Again Daisy Harding and I went over the ground we had already covered in our talk the previous June, and on into uncommented territory as well.
The Marion High School, where Miss Harding had taught for perhaps twenty years, had voted some time back to change its name to the "Harding High School," and I knew Miss Harding had taken great pride in this. But Miss Harding's statement to me, in a voice that betrayed apprehension, "If this should get out, Nan, they would take the Harding name away from the high school!" only made me realize more keenly how pitifully narrow was the thinking which would place the fear of revealment above the desire to do the right thing by their brother's child.
And the possibility itself was ridiculous. Had not hundreds of public men been unconventional, and with far less justification than Warren Harding, and were not their names and deeds written on the calendar of achievement? Would a handful of people—even the home-town friends of Warren Harding—decree that because he had become a father he was unfit for namable perpetuation through any medium whatsoever? If this be the test of true worth, of real manhood, pray what would become of many of the statues and memorials and foundations which stand for the names of world-heroes and benefactors? The strongest of men are weak, and the weakest are strong, but the fact remains that "a man's a man for a' that"!
And what inescapable torment of the mind must my friends be suffering to pin their fears to another remote possibility—that disclosure would bring in its wake the condemnation of certain outsiders where their religion was concerned! Else what prompted Miss Harding to inquire anxiously, perhaps at the instigation of her missionary sister, "You don't think your Aunt Dell knows this, do you Nan?" Poor child! What if my Baptist missionary
