The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 88
One night I had Elizabeth Ann with me out at the dormitory. It was about two weeks or so before I was to leave Chicago. We went to bed and I talked things over with Elizabeth Ann. I would talk with her as though she were an older person, and I swear I do believe she understood many of the serious things I used to talk about. I don't know that I had mentioned to her up to this time that I was going away. She was lying very close in my arms when I said, "Sweetheart, Nan is going away for a little while—on a big boat!" There was silence for a second, then she uttered a scream; it was not the scream of a child except as an older voice might speak through a child. How often have I thought of it! It was a cry of alarm, of premonition.
"No, no!" she cried. I had explained it to her so quietly and in what I thought was a cheerful voice that her cry seemed almost to presage tragedy. And all through the days of preparation following, that cry sounded and resounded in memory.
She was so adorable that year—just three and a half years old. She had all of her mother's impulsiveness with periods of her father's reserve, and she was the most affectionate child I have ever seen. A true love-baby like Nancy Hanks, Lincoln's mother.
In this connection I am reminded of an incident which occurred during Miss Daisy Harding's first visit to her cousin Mrs. Wesener, in Chicago, in the fall of 1921, I think. I was in New York, but my sister Elizabeth related it to me. Miss Harding had come to call upon Elizabeth. During her visit, Elizabeth Ann, who had been presented to Miss Harding, walked up to her and, with charming frankness and with the Harding smile, said, "Miss Harding, I jus' love you!" Elizabeth said that her husband remarked after Miss Harding had left, "Well, blood certainly tells!" Elizabeth Ann may possibly have felt that here was her kin, at least in spirit, for she immediately decided that she loved Daisy Harding.
So again I parted from my baby, and a few days before the 21st of June, 1923, I was in New York. I stopped at the Bretton Hall Hotel. This was right around the corner from Helen Anderson's apartment, on West 86th Street.