The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 163
When in Marion on April 1st, during my talk with Miss Harding, I had told her very frankly how in debt I was and that my rent of $130 would fall due again on April 10th. It had been her postal telegraph order for $400 which had enabled me to pay the two previous months' rent, and at that time I really felt that when the time rolled around for the April rent a sufficient amount would again be forthcoming to cover it. However, Miss Harding had given me only enough when there to cover my return fare, Pullman and meals on the train, and, back in New York on the 2nd of April, I found bills awaiting me on all sides. Moreover, as is often the case when receipts are not asked for, I was being charged $40 in one instance which I did not owe at all, and this distressed me very greatly, and depleted my bank account even more than I had anticipated. But the rent was my chief concern. Not knowing where to turn, I wired Daisy Harding again for something more than that amount; I think I wired her for $150, though I did not retain a copy of that particular telegram.
Miss Harding's reply to that telegram, a letter sent special delivery under date of April 10th, enclosing money orders in the amounts of $50 and $75 was a clear index to her feelings, feelings obviously developed toward me since my visit with her brother at Daisy Harding's home less than two weeks before. In her opening sentence she said she was enclosing $125, "which is all I can let you have . . . I feel that I have been generous . . . especially when I gave you that $400 . . . I can't let you have any more, for I, too, have obligations . . ." Then followed the suggestion that I should find cheaper living quarters by going out to one of the suburbs. ". . . It would necessitate your rising a little earlier . . . but that means very little at this time of the year . . ." Then came the astounding suggestion that if I could not get a cheaper place to live I might better send Elizabeth Ann to her Grandmother Willits' farm, where she could have the advantage afforded by the country! As though the mother of Warren Harding's child should have nothing to say, should acquiescently ship his daughter to people who were not relatives, simply because she would find there a welcome for her! My brother-in-law's people, though admittedly the kindest people one could imagine, were nevertheless certainly not the people upon whose shoulders the burden of maintaining a home for Warren Harding's daughter should rest. And after giving some further suggestions, the letter ended with "Hastily, A. V. H. Lewis." Something told me instinctively that Daisy Harding would no more sign her letters to me, "Lovingly."
It seemed to me that I had been cruelly dismissed from further loving consideration by her who had once termed herself one "who never fails a friend." Perhaps I had been removed from her friend category. But if so, it was only since I had talked with her brother in Marion.
Yet I knew this was not the real Daisy Harding. It was another woman, a woman lately influenced, in my opinion, to believe that she had been the victim of an imposition. I was mortally sure that members of her family who had been utterly remiss in recognizing their own obligations to their brother's child had been swift to denounce my appeal as an attempt to obtain money under false pretenses.
Fragments of our conversation came back to me—and one sentence in particular now seemed to me freighted with a meaning I had failed to catch when Daisy Harding had uttered it to me in her home.
"Brother Deac thinks you might have changed, Nan. He said to me, 'What if she is not the same kind of girl you taught in high school . . . she has been in the city . . . it is quite likely she has changed!'" Why, if argued sufficiently strongly, this would become a peg upon which to hang various and sundry ill opinions of me! As Daisy Harding had written to me, so evidently had she been persuaded to believe ". . . your claim is one that any woman can make and get away with to a certain extent, and while it isn't, it might look like a complete case of blackmail . . ." How overwhelming are the feelings of disappointment and hurt I experience as I write these things and live over the agony of mind they caused me!
Yet quite unconsciously one does change under the force of cruel circumstance. One does become raw under the lash of injustice. One is apt to become, as I did, almost stark and brutal in stating truths. This follows inevitably when one's life cause, one's sacred pledge of fidelity, has been dealt with lightly, indifferently. The Votaws, for instance, likely felt the smart of words I had written out of the boldness of my spirit. For the body may be broken, but the spirit of Right never faints. So perhaps the imputation that I had "changed" was really true. But the truth does not change. I had spoken the truth unwaveringly. But it is not always expedient to believe.
The letter received from this changed Daisy Harding brought to my mind something she said in a letter sent February 2, 1924, shortly after my marriage to Captain Neilsen. She wrote, in speaking of her brother Warren and lamenting his untimely passing:
"to think brother wasn't permitted to live long enough to do the things that he wanted to do, to go where he wanted to go. If only he could have known a little of the love, a little of the praise that was so generously bestowed on him after he was gone. We are all too slow in appreciation, too little given to expressing our love when it is most needed."