it to me. He picked up my Christmas mesh-bag, his gift, which I carried back and forth with me to work until the newness of its possession wore off. "Do you like this sort of thing. Nan?" Mr. Harding asked me as he examined the bag. The mesh in the bag is so soft that it seems almost like silver cloth. "Oh, yes!" I answered quickly and he smiled understandingly at my fervor. Sometimes I was almost ashamed because I was so passionately fond of frivolous things like that.
Through mutual recognition of the trouble we might cause each other and the ensuing unhappiness that might befall, we early decided to destroy all love-letters. It goes without saying that this was a difficult thing for us to do, and we both clung to each other's most recent letters as long as possible. Mr. Harding had a drawer in his desk in the Senate Office which he always kept locked and George Christian, his private secretary, had been instructed to destroy the contents, burn them I believe Mr. Harding said, if anything happened to him. Many of the heart-revealments of which I have spoken and will speak were put in writing by Mr. Harding—and declarations much stronger as well—and he himself admitted that nowhere except in French had he ever read anything comparable to the love-letters we used to write to each other.
When he wrote to me he enclosed his letter in an inside envelope which he invariably stamped with postage also, sometimes on the back as a seal, and when I wrote to him I enclosed and sealed my letter as many as three times, buying for this purpose envelopes of graduated sizes. I wrote on a small-sized note pad, ruled, and always used a pencil. Usually I addressed the innermost envelope to "Dean Renwick" so that if a letter were opened it gave the impression that it had been sent to someone merely in Mr. Harding's care and was not meant for him personally.
