Tim Slade had quite a lot to say about Mrs. Harding. He told me how once, when he was preparing to make a trip to Chicago where he was to meet me at the Congress Hotel to deliver a package, Mrs. Harding had said to him, "Tim Slade, what are you doing for Warren?" And Tim, glad of an opportunity to arouse her curiosity, replied blandly that he was doing nothing at all. "Well, you are!" she insisted, "and what's more, I'll see to it that you are put out—I'll make you lose your job!"
He said it had infuriated her to think he had such a direct entree to the President and upon a matter about which Mrs. Harding knew nothing. According to Tim, he answered her, "Listen, my dear lady, you couldn't do a thing to me!" And he said she knew it, and that further infuriated her.
I never quite understood how Tim would dare to defy the First Lady of the Land, but from the things he has told me, such defiance on his part was of frequent occurrence, and yet never lost him his government job in the secret service.
Tim said he knew that my relationship to the President, whatever it was, was of paramount concern to Mr. Harding, to the "boss," as he so often called him when speaking of the President to me. In this connection he told me how, upon different occasions, when he had received either a telephonic communication from me or a letter, he had gone immediately in each instance to the President, and the President, no matter whether he was occupied with state matters, or a game of cards in his private apartment, had given Tim the strictest attention while the latter delivered his message from me.
Tim, having lived for twenty-one years in and about the White House, knew and was known to everybody from the maid-servants to the Cabinet members, and knew even the gossip of the White House kitchen. It was in this way that I learned from Tim that Mrs. Warren Harding had not been a popular mistress
