The telephone startled us. Mr. Harding jumped up to answer it. He said, “You’ve got the wrong party.” Almost simultaneously, however, there was a rap at the door. Then it was unlocked from without and two men came in. I could hear them speaking to each other before they entered. One man asked my name. I whispered to Mr. Harding, “What shall I say to them?” curiously enough not feeling much fear in the distress of the situation. I never could explain this to myself except that I loved Warren Harding so much that if he were with me it didn’t matter what happened. “Tell them the truth!” he said. “They’ve got us!” He seemed so pitifully distressed. So I told the man my name, where I lived, where I worked, in answer to queries put to me gruffly. All this information he wrote down on a pad. Mr. Harding sat disconsolately on the edge of the bed, pleading for them to allow me to go. He seemed to base his plea on the argument that we had not disturbed any of their guests, and for this reason we should be allowed to depart in peace. “I’ll answer for both, won’t I?” he entreated them. “Let this poor little girl go!” They told him he should have thought of that before, and other things I thought were very unkind considering he had not bound and dragged me there; I had come of my own free will. I remember he told them I was twenty-two years old, and I, not realizing that he wanted to make me as old as he safely could, interrupted him and stated truthfully that I was only twenty.

To almost every argument he advanced in my behalf they answered, “You’ll have to tell that to the judge.” They intimated that they were sending for a police-patrol. I did become frightened then. About that time one of the men picked up Mr. Harding’s hat. Inside was his name, “W. G. Harding,” in gold lettering, and upon seeing that name they became calm immediately. Not only calm but strangely respectful, withdrawing very soon. We completed our dressing.

We packed our things immediately and the men conducted us to the side entrance. On the way out Mr. Harding handed one of them a $20 bill. When we were in the taxi, he remarked explosively, “Gee, Nan, I thought I wouldn’t get out of that under $1000!”

We went to Churchill’s for dinner and he returned to Washington on the midnight train.

Some time later, upon the occasion of one of his visits, Mr. Harding told me that he had found out something he had not then known: namely, that a member of the House of Representatives or of the United States Senate cannot be detained for any reason whatsoever when he is enroute to Washington to serve the people. At the time of our almost tragic adventure Mr. Harding had been “enroute,” for he had stopped to be with me in New York on his way back to Washington from some city where he had delivered an address.

Shortly after that, a week or ten days probably, he came over again. We took a taxi ride. Mr. Harding asked the taxi man where we could find a nice, quiet place where we could feel assured of not being disturbed. I shall never forget how much fun we had over this drive. The taxi driver nodded and turned the car into Riverside Drive. On and on we sped, and we both wondered where under the sun the place was to which he was driving us. When we reached Riverside Drive and One Hundred and something (this was before the Drive was cut through to Dyckman Street), the driver stopped the car beside a lonely wood, jumped out and disappeared into the wood. I shall never forget how funny it seemed to us. “Well,” laughed Mr. Harding, “he is an accommodating driver anyway!” In about ten or fifteen minutes the driver returned. “Say, George,” Mr. Harding said, “we want a hotel.” “Yes, sir,” the driver replied, without glancing around, and with every indication that he understood all along but was just carrying out a little program of his own. Back down the Drive we went and into 60th Street. He stopped in front of a hotel of his own selection, hopped out and went in and almost immediately returned. “This is all right, sir,” he said.

It was a rather shabby place but we felt fairly safe. However, in hotels of that character there was always the fear of being raided. We never had any trouble, however, and we went there several times, probably six or seven in all.

19

On August 11th, 1917, I received from Mr. Harding my first gift. It was a wrist-watch—a birthday present, given in advance of my twenty-first birthday because I was so in need of a time piece. With it, or rather in the same mail, came a letter from Mr. Harding. The Daniels had been informed that “Dean Renwick,” the young man I had met in Chicago and with whom I was still carrying on a desultory correspondence, had been sent to Washington on war-work (though he had not), and I named him as the donor of the wrist-watch. However, they always accused me of having received it from Mr. Harding, I suppose because the letter accompanying its receipt was obviously from him, bearing the United States Senate return. Mrs. Daniels always inspected the mail carefully.

The letter I received was written merely for me to show because I had told Mr. Harding that I wished he would write something I could show to Mr. Close. He therefore wrote this, and sometime later another, which formal letters, in view of the many love-letters I was receiving, were jokes to us.