To Mrs. Votaw, under the same date, September 23rd, 1925, I wrote:
“Dear Mrs. Votaw:
Won’t you write me in the enclosed envelope whether or not it would be convenient for you to have me run down to see you this week-end? I could make the Friday night train and arrive Saturday morning, or I could come down Saturday morning and arrive in the early afternoon, returning Sunday night.
I’d love to see you.
Most affectionately,
Nan Britton Neilsen”
Under date of September 25, 1925, Mrs. Votaw wrote me a short note in longhand. I took heart when I noted the salutation, “Dearest Nan,” but the note itself was not especially heartening. She wrote that she had had a great deal of company. “Am just all in—been going to the Sanitarium for a week taking treatments and fighting to keep on my feet, ...” she wrote. The doctor had informed her that she must go to bed and be quiet for a time. After that she was going to Clifton Springs, New York, where her sister Daisy would soon join her. “Am so tired—hope you are feeling well,” the note ended.
Not a single intimation that she knew my story! Never a word of sympathy for me, though she must have known from her sister Daisy that I, too, was nervously exhausted beyond words. Never a promise of help, though she must have known the purpose of my desire to see her. It was all so evasive. Yet the tenor of the note, with its implication of a rather sudden breakdown, seemed to my sensitive mind to impute to me responsibility therefore, if it resulted from revelations made by Daisy Harding. Not to be permitted to see her, to talk with her, and give her the many details I had given her sister Daisy, seemed to me unfair treatment. It left me with the feeling a child has when accused of something and sent off to bed with no opportunity of explaining his innocence.
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While I still puzzled and grieved over the disappointing note received from Mrs. Votaw, I received a cheering telegram from Daisy Harding. She wired that she had arrived home, the night before my letter reached her, from a trip into Illinois and Indiana. “You can count on me for K and C funds,” she said in her wire. She asked my permission to send the letter she had received from me on to her sister, Mrs. Votaw. The telegram was signed, “Mrs. A. A. Stuart.” I assumed that Miss Harding had not wanted to sign this telegram in her name “Mrs. Lewis” because of the necessity for having it go through the telegraph office where she might be known. However, it occurred to me that the wire itself was so coded that it would have made little difference. I knew that “K” and “C” referred to Kindergarten and Clothes funds, and I was delighted that she wished to send my letter on to Mrs. Votaw.
In the meantime, however, under date of October 5th, 1925, I had written Daisy Harding again, telling her of Mrs. Votaw’s letter to me and ending my letter with the following sentence: