sought to allay their fears through information I might give to Miss Harding? I had no way of knowing.
Her letter contained another sentence which hurt me but at the same time aroused in me more resentment than I had known during the whole course of my appeal to the Hardings. She wrote, "I heard of a case the other day, where a woman of means thought she could defy the conventions, but she is realizing now what it means to her son . . ." To quote to me an example of what a "woman of means" was realizing through her indulgence in unconventionality was highly grotesque when at that very minute I was staggering under the weight of bills long overdue, even to being unable to send my sister any money toward my child's fall clothes. The utter incongruity of a situation where there existed an amplitude of funds, as was evident with the "woman of means," and my own situation, where I was unable to meet the rent for the apartment which was sheltering the child of Warren G. Harding, is apparent without any comment from me.
Nor had I, up to that time, even attempted to "defy the conventions" openly! In what way could I more meekly have conducted myself, both in the expenditure of nervous energy required to protect the great-hearted man I loved, and, in the later days after his death, in my efforts to carry on alone and practically unaided, that I might not be obliged to go to the Hardings and request to have the situation righted. This would have been justified, even while my daughter's father lived, had mere money been my paramount consideration. Open defiance of conventions could have yielded me no greater suffering than had the growing realization of the hypocrisy which calls itself Justice and marks out its path according to its own narrow-minded limitations.
Daisy Harding, I am sure, did not believe to be true certain things which she wrote—unconscious imputations of past wrong-doing on my part—for she herself had spoken her true feeling when, upon my first revelations to her, she had said, "Why, Nan, I'll bet that was brother Warren's greatest joy!" That was the real Daisy Harding speaking. And this sentiment so early and
