skirts from the child who had every right in the world to tug at them in her rightful demand, through the voice of her mother, for recognition and equity.
In a letter received by me from Daisy Harding (Mrs. Lewis), under date of October 20th, a post office order in the amount of $110 was enclosed. Miss Harding wrote in this letter, in asking me to immediately destroy her letters to me, "perhaps it is best to destroy them at the Club." In this I recognized a conscience which whispered the right thing, but a human mind which overruled and dangled the fear of exposure before frightened eyes. A wave of pity swept over me. It seemed to me that the values of the real things in life were being placed only upon their shadows, not upon the things themselves. What if the whole world knew? What if a nation knew that it elected a President who was so much a man that he craved to be a father? Where was the infamy of such an exalted desire? Would not every man, woman and child enshrine him in their hearts as a martyr, a man who had sought to know the real things but who was cruelly deprived of his birthright as a lover and a father, in the fullest sense of the word? And who but would love him the more because he had suffered in silence, as he said, harassment and years of weary unhappiness at the hands of her, who, a tragedy in herself, had also been the victim of a wrong placement of life's values. And where the reflection of shame upon Warren Harding's family simply because a child had been born to us, a daughter had been given to me, to help fill my life during his veritable incarceration in the White House, and afterwards—after he had met death as a result of having literally used up his life for his country!
I did not promise to destroy Daisy Harding's letters. These letters, with carbon copies of my own to her and to the Votaws, I was saving for my daughter. Through them she could read the
