The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 145
In the crowded three-room apartment where my mother, my baby and I were living, I was finding it all too difficult to devote as much quiet time to my course in playwriting as it required. It seemed to me far more desirable to retire early with my little girl and visit with her until she fell asleep on my arm. I was grateful for the attitude of Daisy Harding, but the attitude the Votaws had assumed made me heartsick, and when a realization of what it would all mean to Elizabeth Ann swept over me, I wanted literally to catch her up close to me and close her eyes and mine to life's cruelties.
The mental misery I suffered must surely have been reflected by Elizabeth Ann, for she was oftentimes restless and unnaturally apprehensive for a child of six. I remember one evening when she gave me a great shock, so really did she mirror my own mood. My mother had gone away that evening and Elizabeth Ann was in my bed awaiting me and the bedtime story I had promised to tell her. But when I came in from the bathroom I found her crying. "Why, whatever is the matter with my precious darling?" I asked her, taking her in my arms and kissing her wet cheek. "Oh, Nan, dear," she sobbed, and her voice grew hysterical, "I was just thinking about our poor dear Mr. Harding!" I had not mentioned Mr. Harding or any of the Hardings that evening, and it seemed an uncanny thing to have her express the heartache I was experiencing those days from contemplation of the attitude the Votaws had assumed. It has often seemed to me that Mr. Harding has even spoken to me through our daughter, and, as I took her in my arms that night and talked to her, it was not to depart from the subject of Mr. Harding but rather to promise him, through my words to her, that she and I would not forsake him. As Elizabeth Ann herself put it, "We'll always love our dear Mr. Harding, won't we, Nan?"
Who can say that he was not looking down upon his two loved ones, hovering near us in spirit, urging me to the exhaustion of every effort to establish his daughter's rights, and deploring with all his heart the struggle I was having to come into my own, to have our child?
But I could not have survived in an atmosphere of constant conscious worry, and there were days when the full buoyancy and optimism of my true self would assert themselves, and I would reflect gratefully and lovingly upon Miss Harding's prophecy that things would "come out all right," and dream of the day when my child would be welcomed into the hearts of those whom she should know as her own people.
When friends commented upon my taking Elizabeth Ann and my mother for the winter, I reminded them that I was alone in New York, awaiting the final decree of my marriage annulment, that my sister Elizabeth and her husband were busy teaching, and that it was the most natural thing in the world for me to want company.