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
