Fragments of our conversation came back to me—and one sentence in particular now seemed to me freighted with a meaning I had failed to catch when Daisy Harding had uttered it to me in her home.
“Brother Deac thinks you might have changed, Nan. He said to me, ‘What if she is not the same kind of girl you taught in high school ... she has been in the city ... it is quite likely she has changed!’” Why, if argued sufficiently strongly, this would become a peg upon which to hang various and sundry ill opinions of me! As Daisy Harding had written to me, so evidently had she been persuaded to believe “... your claim is one that any woman can make and get away with to a certain extent, and while it isn’t, it might look like a complete case of blackmail....” How overwhelming are the feelings of disappointment and hurt I experience as I write these things and live over the agony of mind they caused me!
Yet quite unconsciously one does change under the force of cruel circumstance. One does become raw under the lash of injustice. One is apt to become, as I did, almost stark and brutal in stating truths. This follows inevitably when one’s life cause, one’s sacred pledge of fidelity, has been dealt with lightly, indifferently. The Votaws, for instance, likely felt the smart of words I had written out of the boldness of my spirit. For the body may be broken, but the spirit of Right never faints. So perhaps the imputation that I had “changed” was really true. But the truth does not change. I had spoken the truth unwaveringly. But it is not always expedient to believe.
The letter received from this changed Daisy Harding brought to my mind something she said in a letter sent February 2, 1924, shortly after my marriage to Captain Neilsen. She wrote, in speaking of her brother Warren and lamenting his untimely passing:
“to think brother wasn’t permitted to live long enough to do the things that he wanted to do, to go where he wanted to go. If only he could have known a little of the love, a little of the praise that was so generously bestowed on him after he was gone. We are all too slow in appreciation, too little given to expressing our love when it is most needed.”
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My reply to Daisy Harding’s letter enclosing the money orders for $125 now follows:
“My dear Miss Harding:
Thank you for sending the money orders for $75 and $50.
I am able to account, from cancelled vouchers, etc., for every cent you have given me, and I can assure you it was spent for nothing but expenses in connection with my endeavor to maintain an apartment and only decent living quarters for your brother’s and my own beloved child. For nothing else.