The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 21
Mr. Harding's attitude about my taking on any possible confidantes was a very decided one. From the first he begged me to keep our secret and tell it to no one. It seemed to me that he most of all warned me against my mother's knowing. It has many times occurred to me that this solicitude on his part came from his keener wisdom about mothers in general as well as, in my particular case, his knowledge of my mother's conventionality.
It was during our first sweetheart days, although it seems to me it was before my complete surrender to Mr. Harding, that I visited in Marion, and, with the longing to talk with someone I really loved and respected besides my beloved Mr. Harding, I put my case hypothetically to his sister "Daisy." She recalled that I had done this when I first talked with her about the whole matter in June of 1925, and she also recalled her answer which I had in the meantime, immediately after my visit with her, repeated to her brother Warren. She had said, when I asked her what she would do if she were in love with a man whom she could not marry, but who might want her to belong to him anyway, "Don't do it, Nan; the world is against you; no matter how much you love each other, don't!" I had repeated this to Mr. Harding. I remember he said, as he has often said about Daisy, "Dais' is a good girl, Nan, but, dearie, anyone would tell you that! Anyone would advise you against it who didn't know how much I love you!" This intimation of his loving protection strengthened my decision that ours was an exceptional case.
And he did love me too! With the first forty-page love-letter of which I have spoken and which came to me at the Colonial Hotel in Chicago in June of 1917, came also from Washington a snapshot which I have preserved, though the corners are frayed from much kissing and handling. I wrote him that I
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had kissed it many many times. He wrote, "Don't waste any more kisses on a likeness, Nan, when the original yearns for your kisses." The only thing I did not like about that cherished likeness was that he told me a woman had snapped it!
In this connection an incident occurs to me which he related to me upon one of our earlier visits. He told it to me at dinner, with reference to annoying requests from petty office seekers who employ all kinds of bribery to gain their ends.
One such individual, a man, had an even more ambitious wife, who desired to see her husband lifted to a certain post and chose Senator Harding as the intercessor. Mr. Harding said that the lady called him on the phone and requested that he stop in on his way home one evening—she wished to see him "on business." He said he thought nothing about it and accordingly stopped at her apartment, naturally expecting to find her husband home also. The lady herself answered his ring, however, and Mr. Harding said when he followed her into the living-room he observed with bewilderment and embarrassment that she was becomingly en negligee, and the way in which she dropped down upon the comfortable couch and spread the flimsy folds of her negligee gracefully about her could mean but one thing. He told me with such adorable embarrassment of her frankness and of his own confusion. I can imagine well all of this because I know his innate sense of delicacy and refinement. It was probably with difficulty that he excused himself, for I am sure women of that type do not let their prey go easily. The thing of course that pleased me about the story was his assurance that he couldn't ever "fall for" anybody but me.
I think it was late fall of 1918 when Mr. and Mrs. Harding went to Texas to visit their friends, Mr. Fred Scobey and his wife. Mr. Scobey, Mr. Harding told me, had a large warehouse in San Antonio and was rather wealthy.
I failed to hear from Mr. Harding upon the occasion of that trip South as soon as I felt I should, and so I wired him at Scobey's, in care of the warehouse. I received a wire in return, though I have forgotten the contents, except for the love allusion. It was sent to me either at the Steel Corporation or at 611 West 136th Street. He told me later in New York how they had all gone off on an island somewhere and he just didn't seem to have a minute to himself to write me.