The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 130
It was with a great sense of relief that I looked now to my return to New York. Daisy Harding was my friend, she knew the whole story, she loved her brother dearly, and I was sure she would act quickly in acquainting her family with a situation which needed immediately to be righted for the sake of her brother's child.
The motor trip to Washington with Carrie Votaw and her friends was, for me at least, a lark. Not since my early days in France, before the tragic news of Mr. Harding's death reached me, had I experienced such comparative relaxation, mentally. We were a jolly four, singing songs, reciting pieces, and talking about everything—everything except those things which lay nearest my heart. I was thankful that there would be no more mental metastasis to shock and hurt me. My answer to all fears henceforth would be, "Daisy knows; Daisy knows!" And I would soon, through the goodness which I knew was as inherent a quality in the Hardings as was their knowledge of right, have my baby with me permanently.
Many and many a time I thought to myself, as my eyes drank in every move Carrie Votaw made, "What a wonderful family, these Hardings! Each superlative in individual ways!" I visualized Mrs. Votaw with her brother's child on her lap, and thought within myself that God always compensated in His own beautiful way for the things we longed for but which were not always within His will. I had so prayed that I might see our child with her father, on his knee, but instead I was to see her with his sisters whom I also loved.
Our first night enroute to Washington was spent in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Votaw and I shared the same room, and, after we had retired, it occurred to me to inquire casually concerning her opinion of Tim Slade. She answered very briefly, and said she thought that he, like a good many others, had been "roped in" unconsciously, and that he was very probably not a bad sort of man at all. I explained my curiosity in some way which did not at all arouse her suspicions or lead her to think I knew him personally, and it was very gratifying to me to know that she held no unfavorable opinion of him.
Proceeding on our way, the following day we had luncheon in the mountains at the log cabin of Mrs. Votaw's friend, Miss Barnett. The only knowledge I had ever had of log cabins was through conversations with Mr. Harding. I think it was his friend, Senator Weeks, who had many times entertained fellow senators and friends at his camp, which was in New Hampshire. And Mr. Harding's final exclamation, when he described for me the beauty of the country up there and the comforts of the lodge in the mountains, always was, "I wish I might have you up there, Nan, way off in the woods!" He longed, he said, to carry me away to some spot like that for "weeks at a stretch."
I was enchanted with Miss Barnett's log cabin, with its spacious rooms and screened-in porches, its picturesque furnishings, its hardwood floors in bedrooms, where nothing had been forgotten to make the guests perfectly comfortable, the grounds, the deep green coolness of the forest which rose majestically around it. And most of all did it amaze me to see served to us a luncheon as delicately appointed as one might get at the Plaza or Ritz-Carlton.