In my father’s medical library were many books on women and women’s diseases. My sister Elizabeth and I had girl friends who were enormously interested in coming up to my father’s office and poring over these books in his absence, studying with inconceivable interest the lurid pictures portraying various intimate parts of woman’s anatomy, all of course highly colored, but it was to me no less than repulsive to even glance at those medical pictures. I never spent one solitary second looking at them. When I came to the age when all girls experience that normal function which makes of them potential mothers, I was most painfully embarrassed and told my sister Elizabeth, who in turn communicated it to my mother, and even she dwelt very briefly upon it, merely cautioning me not to get my feet unnecessarily wet when I was ill each month.
I told Mr. Harding that I was aware that there was a lovely mystery connected with life itself, but I had early decided that it was a mystery for one’s husband to reveal, and I had been perfectly content not to pry into it. I accepted my puberty as a necessity, even as a sacred necessity to a cause which should later reveal itself. Mr. Harding confessed to me that he had never possessed a woman who had hitherto been possessed of no man, and perhaps that fact concerning me made me the more desirable to him, in addition to his love for me. He told me about his early amours, and he confessed that it had been many years since his home situation had been satisfying.
Mr. Harding told me that he knew of no man except his brother “Deac” who married, having had no previous experience with women. “Brother Deac” was a male virgin, he said, before he married.
The fact that at home we girls were held down, even to not being allowed to attend parties where boys were until we were quite seventeen—at least that applied to me—indicates the measures that my mother and father had taken to guard us. “And no young man is going to visit my girls after ten o’clock at night,” my father used to say. If we expressed sentiments concerning boys—and my sister Elizabeth was early a “man hater” so this refers to me mainly—we were told that they were joshing us, “making fun of us.” So the outlets for my inclinations in this direction were confined to raving about Mr. Harding, and about moving picture actors to whom there was not quite so much parental objection inasmuch as they were only on the screen and in the flesh safely distanced from me.
Of course there was the perfectly logical plea from Mr. Harding that if I loved him so deeply I would consent to belong to him, not merely to be with him, trying him by continued denial. I think I made up to Warren Harding everything I ever denied him—and I was afterward so glad I had not plunged headlong into a relationship which was of such vastness and which I can now look back upon with absolutely no regrets. In the history of lovers, there was, I am sure, none to compare with Warren Gamaliel Harding. And to him I was, or so he has often said, “the sweetheart incomparable.”
17
Through my sister I had met, while in Chicago, a young man, whom I shall call Dean Renwick, who was a pianist of considerable talent, and a rather nice-looking boy. He seemed to like me and “after a fashion” asked me to marry him—perhaps he wanted merely to “be engaged” to me. I have often thought since that the poor boy was just lonesome, for I don’t see how I could have appealed to him particularly; our interests were not the same. In any event, I rather seized the idea of annexing a beau—one who was free to marry me if I wanted and he wanted. You see, I tried hard to convince myself that it was wrong to love Mr. Harding as I loved him, that it would mean ultimate surrender, and perhaps sorrow for us and for our families.
My sister Elizabeth was amazed at the letters I would receive from Mr. Harding when I shared their contents with her. I remember among the first of them that came to me while I was in Chicago that month, was one which particularly took me off my feet. It contained in sweet phrasing a picture of his desire for me, summed up in the final parenthetical exclamation, “God! what an anticipation!” He used to tell me that just to visualize me as he loved to see me brought pangs that seemed virginal in their intensity and surpassed any longing he had ever experienced in his life.
I returned to New York the latter part of June, not having committed myself to Dean Renwick beyond verbal gratitude for his regard and an attempt at a show of affection for him which fell flat in my heart.
The first of July, 1917, I went to work in the United States Steel Corporation. I was interviewed by Miss Blanche Sawyer in the legal department. She informed me that although I had had a splendid introduction I would of course have to prove my worth. She took me in and introduced me to Mr. C. L. Close, Manager of the Bureau of Safety, Sanitation and Welfare, in whose office I was employed for the two years that followed. Mr. Close came from Shelby, Ohio, and his wife, formerly Edna Kennedy, had been a Marion girl. Mr. Close knew George Christian pretty well, having known Mr. Christian’s wife who also came from Shelby, Ohio. This was, in a way, a sort of social grounding for me, as George Christian’s boss, Senator Harding, had been instrumental in placing me with his secretary’s friend in the United States Steel Corporation.