wrote, "I hope you like the place as much as he reports liking you, and . . . find it a desirable avenue to an agreeable career. . . . Making good counts with them." Then he assured me of his very best wishes for my success and, which made me smile affectionately, "the happiness which goes with it." He knew that our love for each other provided the abundance of that happiness.
I received a good many letters from Mr. Harding at the Steel Corporation. He usually sent them in plain envelopes. He used blue envelopes very frequently; these were of very tough fibre but not weighty. His letters varied in length from one to sixty pages. He wrote me a great deal, he said, sitting within hearing distance of the Senate proceedings. And I received a special delivery letter almost every Sunday morning, for which my landlady usually signed. What glorious awakenings those Sunday morning letters used to bring!
In the fall—in November of 1917—I moved next door to 611 West 136th Street, and from then until the spring of 1919 I lived with Mr. and Mrs. P. J. Johnson, as I shall call them. I am sure Mrs. Johnson often wondered who my "man of mystery" was. The one and only picture on my dresser was the photograph of Mr. Harding which he had sent me while I was still living with the Carters. Naturally I stayed out all night with him and I am sure Marie Johnson never believed I was staying with "one of the girls" as I used to tell her.
One evening I walked into my rather exclusive boarding-place, which was at 136th Street and Riverside Drive in a private apartment. About twenty people ate there, among them the former wife of Carlyle Blackwell, the moving-picture actor, and several girl friends of mine. One of the girls called out to me, "Oh, Nan, I saw you at the Grand Central Station this afternoon with a stunning iron-gray haired man. How you were hanging on his arm! What I know about you! I knew who he was, all right!" I probably blushed, but there was nothing left for me to do but admit it. Afterward I doubted her statement for I don't think Mr. Harding was very well-
