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.
