The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 27
Through mutual recognition of the trouble we might cause each other and the ensuing unhappiness that might befall, we early decided to destroy all love-letters. It goes without saying that this was a difficult thing for us to do, and we both clung to each other's most recent letters as long as possible. Mr. Harding had a drawer in his desk in the Senate Office which he always kept locked and George Christian, his private secretary, had been instructed to destroy the contents, burn them I believe Mr. Harding said, if anything happened to him. Many of the heart-revealments of which I have spoken and will speak were put in writing by Mr. Harding—and declarations much stronger as well—and he himself admitted that nowhere except in French had he ever read anything comparable to the love-letters we used to write to each other.
When he wrote to me he enclosed his letter in an inside envelope which he invariably stamped with postage also, sometimes on the back as a seal, and when I wrote to him I enclosed and sealed my letter as many as three times, buying for this purpose envelopes of graduated sizes. I wrote on a small-sized note pad, ruled, and always used a pencil. Usually I addressed the innermost envelope to "Dean Renwick" so that if a letter were opened it gave the impression that it had been sent to someone merely in Mr. Harding's care and was not meant for him personally.
He told me laughingly how he had once received a letter which was meant for a Rev. Harding, although the contents, he said, were far from religious. Also he said he had received mail for the Mr. Harding who was the Governor of the Federal Reserve, as well as mail meant for the Mr. Harding who was once the Governor of Iowa.
We lost several letters in transit. One that Mr. Harding addressed to me at the Steel Corporation, in a blue envelope, contained $30 in cash. It never reached me.
I sent Mr. Harding a letter one time, as he asked me to do, to Atlanta, Georgia. I have forgotten the occasion of his visit to that city. I put the letter in an inside envelope, as we always did, addressed it to him correctly at Washington, then in another outside envelope addressed to him as we had decided to address it, "Mr. A. Y. Jerose, General Delivery, Atlanta, Georgia," each part of this name having for us an intimate meaning. Then I mailed it so it would reach him during his stay there. We puzzled a long time over the disappearance of that letter for it never reached him in Atlanta. Nor did the inside envelope which was addressed to him correctly in Washington. I remember we decided that someone in the dead letter office must have got hold of it, and we wondered what they thought if they read it.