The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 4
There was in Marion a very attractive and extravagant woman whose name, let us say, was Mrs. Henry Arnold. Gossip had it that Mrs. Arnold and Warren Harding were very friendly, and gossip-mongers wondered how Mrs. Harding could be so blind to such a mutual infatuation.
These things reached my ears from the girls at school whose parents kept in close touch with anything smacking of scandal, and very likely discussed these things around the family table. I know I never heard them from my father or mother.
But this knowledge of what was currently thought concerning Marion's leading citizen and one of Marion's most beautiful women did not move me to condemnation of either Mr. Harding or Mrs. Arnold. Rather did I sympathize with her in her regard for him, for I could conceive of nothing save a very high-minded friendship existing between him and anybody. And wasn't it quite possible that she too thrilled to her very finger-tips under his smile? The only thing I regretted was that I was not her age, and that I had not travelled in Europe, and that I was not "in society" or in any kind of position to attract his notice.
Mrs. Arnold had a lovely daughter, Angela, I will call her, about my own age, with golden curls, who had every indulgence loving parents could bestow, and my jealousy was directed solely toward her.
Very often the Harding car would whiz by our house, which was then on East Center Street, on Sunday afternoon, and I knew the occupants were headed for Bucyrus, a town some miles north-east of Marion which distance constituted a "nice drive" from Marion. Once, I remember, there were in the car Mr. and Mrs. Harding, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold, and their daughter Angela, as well as Frank the chauffeur, and of course the bulldog. I was sitting on our front porch. Mrs. Harding waved and blew me kisses and Mr. Harding doffed his hat and bowed. How I envied Angela! I would retire on such nights a most unhappy little girl. But I knew they would be coming back later on in the evening and so I would stay awake. My bed was alongside the window and the window screen opened on hinges like a door. I would swing wide open the screen and hang out of the window. I could see about fifty or sixty feet of street from that window and that part of the street was lighted by the corner street light. But even though it had not been lighted I would have recognized the smooth buzzing of those wheels as the great car sped swiftly past the house on its return from Bucyrus. Many a time I have waited until I knew he was safely back in our town.
Angela Arnold, knowing of my adoration for Mr. Harding, one time stopped my sister Elizabeth on the street and told her to "tell Nan" that her hero had been up to call upon them and had sat the bottom out of one of her mother's favorite chairs! The truth of it was that it was probably a frail chair and Mr. Harding's weight had broken it.