It was with hopeful heart that I met Tim each month at the Waldorf, for I felt so sure that one day he would bring me the news that he had located the fund left, as I fondly thought, for Elizabeth Ann, or if not this news, perhaps the next best, viz., that he had been able to secure substantial funds, either through interesting the Votaws himself, he and the Votaws wishing to surprise me, or by taking the matter to the men whom he had spoken of as Mr. Harding's most loyal friends, notably among them Charles G. Dawes.
I was physically worn at that time, and, despite Daisy Harding's willingness to defray part of my expenses, I felt sure I was going to find it beyond my power to carry on. I was ready to accept for my daughter a fund which would in point of fact really be charitable donations from her father's best friends.
So I suffered Tim's plans to go on uninterrupted, and hoped and prayed that the Hardings themselves would come to a realization of what they should do for Elizabeth Ann. If a fund of some sort could be established, and Elizabeth Ann given the income therefrom, such income could be in part applied upon our monthly expenses and enable me, through her own income, to have her with me.
I accepted tolerantly Tim Slade's oft-expressed opinions of the various members of the Harding family, feeling it would be only a matter of time when he would see for himself the characteristics I knew so well predominated in the hearts of the Hardings, no matter what the issue, so long as that issue was right. And I felt sure they would come to see that the right thing to do for their brother's child was to enable her, through their financial help, to share with them some of that money which their brother had made possible for them to enjoy, and further make it possible for her mother to have her. Women like Daisy and Carrie Harding were not the kind of women who would stop in at a meat market downtown to buy some poor street mongrel a piece of
