was a thing divine. The love I bore Warren Harding, my love for the spirit which was he, was the most God-like instinct I possessed—a thing not of this world.
To Mr. Votaw I said, as I realized anew these things, "To me, Mr. Votaw, Warren Harding was spiritual, almost an immortal." Tears were in my throat. "Bah!" he replied, with a slight grimace, "don't you believe it! Warren was as material as any of us." I marvelled that he had not understood that I only meant that Warren Harding's soul had finely shone through the veil of his material body.
How little the world knew the true Warren Harding!
The following day I was to leave Washington for New York. Carrie Votaw and I were chatting together in the room I had occupied since my arrival, and she was showing me some of her lovely clothes, many of which she said she had not worn since the days her brother was in the White House. This hat had been bought for a garden party at the White House, and this dress was selected for another particular occasion. The prematurely snow-white hair of the woman before me, coupled with the beauty of a face which was, like her sister Daisy's of queenly loveliness, made a startlingly beautiful woman, one who could, I reflected, more fittingly fill the role of the First Lady than she who had recently actually held that title. As I stood there handling this gown and that, my mind flew back to a certain White House reception held on the lawn one summer afternoon in 1922, the only one I ever witnessed, and I wondered if Mrs. Votaw had been there.
I had visited with President Harding that morning, in his private office as usual, and he had told me how he wished he might "get me in on" the party scheduled for that afternoon without Mrs. Harding's suspecting the source of my invitation. As he sat pondering the possibility, I could see many difficulties
