I shall not attempt to give the details of our conversation, for it was inclusive of every phase of my situation and would be a mere repetition of my story thus far told. I showed her letters I had, and pictures of Elizabeth Ann, and she, too, saw the likeness which her brother’s child bore to him.
Miss Harding was understanding and kind, never once criticising her brother, even though she made a brave attempt to convince me that Mr. Harding’s legal wife was fond of him. Though it seemed futile to me to expend so much time discussing this point upon which no one in the world was probably as intimately informed as I, I took occasion to remark that I had fully appreciated her rights, imposed by the long-standing union between her and Mr. Harding, and that this recognition on my part and my respect above everything else for my sweetheart’s peace of mind, had resulted in the tragic situation I was today attempting to face.
It was pitifully plain to me that Miss Harding’s immediate concern was for the Harding name, to preserve it conventionally intact, although the very method she chose to employ in her endeavor to impress me with my own duty toward my child and her brother’s, only made her alarm the more apparent. It would be unfair to Elizabeth Ann, she said, to tell her who she was until she became twenty-five years of age—and perhaps had had a love-affair of her own. Miss Harding asserted that there was every probability that Elizabeth Ann might turn against me, her own mother, if she were told before that time. But this I would not admit for one second. I said that it might be a shock to Elizabeth Ann, but that I knew my child well enough to know that I could never lose her, because she was too much like her father and mother, both, ever to be unduly swayed emotionally by such a revelation.
“How many people know this, Nan?” Daisy Harding asked me.
I told her each one of them, not forgetting to include Tim Slade. At the mention of Tim Slade’s name, Miss Harding seemed greatly distressed, and questioned very much the wisdom of my having made Tim a confidant, telling me a story in which Tim figured and which I had heard from Tim himself, though in an entirely different version. It had to do with an alleged indebtedness left unpaid by Mr. Harding in the amount of $90,000, so Miss Harding said, which amount was due a brokerage firm for stocks of some kind to which Mr. Harding had supposedly subscribed, but for which he had failed to pay previous to his passing. The firm had sued the Harding Estate and Miss Harding said that their lawyers had advised them that, inasmuch as there remained no proof that Mr. Harding did not owe it, they might better strike a compromise than have it made a matter of public knowledge. This they had done, settling for $40,000. I cannot repeat Tim’s version of the same story, but it had been colored throughout with resentment frankly expressed, for it had been the brokerage firm for which Tim had acted as Washington manager, and he therefore said that he knew whereof he spoke when he said Mr. Harding actually owed the money.
I told Miss Harding, as I had told Tim Slade, that Mr. Harding had said to me upon my last visit to the White House that he was then in debt $50,000, and I suggested that perhaps this was the very indebtedness to which he referred, although it seemed to me I did remember hearing him add something about “campaign expenses.” However, I had never been interested in remembering those things verbatim which pertained to business, though I knew by heart the sweet things he had said which affected our personal relations, and it was the amount of $50,000 which had stayed in my mind and the fact that the poor darling had said he just could not seem to get out of debt.
I would not be disloyal to Tim, who was, I was sure, trying to help me in his own way, and so I tried not to bring his name into our discussions after that, except in a general way. Miss Harding suggested to me later on that I might try in an off-hand way to get Mrs. Votaw’s opinion of Tim. Her sister from Washington was then in Marion, and Miss Harding said she thought it would be fine if the friends who had driven through from Washington to Battle Creek, Michigan, and had dropped Mrs. Votaw off in Marion, would invite me to drive back East with them when they stopped in Marion again in a day or two to pick up Mrs. Votaw, and that it would save me that much carfare. I said I would be delighted.
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That evening Mrs. Votaw came over to her sister Daisy’s. I had not seen Carrie Votaw for several years, but I observed that she had lost none of her regal beauty, and she, too, had certain facial expressions which reminded me strongly of her brother. Early in our conversation, Mrs. Votaw found occasion to inquire about my Aunt Dell, who, you will remember, had been a missionary to Burma at the same time Mrs. Votaw and her husband, Heber Herbert Votaw, had been engaged in work of the same character, and it was plain to be seen that the old feeling toward my Aunt Dell was still smoldering in the heart of her whose religion, as a Seventh Day Adventist, was not generally concordant with that of my Aunt Dell, who was a Baptist.
Mrs. Votaw said to me that she had felt very bitter when my Aunt Dell had taken occasion to have published in a certain paper an article, written by my aunt, which voiced the hope of her church that Mr. Harding, now the most distinguished member of the Baptist Church, as President of the United States, might see fit to exert his influence in the direction of promoting the very worthy work which the Baptists were carrying on so admirably in Burma. I knew my Aunt Dell’s sense of humor, and it would have been too much for her to refrain from making capital of a situation such as this, and I could not help being secretly amused. But it saddened me to realize how this given instance of Mrs. Votaw’s resentment proved that the work which should be so universally missionary in spirit and never pettily denominational, was, after all, permeated with the spirit of sect jealousy.