My independent thinking was of course inspired by my intimate knowledge of Mr. Harding’s apparent unhappiness with his legal wife and his evident preference, in his relations with me, for subterfuge, which seemed to promote peace of mind, rather than open rebellion and consequent turmoil. “She’d raise hell!” had been Mr. Harding’s frequent statement to me, and, even though she seemed not to love him in the way a man has the right to expect to be loved by his wife, I knew, without Mr. Harding’s telling me, that she would not release him to another. And, though I had been surrounded ever since a child with an atmosphere of strictest convention, I had found with Warren Harding that the realest happiness is of the spirit, and far transcends in its sublimity the exquisiteness of physical rapture. And stress of circumstances, preventing our more frequent trysts, and fraught with pain, had brought me to a realization that our love was a thing divine. The love I bore Warren Harding, my love for the spirit which was he, was the most God-like instinct I possessed—a thing not of this world.
To Mr. Votaw I said, as I realized anew these things, “To me, Mr. Votaw, Warren Harding was spiritual, almost an immortal.” Tears were in my throat. “Bah!” he replied, with a slight grimace, “don’t you believe it! Warren was as material as any of us.” I marvelled that he had not understood that I only meant that Warren Harding’s soul had finely shone through the veil of his material body.
How little the world knew the true Warren Harding!
133
The following day I was to leave Washington for New York. Carrie Votaw and I were chatting together in the room I had occupied since my arrival, and she was showing me some of her lovely clothes, many of which she said she had not worn since the days her brother was in the White House. This hat had been bought for a garden party at the White House, and this dress was selected for another particular occasion. The prematurely snow-white hair of the woman before me, coupled with the beauty of a face which was, like her sister Daisy’s of queenly loveliness, made a startlingly beautiful woman, one who could, I reflected, more fittingly fill the role of the First Lady than she who had recently actually held that title. As I stood there handling this gown and that, my mind flew back to a certain White House reception held on the lawn one summer afternoon in 1922, the only one I ever witnessed, and I wondered if Mrs. Votaw had been there.
I had visited with President Harding that morning, in his private office as usual, and he had told me how he wished he might “get me in on” the party scheduled for that afternoon without Mrs. Harding’s suspecting the source of my invitation. As he sat pondering the possibility, I could see many difficulties—my lack of a suitable gown and so on—and I assured him I would be just as happy knowing he had wanted me there.
That afternoon I strolled past the White House, along the side near the conservatory which commanded a view of the sloping green. It was a gay assemblage, and in its midst I spied my sweetheart, handsome and tall, standing with Mrs. Harding and receiving guests who were arriving in throngs. It occurred to me he stood in an unusually conspicuous spot, easily observable from my post outside the fence, and I suddenly knew he must be standing there so that I could see him. When I accused him lovingly upon my next visit of raising a hand to me as a signal of recognition, he only smiled and said, noncommittally but fondly, “That would please you, wouldn’t it, Nan.” And I nodded and told him the next time I would hope for a friendlier guard, one who would not say “No loitering, young lady!” as I stood there harmlessly adoring my president!
Little did his sister suspect what was going through my mind as she spoke of this gown and that and I viewed them in unfeigned admiration. And, I thought, wasn’t it just like her to have invited me on one occasion to wear her own black wrap trimmed with ermine, and one of her evening hats? If I were to live there, it would be just like her generous self to let me wear all of her pretty things!
Before we went out of the room, Mrs. Votaw went to the dresser and took from one of the dresser drawers a black pin-seal wallet or bill-book. It bore the marks of long usage.
