The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 87

by Nanna Popham Britton

87

And so there continued to be dissension in the Willits household whenever the mother of their adopted daughter appeared on the scene, and I continued to cast about in my mind for a plan which would make it possible for me to take my daughter. As the spring advanced, and I realized another summer was drawing near, I grew more panicky than ever. In June my school would be out and I knew Elizabeth and Scott intended to go down on the Illinois farm that summer as early possibly as July. That meant Elizabeth Ann would be away from me for one month, two months, and perhaps longer. Oftener than ever, as a result of contemplating another whole season away from her, would steal over me the old, sinister suggestion of taking a husband. "Get married and you can have her, get married and you can have her, get married and you can have her." The wordy little demons danced in my brain like mad until sometimes I wanted to scream, "Stop! Stop!" But in the dead of night, when I could reason more sanely, the idea itself would recur and it seemed to grow less and less obnoxious in proportion to the recompense it alluringly offered.

I grabbed at the following unexpected straw which was suddenly floated before my sinking mind. In late April or early May I received a letter from Helen Anderson, who was my teacher in New York when I took my secretarial course.

"You have a way of getting things you want, Nan, why don't you go to Europe with me? I'm sailing on June 21st with the Armstrong Tour, and enclose circular," Miss Anderson wrote.

My unhappiness inclined me to try anything that would, even temporarily, take my mind off the situation as it existed, and, knowing that soon my sister, her husband and my baby would be gone, and having made no plans whatever for myself for the summer, the trip to Europe seemed a real Godsend. I had never been abroad, and the novelty itself would surely occupy my thoughts and relieve me mentally, as well as doubtless improve me physically. According to the circular the entire trip, including six weeks of university study in Dijon, France, would cost but $525. I had been studying French at Northwestern University that semester and looked with favor upon continuing my study abroad and at the same time, as was contemplated in the tour, seeing various parts of France.

But the deciding element was that it gave promise of getting me away from myself, and from the too exhaustive thinking about my baby girl. It was certain I could not continue to survive the present mental maelstrom. The get-a-husband program was not as easy at it had seemed, and though I was accepting casual

attentions from two or three young men, one an instructor at Northwestern, I could see in none of them enough of the desirable qualities needful in the enactment of the program I had been considering.

I wrote Mr. Harding immediately upon receiving the letter from Miss Anderson, and told him exactly why I thought the trip would benefit me. He himself was to be away in Alaska, I reminded him, which would mean that I could not see him at all, and the baby would be on the Willits farm most of the summer. I told him it would help to make me a little bit more happy if he could let me go to Europe.

Mr. Harding had met Helen Anderson, you will remember, when he first came over to New York, and he knew her to be a gentlewoman. Therefore, in his reply he endorsed heartily my plans and enclosed $200 or $300 as a deposit to be placed with the Armstrong Tour people. He advised me to go ahead immediately and get my passport.

I remember very well that, even as enormously busy as he must have been, he went quite into detail, telling me how I would have to have my picture taken for the passport, and so on, and every succeeding letter I had from him until I sailed contained advices. Advices and expressions of how he "would love to be going" with me! "I would love to see your face when you see London, Nan!" he wrote, and though our plans did not contemplate London, I knew that Miss Anderson who had been abroad about a dozen times, knew London well, for she often visited a friend there, and I thought we would probably break away from the regular tour and go for a brief time to London. Mr. and Mrs. Harding had been abroad but once, I think, during their entire married life, but evidently London had impressed Mr. Harding beyond Paris. He wrote, "I wish I might take you, dearie; I wish we might make the trip together; I wish we might make it our second honeymoon trip!" Instead, he said, he would be journeying in the opposite direction, to Alaska. But not in spirit, for he would be thinking of me every hour, he wrote. And I! Ah, he was never out of my thoughts, try as I did to forget things.