An instance of his kindly nature and generosity occurs to me. We were going down Fifth Avenue. He was taking me to a store of my choosing, Lord & Taylor’s, to buy me a bag. I was always happily oblivious of everybody and everything about me when I was walking on the street with Mr. Harding, and so I did not notice that we had passed a blind man carrying the proverbial tin cup and selling pencils. But Mr. Harding had seen him and he disengaged himself from my arm, went back and dropped a coin into the blind man’s cup, and was back with me, scarcely giving me time to realize what had happened.
“Never pass a blind man, Nan,” he admonished me gently. I knew his sympathy had been made the keener by his intimate knowledge of blindness in the case of his own sister Mary who had passed on a good many years before and who had been almost blind. To this day I cannot pass a blind person, and if they do pass me before I have got my money out, I go back, as he did, prompted by his voice and the impulse it always arouses.
Mr. Harding himself selected the bag for me at Lord & Taylor’s. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than to have something he had selected for me himself. The bag was a dark blue pin-seal and cost $11.75. “Here, Nan,” he said brightly, picking up the bag from dozens of others on the counter, “I think this is fine—what do you think?” I loved it. I would have loved it had it been but one-hundredth as pretty as it was, but it happened to be a very stunning bag. Everything he chose, I thought, would be just right.
I afterwards had this bag in Marion, Ohio, at Miss Daisy Harding’s, during the time when she was still living with her father on East Center Street, before she was married. Mrs. Heber Herbert Votaw, her sister and Warren’s, was there. They were examining and admiring the bag.
“Where did you get this bag, Nan?” one of them inquired.
“Oh, a sweetheart of mine gave it to me,” I answered lightly, just as I was about to pass up the front stairs to the room I occupied while visiting there.
“Now, Nan,” called Carrie Votaw after me, “you know you never loved anybody in your life but Warren!” How little she knew the deep meaning of her words! I have since recalled this incident to Daisy Harding in a letter written to her last year.
Another instance of Mr. Harding’s kindheartedness comes to mind:
I always used to take him to the Pennsylvania Station when he left for Washington. I knew pretty well what trains came into New York from Washington and those that went out. Often he would come over just to spend the evening, taking me to dinner and the theatre and returning on what he called “the midnight” to Washington. When I first met him in 1917 at the Manhattan Hotel, one of the things he said to me, after learning that I had a great fondness for the theatre, was, “Nan, let me take you to the theatre! I’ll come over from Washington just for that, and I’d delight to do it too!”
So one night he had been over and was returning. It was quite late, of course, when we reached the station from the theatre—about eleven-thirty probably—and before he left me to get his train he took me over to the candy stand in the corner of the vaulted concourse and asked me to pick out a box of candy.