.

Everything seemed very quiet as I stepped from the trolley in front of Dr. Harding’s and walked across the street to the house. New railings had replaced the old ones which had to be removed from the porch in order to take the President’s casket in and out of the door, and when I observed them the full significance of this struck me like a blow.

Miss Harding came to the door in answer to my ring. She had on an all white serge suit and I thought she was truly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. The pallor of her lovely face was heightened by the deep lights of her eyes and her black hair was combed back from her forehead. How much she looked like him! The same understanding seriousness in her eyes, the same facial contour, and much the same sad smile.

We sat in the living-room, the same room in which I had, in July of 1922, seen and talked with Mrs. Warren Harding. Daisy Harding told me many details about the passing of her brother. As she talked I thought I should scream with each word. A portrait in colors of President Harding, a “smiling picture,” hung in that room above the bookcase and beneath it stood a bouquet of [Pg 282]flowers. Just as Mr. Harding used to have flowers on his White House desk beside the miniature of his mother, I thought.

The house seemed very quiet. The East Center Street trolley cars rumbled past at regular intervals, the same street cars I suppose that used to pass our house when the “Brittons” lived farther out on the same street. Everything was the same; but everything to me was tragically different.

“That’s the way it is all day long, Nan,” said Miss Harding, calling my attention to a car which drove slowly by while the occupants were gazing curiously at the house wherein we sat. “Thousands and thousands passed his coffin, and everybody remarked the expression upon his face—he looked so peaceful and happy.” God, how awful to listen as she told it! I sobbed with Miss Harding as she went on. “He loved life so, you know, Nan,” she said. Oh, how well I knew! I told her about the strange dream I had had in Dijon, and how I afterwards had counted up the difference in time between France and the United States and had found that the hour of my dream had been the hour of Mr. Harding’s passing. She thought this startlingly coincidental.

I longed to go over and put my arms around her, to tell her that her brother had known some joy during the last years of his life, and that I would have given my own life to have had him know more of such joy. But I sat still and silent in my chair.

Even the grief I felt could not overshadow a certain strange comfort I experienced in being there, ’mid the old familiar surroundings, where his body had last lain in perfect rest. And the spirit that had always been Warren Harding seemed to linger near us as we talked.

Miss Harding’s fiance, Mr. Ralph Lewis, came for her. They were going to dine at an inn in a nearby country town—Waldo, she said. (I knew the very place, for I had dined there with the Mousers and Gorhams not long before—the last visit I made to Marion.) They invited me to go with them; they were driving, of course. But I told them I preferred to remain there at the house and would try to rest a bit while they were gone.

[Pg 283]

It seemed like the culmination of a fairy tale that Ralph Lewis should be engaged to Daisy Harding. He had loved her all his life, I knew. When I was a child he had owned a grocery-store, and we children often went there for “sour pickles.” I can see him now, in his big white apron, stooping over the pickle barrel and hauling up several pickles with the dipper, dripping with the good-smelling vinegar. He used to let us “pick ’em out,” I remember. After a good many years he gave up the grocery business and went in for real estate, and I knew well his reputed success.

Miss Harding told me to go out into the kitchen and help myself to anything I found for luncheon; it was then about eleven-thirty in the morning. Then they left, and I was entirely alone in the house. Miss Harding had told me that her father and his wife had gone away for a rest and visit following the funeral. So I was there alone in the house where my beloved had lain in utter peace, in his father’s home, while mourning thousands brought their tributes of affectionate regard.

I was nervously exhausted, and went upstairs, thinking I would lie down for a while. Miss Harding had told me sometime before that when her brother had been elected President his wife had sent some of her furniture back to Marion from their Wyoming Avenue home in Washington, and the room where I went to rest was fitted with Mr. and Mrs. Harding’s bedroom suite. Their framed portraits hung above their respective beds. I lay down and looked long at the likeness of my beloved. My second self was watching me, and seemed to say, “Go right ahead, Nan, and have a good cry. It will make you feel stronger.” I think I did feel a bit stronger.

I bathed my eyes, put on a dressing-gown Miss Harding had laid out for me, and went down to the kitchen. I prepared a cup of something hot for myself and forced myself to eat some of the fresh things from the ice-box. Then I washed up my dishes and went back into the living-room.

I roamed in and out, visioning the coffin in the front room with my darling lying so peacefully there. I stooped and caressed [Pg 284]the carpet above which the coffin had rested, and closed my eyes as I stood above an imaginary casket and looked down at my darling asleep. He had known this house! He had once lived here, as I remembered hearing his sister say, and therefore every inch of the old home was dear to him.

I longed to hold some of his clothes. He used to have an agreeable man-smell all his own, and there was a time when I thought I knew all his suits. I remembered he sometimes had come over to New York looking not as well pressed as usual, seeming to joy in the comfort of old clothes. On one occasion I told him I wished he were a milkman or a postman or somebody who was not at all important. He had smiled then and looked down at his clothes, and I had hastened to assure him that he was quite all right, that he looked good to me, and that I didn’t care what he had on. And another time, in Washington, we were walking together down Pennsylvania Avenue, and he looked absolutely stunning. And in the admiring glances of passers-by was also recognition. “I never used to notice the conspicuity of men in public office as I have since coming to Washington,” he said to me. And then another time he was chewing gum and asked me if I wanted some, and I took it because I was afraid I would hurt his feelings if I did not. And we walked along together, my arm through his, and were so happy! “We’re just a couple of small-towners together, aren’t we, Nan?” he said contentedly as he looked down at me with fond eyes. And I nodded happily and said to him, “May I kiss you, darling, all night long?” And to this and other loving queries I made he answered gaily, “You can do any damned thing you want to do to me, dearie. I’m yours!”

I left Miss Harding and her home with a sense of having actually communed with my beloved. I did not allow myself to go up to the cemetery. In fact, though I have been in Marion since, I have never once been near where the coffin rests. For they could never bury the spirit of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

I returned to Athens, Ohio. Here Elizabeth, Scott and Elizabeth Ann joined me some days later and soon we were all enroute back East to New York, my younger sister Janet going with us.

I cannot tell anyone how sweet it was to be near my precious baby girl once more. If I had idolized her before, I worshipped her now, for my love was tinged with the spiritual. Elizabeth Ann and I slept together at my mother’s for the few days we remained there before leaving for the East, and I fairly devoured her with my hungry eyes. I could see her father in her every glance. Even in the semi-darkness of our bedroom, where the light from the hall made it possible for me to contemplate her features, I saw constantly the face of him whom I would never again see upon this earth. I felt toward her as Mr. Harding used to write that he felt toward me. “I worship you, dearest, and I reverence you,” he would say to me, and I remember how that reverence was written all over his face when I, just a month before Elizabeth Ann was born, went to see him in Washington. And now I felt more than ever before that same worshipful reverence for my child, and I poured the love I felt for both my child and her father upon her. For now I had only the memory of him to adore.

When we reached New York (September, 1923) I suggested that we go to 72nd Street where I had been living when my sister came with the baby to New York to see her husband off for Europe. The matter of finances had to be faced. I had scarcely any money left, and Scott and Elizabeth almost as little. But there was enough to last until we secured [Pg 286]positions. My sister Janet, six years my junior, was going to secure a secretarial position also. The four of them—Scott, Elizabeth, Janet and Elizabeth Ann—had an apartment downstairs and I secured my old room on the top floor.

It was Elizabeth’s early suggestion that I go immediately to Daisy Harding and reveal the truth to her. I had received no word from anyone about funds having been provided by Mr. Harding and I could not understand this. He had always been so generous, and it was upon the very last visit to him in the White House that he had declared again his full intention to care for both Elizabeth Ann and me all the rest of our lives. So I concluded that whoever had been entrusted with money for the baby and me would probably wait until a suitable time had elapsed before making this bequest known to me. My sister and her husband were skeptical, but then I could condone their attitude because I knew that no one had ever known Mr. Harding as I had known him, and no one could ever convince me that he would neglect his sweetheart and his child. Had he not, long before we had dreamed of Elizabeth Ann’s coming, been tempted upon two or more occasions to reveal to one or more of his friends his relations with me, when he had been seized with acute indigestion and had thought he was going to pass on? Then there was no reason, as I had told him at the time he repeated these things to me, for him to settle any money upon me. He had not harmed me, but blessed me with his love, and I could see no reason why he should even think of arranging for my comfort. But after Elizabeth Ann was born I was far more dependent. My situation was increasingly complicated. And now for me to think that Warren Harding had not made ample provision for his child, and her mother as well, would be for me to impute cowardice and injustice to one whom I knew always bravely met life-issues. No, this was a feeling I could not in my most desperate need ever share, for I knew well the man I loved and I knew his love for me.

Captain Neilsen came around to see us after we had become comparatively settled. Helen Anderson also came and brought [Pg 287]on one occasion some lovely preserves. But for the most part I neither looked up my old friends nor cared to have them look me up. The captain was different. He was kindly, he was understanding, and he was not fastidious in any sense of the word. Therefore he came several times to call upon me there in my sister’s New York apartment before he sailed for Germany in October. I explained to him that a sudden financial embarrassment had arisen with me as well as with my sister’s family, and that I would be unable to then pay him the $450 I owed him. He waved away even the idea of repayment, though I emphasized the fact that I was sure very soon I would have the funds for him. I told these facts to my sister and her husband and they thought he was a wonderfully fine man. “You’ll go a long way before you ever find a man as kind-hearted as Captain Neilsen,” they told me. And I agreed that he was indeed all that.

In spite of our almost destitute circumstances we were, at least, together, and Elizabeth Ann slept with me nearly every night. But it broke my heart to look at the little darling and realize what everything meant.

At that time secretarial positions were scarce, and it was very difficult for Janet and me to get located, especially when I declined to work for less than $35 a week. Janet finally accepted a position for a lesser salary, but it took me several weeks to find a place.

About the first of December, Scott and Elizabeth decided they ought to return to Chicago, where Scott was better known and could get immediate work. For various reasons it seemed best for me to move away from that rooming-house after my family left, so I took a room at the Endicott Hotel, Columbus Avenue and 81st Street. My room there was on the first sleeping floor and had no daylight, just windows into a court which was less than ten feet wide, but the bed was comfortable, [Pg 288]and, anyway, I could not afford to pay more than $12 from the salary of $35 which the position I had finally secured paid me.

I put on my bravest front when I bade my baby girl goodbye again, and faced the contemplation of hardships hitherto unknown to me. I felt so pitifully alone, and swallowed hard the great lump that rose in my throat as I tried to smile and blow farewell kisses to her who was my very life.

On the occasion of one of my visits to the White House I had, with the nervous apprehension born of mental unsettlement, spoken to Mr. Harding about the future.

“Why, just think, honey, I am twenty-four years old now!”, indicating that the years were piling up alarmingly and I could as yet see no possible way for me to have our baby with me.

“Well, dearie,” he had answered me with the gentleness that always aroused my most worshipful love, “if you are twenty-four years old you should be grown up, you know!”

And then he had told me how when he was about that age he went through a nervous breakdown, but here he was now, in the White House, and President of the United States! He was sure I would weather through. And this gentle banter brought a smile back to my face. Therefore now, as then, I must remember how much I had at stake in my precious baby’s future and bear up for her sake.

One of my biggest difficulties was to live on $35 a week. It was very hard to suffer denials but I set about with grim determination to adapt myself. I continued to shun my friends to a very great extent. Captain Neilsen returned from another sea trip and came to the hotel to see me. My meagre salary oftentimes would not allow me to have even as much food as I could have eaten, especially toward the end of the week before pay day, and, pridefully concealing my poverty, I accepted Captain Neilsen’s invitations to dine with inward thankfulness for his persistent attentiveness.

There was another friend who called upon me frequently, whom I had known since 1917, but he was a man with whom I felt I must keep up appearances far more than with the captain, [Pg 289]so I did not encourage him to call. I needed many things and I felt less conscious of the lack of these things when I was with the captain. Though the captain always seemed to have a great deal of money with him, and though he spoke carelessly of moneys he controlled, running into many thousands of dollars, still he dressed with a carelessness that often distressed me and brought my frank criticism.

In October or November I read with loving interest of the fund which was being gathered together throughout the country to go toward the erection of a memorial to the 29th President of the United States. My secretarial position was not a very exacting one, and I had ample leisure in which to do any outside work I might care to undertake, so it occurred to me that there might be typing in connection with the clerical work the memorial project would entail, and that I might help in this way to raise the fund, inasmuch as I could not myself give any actual money towards it.

Mrs. Warren G. Harding herself seemed, from the newspaper reports, to be actively engaged in the matter, and so I decided to write direct to her and make known my desire. First, however, I wrote to Judge Elbert H. Gary, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the United States Steel Corporation, to whom Mr. Harding had taken me in 1917 when I was given a secretarial position in the Corporation, and who now was prominent in the activities connected with the Harding Memorial Fund. I recalled to his mind that Mr. Harding had once introduced me to him and that he in turn had kindly made it possible for me to obtain a position in his organization, and I told him that it was my desire to be of service to those who had undertaken the initial steps in creating the Harding Memorial Fund. I waited for several days and received no reply to that letter.

Then I directed a note to Mrs. Harding. About a week or so [Pg 290]afterwards I received a note from her secretary, Miss Harlan, expressing, for Mrs. Harding, appreciation for my proffered assistance, but regretting that there was really no way in which I could be of service. After several lesser attempts I had to give it up.

I wrote to Miss Daisy Harding and told her what I had hoped to do, and I have her letter in which she said if I had not heard from Mrs. Harding personally it was merely because she was so terribly busy. She told me how generously her brother’s home town had given toward the Fund, and expressed the opinion that he was indeed a greatly beloved President.

It hurt me more than I can tell not to have been able to help in this movement. I did so love to work for Mr. Harding or in an atmosphere that breathed of him. But it seemed to me as the days went by and I received no word of his having left any message for me, that I was more and more alone, that I was shut out and away from the very things that would have given me such comfort. For it did hurt me cruelly to receive no word that I had been in his thoughts before he went away. If only he had left a note! He might not have been able to entrust material aid to anybody in the last days, to be given over to me for our child, but I was under the impression that Major Brooks, his valet, had been with him during his last illness, and I was sure he would have given him a note to mail to me if it had been humanly possible for him to do so.

My longing for Elizabeth Ann and my yearning for the joy and comfort I experienced from being with her and loving her was sometimes more than I could bear, and I often went home after work to my gloomy bedroom in the Endicott in a state of depression which brought vividly to my mind some lines in a poem by John Keats:

The first part of December Captain Neilsen sought my advice in a matter of investment which would involve several thousands of dollars and which would take him to Texas for the culmination of the transaction. Christopher Hannivig, a wealthy Norwegian, and he, were to purchase jointly from the U. S. Government some ships, which were to be utilized for shipping oil. After consideration of the details it seemed to me it was a wise investment and I so advised my friend. He then asked me a question which I had grown used to hearing periodically and which I had always answered negatively—would I marry him? Would I accompany him to Texas as his wife and make of the trip a honeymoon?

I told him no, and I further said very bluntly that when I did marry, there were certain reasons why I must require from my prospective husband in advance of my marriage a check for $25,000 or $30,000. To my surprise, Captain Neilsen smiled and answered easily, “Oh, is that all? Well, shall I bring you my certified check for that amount tomorrow?” And than I felt ashamed because I could not then explain to him that I wanted it for a fund for my baby, inasmuch as her own father’s bequest had not yet come to light and I feared to marry unless that marriage provided amply for my child. So I shook my head.

The captain left shortly after that, returning around Christmas time. In the meantime I sought my friend, Helen Anderson. She agreed with me that it seemed to be the sensible thing to consider marrying the captain and in that way be able to take my baby. The fact that he dressed carelessly should certainly not deter me from doing the thing that would give me my baby. He was, Miss Anderson and I agreed, a “diamond in the rough,” and I would simply have to become his personal polisher. He seemed genuinely in love with me, and would sit all evening just talking to me, never attempting to get “fresh” as many [Pg 292]another man might have done after a friendship of such long standing. I was thoroughly appreciative of these traits. I told Helen Anderson that in return for his generosity in making it possible for me to take my child, I would prove to him my gratitude in endeavoring to make him at least reasonably happy. And I was very sure I could make him over in appearance.

Upon the captain’s return from the South, I determined to tell him about Elizabeth Ann. I thought I would try him out, and see what the effect of my story would be, for, if he refused to allow me to take Elizabeth Ann, I would not, of course, marry him. But I could not marry him anyway unless I had been frank and honest about things. I had deliberately postponed the telling until we should be together New Year’s Eve, because I wanted to carry this new step in my life over into another year, not wishing to identify the year 1923, in which I had lost my beloved, with a marriage to another man. It was a foolish little fancy I will admit, but quite characteristic of me. Therefore I had postponed my confessionary revelations until the dawn of a new year.

When Captain Neilsen arrived, I found myself in a suitably revealing frame of mind. I told him the whole truth. I confessed how miserable I was without Elizabeth Ann, and gave him the entire picture just as it stood. He was kindness itself, and repeated his oft-expressed desire that I marry him. “Well, can I really have Elizabeth Ann?” I asked him. “Of course you can!” he acquiesced heartily. He then told me he wished me to understand his financial status, explaining that he was actually worth something over $125,000, and even itemizing on paper his holding for me to see. He said, however, it was not all available in ready cash. I said that didn’t matter if only I could have my baby. The captain knew of my natural extravagances in little ways, and he had, as I have said, visited at my sister’s apartment in Chicago and knew that, although I was not used to great luxury, I was at least used to modest comforts. And I was very sure I could depend upon him to provide more than generously for both my child and myself.

[Pg 293]

During the next day, not having the usual phone call from the captain, I decided impulsively that he was avoiding me, having concluded that if I actually married him I might do so from unfair motives. But I could not reconcile these conclusions with his oft-repeated proposals of marriage on any grounds that would please me. “Marry me,” he would say, “and I’ll make you happy!” I felt that he meant that he would be so generous in his material manifestations of love that I could bring myself to care for him through sheer gratitude.

But my fears were groundless. He phoned the following day and that night took me to the theatre. He asked me again and again to marry him and let him provide for me and for Elizabeth Ann, but I found that I could not even then, after my own careful decision to do just that, tell him that I would marry him. “Well, if you refuse to marry me, I will make a will tomorrow anyway, and leave all I have to Elizabeth Ann when I die. I can at least do that for you,” he said, as we sped along back to my hotel in the taxi under the elevated tracks on Columbus Avenue. This to me was the acme of generosity and touched me very deeply, though I didn’t let him know it. I told him, half-jestingly, that I would certainly go on a search the following day for an engagement ring of my liking! To this he also heartily agreed.

But the following day, after I had actually selected the ring I thought would look well with the ring my beloved Warren had given me and which I meant to keep always on my engagement finger, the captain met me and said he had been unable to convert into cash some stocks which he owned and requested that I wait a while before deciding upon a ring. I felt sorry, though slightly provoked that he should act this way—first to convey the impression that money meant nothing to him, and then to refuse to buy an engagement ring for the woman he seemed to want so badly for his wife. But I decided he must be “trying me out,” and I determined I would prove to him that I didn’t have to have the ring in order to marry him. Elizabeth Ann was my sole motive and purpose.

I thought about it all very seriously that night and when Friday, January the 4th, came, and Captain Neilsen called me on the telephone in the evening, I informed him that I had decided to marry him the following day, Saturday, January 5th.

With my actual acceptance of his offer of marriage, it seemed to me he was taken somewhat aback, though he said he would meet me, as I asked him to do, at the Municipal Building, the following noon. He was late, but explained that he had been inspecting a ship and could not come when he had planned.

We secured our marriage license. When the man asked what the captain’s business was I spoke up and said, as he had told me many times, “He is a ship broker.” The captain looked slightly embarrassed as he said to the clerk, “Better say ‘ship’s master’.” I didn’t know that this different title meant another kind of business and it didn’t worry me specially.

With the license in hand we went over to the Savarin in the basement of the Woolworth Building for our luncheon. As we were crossing the street, I remember that the captain had said that his money was not all available. So I asked him, “You could raise $50,000 if you had to, couldn’t you?” thinking I would avail myself of $30,000 to put in trust immediately for Elizabeth Ann, and the captain, Elizabeth Ann and I would keep the other $20,000 to live upon and have a home for ourselves, until he went back to work after our proposed honeymoon. “Oh, of course, if I had to, I could raise $50,000. I should say so!” The captain was very certain about it.

This was all the assurance I needed. Anyone who could raise $50,000 would have enough and plenty to keep me and my baby. And I would be economical, and would try my best to love him to show him how grateful I was that he had made it possible for me to have my baby with me.

That evening at nine o’clock we were married in the parsonage [Pg 295]of a Swedish Lutheran Church on Lexington Avenue. Helen Anderson and the minister’s wife were our witnesses. We went to the Alamac Hotel for three days. We had driven Miss Anderson home and were alone for the first time since we had become man and wife.

It seemed almost sacrilegious to me to yield to my husband the body which had belonged so completely to Warren Harding, and I appreciated his leaving me for half an hour. It gave me an opportunity to mentally pull myself together. I told myself that I would soon have Elizabeth Ann and it would all be so worth while. But my husband looked to me so much like a million other men.... I just could not feel that I had done the fair thing by either of us.... I did not love him that way.

Monday morning following our marriage on Saturday evening I returned to work. I had not given my employer any notice and I knew I would have to remain at the office until he found someone to take my place. Moreover, Captain Neilsen had told me during the previous day that he would immediately send to Norway and get some money which his legal guardian was holding for him; and he would also start negotiations for the sale of certain property which he, as the eldest child in his family, should have urged the sale of long ago, after the death of his parents. It would amount to $90,000 in all, and $30,000 would come to him as his share.

From the Alamac we moved up to Bretton Hall, and I kept my secretarial position for a couple of weeks. I had not been married more than a week when I discovered, through questioning the captain closely, that he did not actually have sufficient funds in the bank to enable us to live even another month. But he assured me that his next trip to Europe would net him a commission of $20,000 on a ship he expected to sell. It seems to me he must have procured a loan, and with some of this money and $40 of my own salary I bought myself a diamond circlet wedding ring, for which I paid $165 and which I wore on my engagement finger next to the ring given me by Mr. Harding.

I grew fonder of the captain during the two weeks before he [Pg 296]sailed for Europe. He was so enthusiastic about taking Elizabeth Ann, and said that just as soon as he returned from Europe we would begin the arrangements.

During his absence abroad, after I had given up my position, a friend of mine from Chicago came on to New York. When I learned she was coming, and realized how little money I had, I borrowed $150 from Helen Anderson, assuring her the captain would return it to her just as soon as he came back from Europe. With part of this I bought new shoes, a new dress, and entertained once for my Chicago friend at a small theatre party. I really felt quite dignified as Mrs. Neilsen.

As soon as the captain stepped into our room at Bretton Hall I asked him what success had attended his trip. He had not sold the boat. Nor had his money come from Norway. He looked very much distressed about it and I felt genuinely sorry for him. He kept telling me to be patient, something would “break soon.” But the weeks passed, and he said he would have to make another trip to Europe, and still nothing had “broken”—except my hopes.

I planned to go to Athens, Ohio, to visit my mother in early March while Captain Neilsen was in Europe. I had promised my mother that she could come East to be with me that oncoming summer, thinking of course that I was to have an apartment and that I would be fully established in my new home with Elizabeth Ann. I despatched a letter to my sister Elizabeth, asking her to let Elizabeth Ann come to Athens for several weeks, and this she did, my mother going to Chicago for another purpose, but bringing Elizabeth Ann back with her to Athens on her return. I was heartsick to think I could not return to New York with my baby and feel free to become settled permanently. But I knew enough by then of the captain’s financial situation to know this was impossible. I felt I had been trapped all around, though [Pg 297]I could not that early accuse the captain of having misrepresented himself to me, and indeed I did not believe he would do such a thing. He had loved me so much, and he had actually thought that he would be able to get the money, I was sure. Still, I could not help remembering that he had told me distinctly that he had sufficient funds to keep us comfortably, and that had been an untruth, for I was not even at liberty to lease an apartment because we could not pay the rent in advance. The whole situation was inexplicable. The captain’s generosity of former days, when he had sent me $200 to Europe and had had $200 awaiting my demand in New York, and had deprecated my repayment of these advances, all pointed to comparative affluence.

The more I thought about it the more distressed I became, and I could not even then admit to my family the truth of the matter. Instead, I found myself lauding the captain on all sides. I felt the situation would surely right itself, if, as he had asked me, I would give him just a little while to “get on his feet.” Like a pendulum I swung from one decision about him to another, and in the night when I reflected that after all I might not be able to have my baby with me, it almost crazed me. No one knew the state of mentality I was in, for I could not admit that I had failed in marriage, and I had not divulged our plans of taking the baby away from my sister and her husband.

Here in Athens, Ohio, at my mother’s home, I again had my baby with me and we slept together and played together, and I thought I could not stand it to give her back. I wanted her so badly that I didn’t care whether or not I ever returned to New York if I could not take her with me and have her to keep always. I wanted to die rather than to go on as I might have to go on—without my child. Nevertheless, after the most severe misunderstanding I had ever had with my sister Elizabeth, who came on to Athens to get Elizabeth Ann after about a month, I regained control over myself and accompanied her and the baby back to Chicago, where I visited for a week or two longer before proceeding back to New York and to my husband.

I had received instructions from him to go to live with a [Pg 298]woman whose husband was the captain of a U. S. liner, on which Captain Neilsen had accepted the position of second officer. I lived with her for a couple of weeks and when the captain returned from a voyage, we went temporarily to a hotel again.

The first of May we moved into a furnished apartment on West 114th Street. I realized, however, that we could not live there and pay the rent of $100 a month, unless I, too, went to work. So at Columbia University I obtained a position in the Appointments Office. I worked there a part of the time, and also took small pieces of dictation from the various professors, sometimes going to their offices and getting the work and doing it at home upon a typewriter which I had rented for the purpose. I never in my life worked so hard as I did that summer of 1924.

The captain wrote Elizabeth and Scott under date of May 16, 1924, and told them that we now wished to take Elizabeth Ann. I had determined that if the captain did not make good his promise to me to provide a home for her and me without my having to go back to work as I was then doing, that I would not under any circumstances permit her to be taken permanently by us, for I would eventually have to leave a man who had so erroneously represented himself to me. But I clung to the hope of fulfillment on his part and tried hard to banish these unpleasant thoughts, so together we devised a letter which the captain signed.

In his letter to Elizabeth and Scott the captain said that we would come that fall to get Elizabeth Ann, after she had returned with them from the farm where they went every summer, and where they expressed a wish to take Elizabeth Ann with them on a farewell visit to Scott’s people.

About the middle of September I went to Chicago and got the baby. We had committed ourselves to the extent of expressing in our letter our desire to take the baby ourselves, and this was the understanding that Elizabeth and Scott [Pg 299]had when I went to Chicago to get her. Scott looked unfavorably on the whole thing, feeling that I should not have given her into their keeping only to take her away. I had never breathed a word to them of Mr. Harding’s promise to me to take her himself as soon as circumstances made it possible, but I knew that in that event I would have had her through him, and was only endeavoring to get her in another way since her father’s way was impossible.

I could not work, now that I had Elizabeth Ann, until I had put her in kindergarten somewhere, and I had no money with which to do that. The captain kept saying, or writing when he was away, that something was bound to “break,” but the first of October came and nothing had “broken.” Our apartment lease ran out October 1st and it was necessary for Elizabeth Ann and me to move. As an officer on the liner, the captain spent quite a bit of his time there, even having to sleep on board certain nights. I found it difficult to find an apartment suitable for three and comparatively cheap, but decided upon a large room which would suffice until I could find more suitable quarters. It was in 109th Street, and, although the sun streamed in at the back court window all afternoon, the place was frightfully dirty and full of vermin. My little girl was bitten at night and I soon knew we could not stay there.

The captain had said he would be in the city two weeks steady before making another sea trip. It had only gradually dawned upon me that these trips he was taking were in themselves the only source of income that the captain had, and up to this time not one of the things he had told me about converting property into money had come true. And I, who had been frank with him to the point of possibly hurting his feelings in admitting I was marrying him so that I might have a home for my child, could not understand these misrepresentations.

I cast about for a suitable apartment and at last found I could get two rooms and bath, very clean and nicely furnished, on 116th Street West, for $110 a month. We were paying $22 a week for the one room we were living in then. The captain went [Pg 300]with Elizabeth Ann and me to look at the apartment, approved the price, and signed the lease. But he was able to pay but $50 down. I promised to pay the other $60 when we moved in, and the captain said that he would have that and more besides before I would need it.

Elizabeth Ann helped me in her adorable little way to “pack,” and at three o’clock on the appointed day we awaited the drayman. The captain had not returned as yet, but I felt sure he would be up on 116th Street with some money when we reached there. I had barely enough to pay the drayman.

The phone rang. It was the captain. He was leaving within an hour unexpectedly for Newport News to be gone two weeks with the U. S. liner for repairs. “But, goodness,” I said in utter despair, “what am I to do in the meantime for the rent? and food?” He told me to go right down to his lawyer, who had $100 which he would give to me.

Leaving things as they were, with the possibility of the drayman coming any minute, Elizabeth Ann and I boarded a subway train, and within the next thirty-five minutes were at the lawyer’s office in 43rd Street. But he didn’t seem to know to what money I referred. He asked me to phone “Angus,” as he called my husband, so that he might talk with him. I brought my little daughter in and introduced her to the lawyer. He scarcely acknowledged the introduction and I was hurt and embarrassed to tears. To think that the daughter of Warren G. Harding should be so slighted! I didn’t care how he or anybody else treated me, but I was furious if they were not entirely lovely to my darling. The lawyer himself had children, and I thought at least he might have shaken hands with her. What kind of a man was this lawyer my husband employed? He asked us to leave the room while he talked with the captain. There was no money from that source. This I found out after the lawyer’s lengthy telephone talk with the captain. I took Elizabeth Ann and went downstairs and telephoned Captain Neilsen from a booth. I reached him just before the liner had disconnected the telephonic service prior to sailing. He said his friend, the ship’s [Pg 301]commander, wanted to speak to me. He came to the phone. He said he had called his wife and that she would come down that night to see me with the rent money, $110. That left $50 from the $110 for Elizabeth Ann and me to live on until further remittances from the captain might come. So, after all, Elizabeth Ann and I slept in our new apartment that night.

I have since gone over that whole situation thoroughly and fair-mindedly, and I am sure that no one could have done more to help a husband get on his alleged normal financial feet than did I to help Captain Neilsen. That is, I helped until February 1st. Helen Anderson, ever glad to assist when she could, advanced the necessary initial kindergarten fee of $108 and I placed Elizabeth Ann in school, paying $30 a month extra to have her remain there all day so that I might keep an all-day position. I had a girl from Columbia come in the mornings and take her to school and go after her at night, and in that way the baby and I reached home about the same time. In the evenings I would clean her up and clean myself up and we would go out for our dinner. I was so tired at night sometimes I thought I could not get up the next morning, and very likely I could not have done so had I not retired every night with Elizabeth Ann at seven or eight o’clock.

I was then working at The Town Hall Club on 43rd Street. I began to work there in October, 1924, and remained there for a year and a half until April, 1926, as assistant to the Executive Secretary, who had had charge of the Appointments Office at Columbia when I worked there the previous summer.

When the latter part of January of 1925 came, I knew I just could not go through the spring as I had done the greater part of the winter, and I wrote Elizabeth, who was at that time with her husband in charge of certain music work at the Ohio University at Athens, Ohio, to come and get [Pg 302]Elizabeth Ann if she could. It hurt me to do this, for I had taken my child with the full intention of being able to provide a home for her permanently. But I could not longer stand the physical strain of keeping up the apartment, though that strain was not equal to the mental strain of never knowing whether or not the captain could meet the rent and other obligations. The last month we lived there, January, I was obliged to go to a friend for $75 to help me out with the rent, and I did so, taking Elizabeth Ann with me and meeting the friend in the lobby of the Pennsylvania Hotel. I have not been able to pay that back any more than I have yet been able to repay the Italian the $90 borrowed in 1923. And January of 1925 found me owing other debts also—school tuition for my baby, Helen Anderson’s loans amounting in the aggregate to over $300, and others.

I began very early to acquaint Elizabeth Ann with the likeness of her father, and she could pick him out in the Sunday supplements when she was as young as two. She knew, of course, my autographed photograph of Mr. Harding which always stood in a silver frame on my bedroom table, as well as pictures of other members of the Harding family, all of which hung on my wall, and my sister Elizabeth’s photograph of Mr. Harding which he had autographed for her early in 1921.

In many ways Elizabeth Ann reflects my own moods, but love for Mr. Harding seems to have developed of itself in her heart with an almost uncannily independent force. When we first moved into the apartment on Lafayette Parkway in Chicago, Elizabeth Ann was about two and one-half years old. I had a small book written by Joe Mitchell Chapple, entitled “Harding, the Man,” on the cover of which was a small picture of Mr. Harding, an excellent likeness, set against a background of American flags. The frontispiece was a larger, though not as good, picture of Mr. Harding, and throughout the book were various other [Pg 303]pictures—one of Mrs. Harding, one of the old Harding homestead, one of The Marion Daily Star Building, one of the Harding home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion, and also one of their Wyoming Avenue home in Washington.

I liked the manner in which Mr. Chapple had written about the President-elect (for the book came out during the campaign of 1920) and I had written Mr. Harding that if Mr. Chapple needed a secretary I would consider it a pleasure to work for him. Anyone who was so manifestly strong for my sweetheart appealed to me as the “slickest” kind of a boss imaginable. Mr. Harding was evidently amused at my reason for wanting to work for Mr. Chapple for I remember he said it would “do no harm to write to him and ask.” However, I never did.

Elizabeth Ann took a curiously decided fancy to this Chapple book. She seemed actually much to prefer it above her own picture books, and, on the floor, her chubby little legs spread apart the book in front of her, she would sit for long stretches leafing through the pages and “reading” aloud to me the story improvised in her baby language. She had a habit of telling her stories in the form of questions, answered by herself in a slightly different tone, sometimes ringing in a third party and adapting her voice to this person also. Often, too, her stories would take the form of letters, and I can hear her now in her babyish oratory “reading” aloud to me about her own father. Slightly embarrassed because she knew she was really not following the text, she would look up at me, and with impish delight and with the smile of her father, which made me gasp, she would continue, “My dear Mr. Harding, how are you? I love you, dear Mr. Harding. Mamma Nan loves you too, ver’ ver’ much....” Then she would turn to me and raise her great deep blue eyes and set her lips in the soft line which so imaged the serious sweetness of her father’s expression, and say, “Nan, dear, isn’t he a darling man!” And with that I would crush her to me and smother her with kisses. Nor would I forget to tell her father on my next trip to the White House her latest sayings about him, and he would look at me exactly as she had looked and would say, “She’s rather [Pg 304]like her mother in some respects, isn’t she, dearie?” And then he would lapse into audible musings over his extraordinary feeling for little girls, which had come over him since his own daughter’s birth, and with the most pitifully tense, unsmiling sweetness he would say, “How do you think she would like me for her father?” or, “Just think, Nan, how grand it is to be a father!” and I would pat his hand and swallow to keep back my tears for I knew he was but remarking his very heart’s desires.

Often in her two-and-a-half-to-three-year-old days I would call Elizabeth Ann into my room, which was at the far end of the apartment, front, and she would come trudging down the hall, her “Harding book” under one arm, and her other favorite, an abridged edition of Webster’s Dictionary sometimes dragged along by a few of its leaves, which was the easiest way for her small hand to grasp such a grown-up volume. And once, when we snapped her picture in the back yard beside her doll carriage, her Harding book lay in the carriage, open to Mr. Harding’s picture, and the whole “took” very distinctly.

Here in New York in 1924, when I brought her on from Chicago to be with me, she was five years old. She had the same love for Mr. Harding then as when she was more babyish, but spoke of it now in an amazingly grown-up fashion. For instance, she listened when those present thought she was not listening, and naturally heard Mr. Harding discussed pro and con. But whatever she heard did not influence her deep-rooted love for the man who was her father. She so often said to me during that winter of 1924-25, raising the question herself, “We won’t let anybody talk about our dear Mr. Harding, will we, Nan dear?” And I would gaze at her and reiterate softly, “No, indeed, precious Bijiba, we won’t let anybody talk about our dear Mr. Harding,” knowing she meant “against” him, when she said [Pg 305]“about.” “Bijiba” was her own baby interpretation of “Elizabeth Ann” and has clung to her as a fond nickname ever since.

Then again, she would request that I take down from the mantel the picture of Mr. Harding so that she could kiss it, and she would shake her head and exclaim, “Isn’t he just the sweetest man!” And once she repeated what she had of course heard, “Mr. Harding is dead ... what does ‘dead’ mean, Nan dear?” And with tears I would tell her that our dear Mr. Harding has just gone away, into another land. And once, curiously twisting her query as though she knew whereof she spoke, she asked, “And won’t he ever see me?” And she seemed for all the world to be unconsciously expressing her father’s disappointment more than her own. And I thought sadly, as I searched for a suitable reply, no, he will never see his own daughter, not on this earth. It was all so cruel, so cruel!

I simply had to ask Elizabeth and Scott to take Elizabeth Ann back by the time the latter part of January had come around. Even as early as the previous October, when the baby had been with me scarcely more than a month, I had a bitter taste of what real need was. I had exactly seven cents in my purse when I took Elizabeth Ann with me one day to the Provident Loan Society to pawn my wedding ring. I had the captain’s watch also which he had given me permission to pawn, and the combined pawnings brought $75. This enabled me to buy my darling little girl a new coat and hat and a couple of school dresses, shoes, etc., in preparation for her kindergarten. Everything seemed to cost so much; but I thought that must be because I was not used to a limited income. I wondered how people who had no more than we had really got along; I know I fervently wished that I had learned the ability that makes a dollar stretch five times its worth.

Shortly after I had pawned my wedding ring and had bought Elizabeth Ann some new clothes, I had a letter from Miss Daisy Harding, saying she was to be in New York soon to do some shopping. I surmised that she would soon be married to Ralph Lewis and in truth learned afterward from her that the trip East was for the purpose of purchasing linens, and certain garments to complete her trousseau.

Even the knowledge that my child’s aunt was, according to her own written statement to me months before, liberally cared for as a result of her brother Warren’s will, did not cause me for one moment then to consider as advisable or proper an appeal to her for financial assistance. Moreover, I had launched myself upon matrimonial waters, and, though I knew the craft which carried my child and me appeared to be headed toward the rocks, there was still hope.

While in the city, Miss Harding stopped with a girlhood friend whose father had been a prominent judge in Ohio. They lived at Broadway and 71st Street in an apartment building, and it was there that I took Elizabeth Ann one afternoon to call upon Miss Harding. Helen Anderson, who had always wanted to meet Miss Harding, about whom she had heard me speak so often, went with us.

I was glad it was cold enough to warrant my wearing my winter coat, which was trimmed with the squirrel from the coat Mr. Harding had given me the money to buy back in 1920. Thus I looked as presentable as my child. Pride would not yet allow me to admit to certain people that in less than a year I had found that, in my instance, marriage was a failure. I could not in the same breath confess I had married for a home for my child, and without such explanation I would be stamped mercenary, and rightly so.

I do not know whether the explanation I offered Miss Harding [Pg 307]in extenuation of Elizabeth Ann’s separation from her foster parents sufficed to satisfy her natural speculation about the situation. I do remember, however, that we repaired for a little private chat, toward the end of our visit, to the play-room of the little daughter, where she and Elizabeth Ann had been playing together, and I remember distinctly that I made a broad statement to the effect that if I ever for a good reason found I could not live with my husband, I would not hesitate a moment to seek my freedom. And Daisy Harding, standing there before me, not yet a bride, echoed my statement.

When we returned to the other room, I called Elizabeth Ann and told her that we must go, but she and the little girl were having such a gay time that she was loath to leave, much less put on the little kid gloves which meant the final touch for leave-taking. And the joy of the whole visit for me was summed up in seeing her “aunt Daisy”—as unknown to her as such as she herself was unknown to Miss Harding as Warren Harding’s child—coax her little hands into the gloves and talk to her in a low voice which in the quality of its sweetness was much like her brother’s. And I could tell, though Elizabeth Ann’s back was turned to me, that she was looking straight into Miss Harding’s eyes with the same sweet seriousness which was in her father’s eyes when he talked to me about our child.

[Pg 308]

[Pg 309]

I wanted to be perfectly fair to my husband, the captain, but I wanted more than anything else in the world to be fair to my precious Elizabeth Ann. Therefore, I struggled through the winter until the latter part of January, going in debt in many directions and often using available cash to buy things for Elizabeth Ann, when pressing bills awaited payment. For instance, I could not bear not to get my darling a tricycle when she expressed an ardent wish for one, nor could I stand it to see her go without a bounteous Christmas. My sister Elizabeth sent her many lovely [Pg 310]things and I thought, with mingled pride and relief, that she had fared, after all, far better than most children. I felt a great wave of pity and sympathy for the captain when he came home at New Year’s from another trip abroad, and brought the baby a box of toys; ungracious as I was growing toward him, such thoughtfulness toward my baby never failed to arouse my sympathy and a renewed attempt to bear up a little longer.

However, I despatched a letter to Elizabeth the latter part of January and she came East almost immediately. I persuaded my landlady to allow me to break my lease. I advised my family that I was leaving the captain. Mother came in from Long Island where she was teaching, and she, Elizabeth and I, talked things over. Elizabeth said her husband did not approve of sending Elizabeth Ann back and forth from Chicago to New York whenever I found it within my power to take her for a little while, nor could I really blame him for this attitude. However, that had been my first attempt to take her permanently, and I fervently hoped that the next time would be more successful. It broke my heart to see her go, but once more I bade her goodbye from the Pennsylvania platform and watched the train pull out, taking her away from me.

After all, Captain Neilsen was not, in spite of his seeming misrepresentations, such a “bad fellow,” for he had simply loved me so much that he had thrown a veil over realities and had refused to accept true facts, preferring to pour all of his hopes into the scale of optimism, fancying perhaps he could in some miraculous manner clap his hands, and fortune, hitherto so elusive, would appear. So I didn’t really want to hurt him, but I wanted to rid myself of him now and start anew, never again to jump into matrimony with closed eyes. I had learned a very dear lesson. I was sure he had learned one also. And I had no wish to incur his enmity.

I moved into a hotel in West 55th Street the first part of February. I was working at The Town Hall Club, as you will remember, and the Club is on West 43rd Street, so my hotel was conveniently within walking distance of my place of business. My [Pg 311]work at the Club was quite absorbing, especially because the executive secretary, whose assistant I was, was occasionally ill, which threw her work upon my shoulders in addition to my own routine work. I had been far from well myself all winter, and it was only by observing early-to-bed hours that I was able to carry on. I liked the atmosphere of the Club and came in contact with interesting people, and, for the period which I planned to go through in my immediate endeavor to seek a divorce, it was conventionally a good place for me to be employed.

I had, as I have stated, always felt that there had been some provision made by Mr. Harding for me to care for our daughter, and, after my failure in marriage, it seemed to me I ought, for Elizabeth Ann’s sake, to ascertain whether or not such a bequest existed. But even so it did not occur to me to go then to the Hardings, feeling that, since Mr. Harding had not chosen to confide his long-continued relations with me to any member of his family during his health-time, it was not likely he had done so just before his death. The most logical person, in my opinion, and the man who most likely could tell me to whom to go if he himself did not know about such a bequest, was Tim Slade. He it was who had met me so many times and had escorted me to the White House, and had come to Eagle Bay and Chicago with funds from Mr. Harding. I knew Tim Slade had long since made a change from the governmental secret service to the brokerage business, but I did not know of any further changes he had made. So, not knowing where to address him now, I merely sent my letter to him at Washington, and apparently this address was sufficient.

My first note simply greeted him after the stretch of more than two years since I had last seen him, and I wrote that if he ever came to New York I would be glad to see him. To this letter, [Pg 312]which I had signed of course with my married name, I had an early reply. Tim wrote that he would give me a ring on the phone the next time he was in the city; that he was glad to hear from me; and that I should address him in the future at his residence, giving the number and street. Very shortly thereafter he came over to New York, called me on the telephone at The Town Hall Club, and invited me to have dinner with him at the Waldorf, where, he told me later on, he always stopped. I do not remember that I accepted his invitation for dinner that time, but I do remember very well the talk I had with him there which was the first talk I had ever had with anybody about any money Mr. Harding might have left for our daughter and me.

We sat in the lounge which one enters beyond the lobby from 33rd Street, on a couch in the north-east corner. It seemed strange indeed to be sitting with Tim Slade discussing my sweetheart in the past tense. Heretofore Tim had been merely the messenger to take me to Mr. Harding. Tim really knew very little about me. I proceeded to tell him that I had been married since I had seen him, which accounted for my new name which he told me he had not understood. It was easy to talk to Tim Slade for he knew everybody connected with the Harding Administration, and our conversation gradually bordered upon the very topic I had been apprehensively waiting for an opportunity to broach. Tim was not so aggressively curious as to give me reason to feel his curiosity was other than that any man might display toward a girl who had apparently had certain claims upon the time and attention of the President of the United States. So I thought I should proceed to elucidate certain mystifying past actions on the part of both Mr. Harding and myself which must have excited speculation on Tim’s part. I tried to lead up to such explanation by first re-establishing in his mind certain facts which he very readily recalled—his first trip to Eagle Bay in the Adirondacks in 1920 with the packet of money from President-elect Harding, his many subsequent trips to Chicago, and the times he had escorted me to the White House. Also, I reminded him of the many letters I had sent in his care to Mr. Harding previous to the latter’s arrangement [Pg 313]whereby I sent them all in care of his colored valet, Major Arthur Brooks.

Even then I shied at a direct revelation. I merely parried with the issue in such a manner as to hint at it strongly. I said since Mr. Harding’s death there was but one thing in all the world that I wanted. I found the tears coming into my voice as I talked, and oh, how distasteful it was to me to think of speaking of such a sordid thing as money in confessing why I could not have this one thing I wanted.

“What is it you want more than anything else in this world?” Tim asked me kindly, avoiding my eyes because he felt my sensitiveness.

And somehow I found great relief in confessing to him that I wanted the daughter of Warren Harding who was also my daughter. And when Tim turned to look at me there were tears in his own eyes as he said, “I thought so!”

After that I talked much and at random, explaining this and that, and Tim seemed genuinely interested in hearing the whole story. I told him how I had married Captain Neilsen with the idea of being able to take Elizabeth Ann, and how that marriage had been a failure from the standpoint of fulfilling this promise. And when I observed that it just did not seem possible that Mr. Harding could have entrusted money to someone for me who would deliberately fail to hand it on to me after his death, Tim ejaculated in great surprise, “Didn’t he leave you anything at all?” I said I would never, never believe that he had failed to do so, but I was convinced that the manner in which he had done so had been such as to make it a very simple thing for the person entrusted with the money to withhold it from me.

Tim’s assertion was spontaneous and emphatic, “Well, he didn’t leave anything with me, that’s a cinch!” I told him I had thought such a thing was possible, but that inasmuch as he did not hold the fund I wondered if he would have any suggestions as to who might have been chosen by Mr. Harding as confidential messenger to me after his death. He volunteered to make guarded inquiry in Washington in my behalf.

[Pg 314]

I was interested to hear Tim say that he had always felt I had a very deep claim on Warren Harding, “the boss,” as he called him. He said he had half concluded that I must be his daughter by some alliance of long ago. One of the first things he said, and one which led me to believe that he was honestly sincere, was his statement that if he had known the facts he and Mrs. Slade would themselves have taken Elizabeth Ann immediately. I explained to him that I never would have consented to such a thing anyway, that discussion had occurred in other directions along this same line, but that the adoption which had actually eventuated was the whole source of my present unhappiness. I wanted my child myself.

It will avail nothing to go into detail concerning the many points upon which we touched in our later conversations. I related during the many interviews I had subsequently with Tim Slade much of the story as it stands in this book. Tim had, of course, a slant upon many angles of Mr. Harding’s life as President which were amazingly revealing to me, and which grieved me beyond words to hear. I knew pitifully little about politics in general, and next to nothing about the inside workings of the “machine” which is apparently an indispensable part of both of our great political parties. Tim said he had gone to “the boss” and had warned him that even his closest friends were double-crossing him at every turn. He said Mr. Harding had replied, “Why, Tim, you’re crazy!” And Tim had answered, “All right, maybe I am,” and had found Mr. Harding adamant where his trust in his friends was concerned.

Tim was frank to say that he had no use for anybody coming out of the State of Ohio except President Harding. “But I certainly did feel sorry for the boss,” he said. He said many of those connected with the Harding Administration had been no [Pg 315]less than cut-throats and that “the Chief” had really had mighty few friends.

Tim related to me his own experiences in Marion, Ohio, where he was for several months the President-elect’s bodyguard. I was sorry to hear him say frankly that he had never met such a “bunch” in all his life, and I assured him that I was certain the streak of social madness of which he spoke had developed in Marion only since the birth of the excitement surrounding Mr. Harding’s nomination for the presidency. I knew all or nearly all of the people of whom he spoke and I had known them from childhood, and the wildness to which they might have inclined as the result of a misdirected patriotic stimulus was condoned by me who knew the genuineness of my home town people. I could not believe as Tim believed, that “The whole bunch out there is rotten.” No town which could produce Warren Harding could be fundamentally wrong in any respect. It was only a temporary social dementia from which they would recover with the passing of time.

Tim said Mr. Harding had instructed him that in case of “anything happening” to him, Tim should get from his private secretary, George Christian, the President’s little black notebook in which the latter had kept private memoranda. Tim said Mr. Harding had told him he was to tear out immediately the sheets containing my several addresses and my name. I moved around, you will remember, quite frequently, and likely if Mr. Harding kept these addresses they had filled several sheets of such a notebook. However, it did seem to me, as I told Tim, that Mr. Harding would have felt it important enough to see that each time I moved he himself blotted out or destroyed my previous address, and it also seemed entirely unlikely that he would have my real name written in this notebook. Any fictitious name would have sufficed, and he and I had many secret initials which meant something to us and which he might have used for such purpose. Nevertheless, Tim said, those were his orders. It seems to me Tim said that when he had gone to Mr. Christian for the notebook the latter told him it had already been destroyed.

[Pg 316]

When I left Tim Slade after our first interview I felt sure he would be able to trace the fund I felt had been left by Mr. Harding for Elizabeth Ann and me, and Tim had spoken of his intention to speak also to Major Brooks, the President’s valet, who was with the President, Tim said, shaving him, only a short time before he passed away.

I felt very sure I could depend upon Tim, and was confident that his own expressed opinion of the terrible injustice to Elizabeth Ann would incite him to immediate action in my behalf. When he apologized for his financial position, telling me he had only recently acquired a new country home in Maryland and was shy of money, I hastened to assure him that I didn’t expect any help from him. I was merely intensely anxious to hunt down the fund which I felt sure had been left for Warren Harding for our child and me.

The Town Hall Club, through its executive offices, issued invitations for two Club dinners, the first they had ever given since the opening of their new club rooms, and the designing of these invitations as well as the supervision of their issuance was left to my execution, under the direction and approval of the Program Committee. This Committee consisted of Miss Rachel Crothers, who was also a Vice-President of the Club at that time, and Mrs. Francis Rogers. I was proud to find that I was capable of assuming many executive responsibilities, and the success of the First Club Dinner on April 27th, 1925, was a source of great satisfaction to me personally. There were seven hundred and fifty people in attendance.

I had, as you will remember, always wanted to “write,” and in my position at The Town Hall Club I was constantly meeting men and women who had actually accomplished things in the literary world. I was chafing under physical strain and nightly fatigue [Pg 317]which were far from conducive to creative writing. But I struggled over what I thought might some day be a play, writing it around my own experiences with my beloved Mr. Harding, disguising it, of course, and making our daughter the central figure. In connection with my work under the approval of the Program Committee of The Town Hall Club, I was obliged one evening to go up to Miss Rachel Crothers’ apartment to submit to her the proofs of the First Club Dinner invitations. I adored Miss Crothers, and I longed to say to her, “Oh, I would give the world to put what I know into a play!” As it was I merely said, “I admire your work tremendously, Miss Crothers. It is the work I want some day to be doing.” “Have you ever written anything?” she asked me. “No, nothing much,” shaking my head. “Well, what you need to do is to have a child, and some experience. Then you can write!” I wondered whether even Rachel Crothers could match out of the fecundity of her imagination a drama equal to mine. And she had written so many successful plays!

When the next Club dinner was held, on May 19th, 1925, a prominent New York attorney introduced himself to me as one of our Club members. In the days that followed we became friends, and, after telling him that I was merely separated from Captain Neilsen and not yet divorced from him, he was kind enough to wish to help me in this respect.

I have been told that each phase of my experience seemed a needful one, and certainly the manner in which my experience has worked itself out appears to have been providentially directed. I had not a cent with which to obtain a divorce. Moreover, the only legal grounds I had for such obtaining were the grounds of misrepresentation, and divorces in New York are obtainable only upon statutory grounds, and I would not impose upon the captain even the suggestion of collusion. Therefore I had decided [Pg 318]that only by going to Reno would I be able to untangle the matrimonial knot which I had precipitated for my child’s sake.

Tim Slade had offered to go to a friend in Washington, who, he said, was a prominent lawyer, and who would advise me how I might best obtain a divorce and the most quickly. Tim said he thought likely it would have to be upon grounds of desertion, and for this purpose I could establish a residence in Virginia across the Potomac, commuting daily to Washington, where, Tim said, he would see to it that I obtained a position as secretary. Furthermore, he said that this lawyer was a particularly good friend of his and that he was sure he would handle my divorce as a favor to him, Tim, and charge no fee whatever.

It seemed to me that fate had helpfully intervened when I met the New York lawyer who became my friend, and, after he had sympathetically extracted from me my real reason for wanting a divorce, and the one contributing factor which had led to compulsory abandonment of cherished plans in behalf of my daughter, he stated that in his opinion I had sufficient grounds for a complete annulment of my marriage, with restitution of my maiden name. This pleased me immensely. He immediately drew up what was in effect a mutual agreement between Captain Neilsen and me bearing no legal significance beyond our own promise to each other to respect each other’s rights, as though a state of marriage did not exist, until such time as I could obtain absolute legal severance. We both signed this agreement, which also specified an amount of money which the captain was to pay to me monthly, and which he did in good faith pay until my annulment the following February had been legally consummated. But this amount of money was not even sufficient to cover the rent I had been paying, and so of course would not have kept me had I not supplemented it with my own salary.

Tim Slade came over to New York about once a month, and the second or third time I met him at the Waldorf he advised me that he had spoken to Major Brooks as well as to George Christian, of course talking to them hypothetically. He said Major Brooks remembered very well indeed having received letter from “E. Baye” enclosing letters for President Harding, but he knew of no money having been left for anyone at all outside of those who were mentioned in Mr. Harding’s will. And nothing had been left with him. Nor had Tim’s talk with George Christian, the President’s secretary, revealed knowledge of such a bequest.

Tim seemed very sure that he could go further in his investigations. He spoke of various people who had benefitted by the Harding Administration, and who would, he said, undoubtedly be glad to interest themselves in my situation. He said he was very sure, from what he knew about the Harding family outside of the President, that it would be difficult to persuade them to part with any of their money, and his characterizations of particular members of Mr. Harding’s family were distinctly severe. But I felt sure they would come immediately to my rescue with as much eagerness to do the right thing as Elizabeth Ann’s father had always shown. I said to Tim Slade that I would prefer not to go to Harding family until we had exhausted other channels of effort, especially until he had definitely determined in his own mind that the money which I believed had been left for us by Mr. Harding could not be traced.

When I next saw Tim Slade he had not accomplished anything so far as I could see except to have further confided the facts of the situation to certain individuals of his own choosing. I did not try to advise him, feeling he ought to know the right method of procedure if his desire to help me was truly genuine.

He said there were so few men who were really Mr. Harding’s [Pg 320]friends that the situation was a difficult one. When I met him every month at the Waldorf the time was not spent entirely with discussions about my own affair. On the other hand, Tim would tell me long stories about individuals in Washington. I was learning surprising things about such people as George Christian, Brigadier-General Sawyer (Mrs. Harding’s personal physician), Mr. Brush, who bought The Marion Daily Star, Harry Daugherty, his son Draper, and many, many others, some of whose names were familiar with me, and others of whom I had not heard and therefore have forgotten. The one man above all others who escaped critical mention was Charles G. Dawes, who, Tim said, was “his best friend,” and who, he was sure, would “go a long way” in helping to solve my problem about Elizabeth Ann and my rightful expectations for her.

I asked Tim if he had ever heard about the lost letter I had sent to Mr. Harding the first month of his term as President, and I explained how I had addressed it and how I had enclosed many snapshots of Elizabeth Ann, and some of myself with our daughter. This letter was not received. Tim said that he himself had assisted George Christian until the latter had got onto things, but that some one else had opened all of the President’s mail at that time. He said he did not think this particular letter had reached there for he was confident it would have been given to the President.

I told Tim about having met a friendly New York attorney and about his volunteering to assist me, for a nominal fee, to free myself from the captain, and Tim thought that would be wise.