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. Hard-
