I left the Carter home in Sutton Place, preferring for obvious reasons to live by myself, or rather with a strange family where my movements would not be restricted. The first room I rented was with Mr. and Mrs. Daniels who lived at 607 West 136th Street. I had heard of Mrs. Daniels through Helen Anderson who in turn had met her at the Y. M. C. A. where she had filed her notice of “rooms to rent.” I lived there from July to November, 1917.
Of course I was proud of my friendship with Mr. Harding, and, inasmuch as up to this time it had been free from deepest intimacies, I felt freer to discuss him, although as a matter of fact I had always talked about him so much at home and elsewhere that it was much a matter of course.
The Daniels were wise enough to appreciate that their roomer was rather more than “in” with a United States Senator. Moreover, mention was made from time to time in the papers of senate activities in which Mr. Harding took a prominent part, and on August 12, 1917, The New York Times carried in its magazine section a front-page article entitled, “Need of Dictator Urged by Harding.” I wondered at the time whether the publication of this article had been arranged for in a series of telephone calls made to the Times, the Sun and newspaper friends of Mr. Harding upon the occasion of one of his visits here when I was with him. The Daniels immediately said that I ought to try to persuade the senator to dine at their home. It would, obviously, have been a feather in their joint social headgear! As a matter of fact, he did not do so, though I had his assurance that he would if it would please me.
18
It was mid-July when Mr. Harding came over from Washington. We went to a moderate-priced hotel on Seventh Avenue. He told me that that hotel had once been a very nice place, and he knew George and Dan Frank (dry-goods merchants from Marion) used to stop there when in New York.
We were not questioned when he registered, and we were made very comfortable in a room on the sixth floor, if I remember rightly, looking down upon Broadway. Although I was deliriously happy to lie in close embrace with my darling, I just could not even yet permit the intimacies which would mean severance forever from a moral code which, while never identified to me by my parents as the one virtue to hold intact, was intuitively guarded by me as such. Mr. Harding has many times said to me that if people were to know that we had been together intimately without indulging in closest embrace they would not credit the story. In fact, he said to me with something like chagrin that the men would say, “there certainly must have been something wrong with Harding!” But somehow it is characteristic of me to be sure of myself, and when once committed to a cause there is seldom a turning-back. And, as much as I loved Mr. Harding, the traditional frailty men are wont to attribute to women as the weaker sex did not dominate me. This sureness on my part accounted later on for the total lack of “recriminations,” a word Mr. Harding very frequently employed. “Remember, dearie, no recriminations!” he used to say.
On July 30th, 1917, Mr. Harding came again to New York. He decided we could safely go to a hotel where friends of his in Washington had intimated to him that they had stopped under similar unconventional circumstances with no unpleasant consequences.
This was on Broadway in the thirties. I remember so well I wore a pink linen dress which was rather short and enhanced the little-girl look which was often my despair. I waited in the waiting-room while Mr. Harding registered. I have been in that hotel once since that time and I have noted that they have changed the first floor entirely. I think Mr. Harding said he registered under the name of “Hardwick” or maybe “Warwick.” There were no words going up in the elevator.
The day was exceedingly warm and we were glad to see that the room which had been assigned to us had two large windows. The boy threw them open for us and left. The room faced Broadway, but we were high enough not to be bothered by street noises. We were quite alone.
I became Mr. Harding’s bride—as he called me—on that day.