The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 137
It was with hopeful heart that I met Tim each month at the Waldorf, for I felt so sure that one day he would bring me the news that he had located the fund left, as I fondly thought, for Elizabeth Ann, or if not this news, perhaps the next best, viz., that he had been able to secure substantial funds, either through interesting the Votaws himself, he and the Votaws wishing to surprise me, or by taking the matter to the men whom he had spoken of as Mr. Harding's most loyal friends, notably among them Charles G. Dawes.
I was physically worn at that time, and, despite Daisy Harding's willingness to defray part of my expenses, I felt sure I was going to find it beyond my power to carry on. I was ready to accept for my daughter a fund which would in point of fact really be charitable donations from her father's best friends.
So I suffered Tim's plans to go on uninterrupted, and hoped and prayed that the Hardings themselves would come to a realization of what they should do for Elizabeth Ann. If a fund of some sort could be established, and Elizabeth Ann given the income therefrom, such income could be in part applied upon our monthly expenses and enable me, through her own income, to have her with me.
I accepted tolerantly Tim Slade's oft-expressed opinions of the various members of the Harding family, feeling it would be only a matter of time when he would see for himself the characteristics I knew so well predominated in the hearts of the Hardings, no matter what the issue, so long as that issue was right. And I felt sure they would come to see that the right thing to do for their brother's child was to enable her, through their financial help, to share with them some of that money which their brother had made possible for them to enjoy, and further make it possible for her mother to have her. Women like Daisy and Carrie Harding were not the kind of women who would stop in at a meat market downtown to buy some poor street mongrel a piece of meat, as I remember well they used to do in Marion, and then fail to experience that far greater sense of human sympathy and sense of justice where their own brother's child was concerned.
So Tim Slade's repeated statement, "They don't want to part with their money, I tell you," fell upon deaf ears.
"Gee, if I had known this during the presidential campaign of 1920, you could have had anything you wanted, and I myself could have got you anywhere from $200,000 to a million!" was in substance Tim's statement to me, "and with only a crook of your little finger, too!" he added.
When I said to Tim that such a request from me would have been as foreign to my thoughts as would have been the idea of threat of exposure of my sweetheart, he replied that the money was going those days to far less worthy causes than mine. He even cited the case of the woman whom I have called Mrs. Arnold, of Marion, Ohio, whose name had been mentioned with that of Mr. Harding during the campaign. "Look what they did for Mrs. Arnold! Why, they sent her to the Orient!" Tim declared. I remembered hearing that she had gone abroad upon the heels of the gossip which arose during the campaign.
"Yes, and they gave Mrs. Harding plenty of money, too!" Tim continued his amazing revelations. "And all the time you held the safety of the Republican Party in your hands!" But, I told Tim, Mr. Harding was the man I loved, and moreover he was at the time making ample provision for his sweetheart and our child, and Tim's implication that I should have taken financial advantage of the campaign situation filled me with resentment. However, as he said, here I was, fighting to keep on my feet, and depending upon my sister and her husband most of the time to keep the child who should have been a first consideration at all times. And I could not but concede that this was true. I knew, though others perhaps would not believe it, that my darling sweetheart had his child constantly in mind, and I could never, never be convinced that he had not made as adequate provision for her, in case of his passing, as he had personally provided for her and me during his lifetime.