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.
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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.
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I had met, when I was going to Columbia University in 1921, and living in the studio apartment building on 72nd Street, a Norwegian sea captain whom I shall refer to in this book as Captain Angus Neilsen. According to the girl on my floor who had introduced him to me, Captain Neilsen had until recently been a very wealthy man. She said he had lost heavily through Charles W. Morse, in ship matters, but even so he was reputed to be substantially wealthy if he could convert his properties into cash. The girl who introduced me to the captain told me, in a grandiloquent manner, that she had known Captain Neilsen when he lived in his apartment on Central Park West and had a couple of cars at his disposal. She claimed to have helped him enormously mentally to recover from the terrific shock it had been to him to lose his money through Charles W. Morse. He was at that time very lovely to me and I judged him to be a fine man.
We remained friendly, and Captain Neilsen even came to Chicago during the spring of 1923 to see us, staying at my sister’s. I spared a little time from my lessons at Northwestern to come to Chicago from Evanston to see him. When Scott had sailed for Europe the captain had been greatly in evidence, taking us all, including Elizabeth Ann, who had taken quite a fancy to him, to the theatre and so on, and helping me to box some of my belongings when I returned later on with Elizabeth and the baby to Chicago. He had quite a way with children.