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:
But you can't do that way when you're flying words;
Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead,
But God Himself can't kill 'em once they're said."
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
