There would be opportunities for intimate companionship, he promised. I told him I was in no danger of being a hermit maid in that event. I was free to be with him just as in the old days. And I hoped he was going to be equally free. Yet somehow I inwardly lamented the personal restrictions I felt the presidency would impose. I think it took Warren Harding a few months to discover these restrictions.
After I returned to Chicago from my initial trip to Washington and the White House, I prepared to go to New York. Scott, Elizabeth and Elizabeth Ann were going down on a farm in Illinois, which is the home of Scott’s people, and I left Chicago for New York about the same time. That was in August. Scott’s mother and father adored the baby; she seemed to make everyone love her, and people outside of the family spoke about her “adorable smile,” which is the smile of her father.
In 1921
On July 30th, 1921, I took Elizabeth Ann and went away for two days. I wanted to be alone with her for a little space, away from everybody. We took a lake boat and went across to St. Joseph, Michigan. Going over it was a lot of fun for me to speak to strangers openly as “her mother,” for Elizabeth Ann was too small to know things, and her affection for me was always the very natural affection of a daughter for her mother. We stopped at a hotel in St. Joseph, the name of which I have forgotten, and the next day some time I held Elizabeth Ann in my arms while one of those “tin-type” photographers snapped our picture, which eventually found its way to Washington. She was so small that we could not do much except walk about a bit and take a long ride in a touring car which I hired by the hour. I remember Elizabeth Ann slept most of the rather uninteresting ride we took about the country, but we were at least together—mother and darling baby—and for two whole days!
When we crossed the gang-plank to board the steamer on our return, a gentleman asked if he might assist me with my bag. I carried the baby. I turned later to thank him and said, “Thank you very much, sir.” Elizabeth Ann, with characteristic mimicry, looked up at him and echoed, her Harding smile very evident, “Ver’ much, ver’ much,” which delighted the whole crowd.
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I stopped at the White House enroute East in August. I went to see President Harding as soon as Tim Slade could make an appointment for me. It seems to me that appointment was in the late afternoon, though it is difficult to remember these details.
Leaving Elizabeth Ann had again thrown me into a state of mental depression I could not shake off, and I was far from normally strong and well in spite of the enormous good Dr. Barbour had done me. As he said, I had been “pretty far gone nervously.”
I told Mr. Harding I contemplated plans for combining work with a course at Columbia University that fall and winter. He heartily approved of this. I told him I had understood that secretarial positions were scarce in New York, but that if I could get a good all-day position I would take it and attend Columbia at night, unless the strain proved too great. He did not encourage me to take an all-day position, but he did make some suggestions with regard to obtaining work, and offered to give me a card of introduction, and to write a letter in my behalf, to the Collector of the Port of New York, Mr. George Aldridge, whose office was of course in the Customs Building, Battery Place. He told me Mr. Aldridge had been one of his appointees and that he did not hesitate to ask such a favor of him. The card Mr. Harding gave me to present to Mr. Aldridge merely bore his name, Warren G. Harding, and, in his handwriting, “Introducing Miss Britton.”