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.
5
When my youngest brother, John, was born there was much discussion about what he should be called. I immediately attempted to solve the problem by announcing, “Why, he’s going to be named ‘Warren,’ of course!” Father, in cahoots with “his girl,” said we could call him “Warren Le Grand” the latter name for father’s only brother, Le Grand Britton. But Mrs. Sinclair, the judge’s wife, my mother’s friend, seemed to have quite a bit to say in our household and now stepped into the picture. “He’s going to be plain John Britton, isn’t he, Mrs. Britton?” I think she had in mind John the Baptist, much less deserving of a namesake in my opinion than my beloved Mr. Harding. It took a long time for me to recover from this defeat.
In Marion the livery stables rented by the hour one-seated phaetons, drawn by dependable, equine “plugs,” as my father called the drooping animals that jogged about the town pulling the occupants of these pleasure-providing equipages.
Before my doctor-father acquired the small red motor runabout which served to carry him about on his professional calls, he was a good customer at these livery stables, and we children often accompanied him. Often he gave the reins into my small hands and I experienced the thrill of a real charioteer as I called “Giddap!” to the horse and whisked imaginary flies off his back with the reins, even as I had seen my father do.
I have marvelled at what must have been an effort at resigned suspension of parental watchfulness which was responsible for the few memorable afternoons my sister Elizabeth and I enjoyed, unchaperoned, and with fine airs, the use of one of these coveted livery conveyances. One such “drive” in particular stands out in my memory because it is coupled with the memory of the only real “call” I ever made upon the Warren Hardings at their Mt. Vernon Avenue home. This occurred the Sunday following the birth of my baby brother.
I always looked up to Elizabeth with great sisterly reverence for her poise and superior judgment. When she privately voiced to me her resentment that mother and father had not consulted us before adding a baby to the family just when she and I were enjoying associations in high school which demanded dignity in our family circle, I followed suit willingly enough and maintained with her an injured air toward mother and father. I was vaguely confident that divine Providence, in the form of the proverbial stork, could have been appealed to to bestow its infantile goods elsewhere had my sister Elizabeth been allowed to take the situation in hand early enough. Here we were now, Elizabeth seventeen and I fourteen, compelled to admit that we had a tiny, squawking, red-faced youngster in our home. How shamefacedly we responded to congratulations! I might say that within a week or so after the baby’s arrival, both Elizabeth and I were won over to the tiny bundle and became his willing slaves, and, as time went on, yielded him to mother only when he demanded to be fed, spoiling him with attentions which mother deplored with shaking head and futile admonitions. Just so, in our more extreme youth, we were told, had we spoiled Janet, our baby sister.