“Why, dearie, I don’t know! Did I make him laugh?” he asked, himself deeply amused at my query. I told him he must have done so because it was in the papers. He smiled whimsically, seeming to get quite a kick out of my credulity as to the accuracy of newspaper accounts.
Mr. Harding wanted to know whether I liked my work, and intimated that he either had already spoken to another steel man who was a friend of his or he intended to speak to him—J. Leonard Replogle. I know Mr. Harding played golf with Mr. Replogle and two other men some time that fall on Long Island. But I did not encourage him to use his influence in getting me into another permanent position, for my movements were too uncertain those days.
During that visit I asked Mr. Harding if I might be taken through the rooms in the White House. We discussed the possibility of my running into Mrs. Harding, and Mr. Harding said it was possible, though not probable. It didn’t seem to worry him, and I was confident I could handle such a situation, anyway. The only time I had met Mrs. Harding, since the time back in 1915, when I went to their home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion to congratulate Mr. Harding upon his election to the United States Senate, was one day in Chicago shortly after Mr. Harding’s nomination for the Presidency. I had a friend with me who was interested to meet Mrs. Harding and we waited in the Florentine Room of the Congress Hotel, where we knew Mrs. Harding intended coming to hold a brief reception. I was entirely at ease with her when she finally made her appearance. And, if I may be permitted to so assume without seeming presumptuous, there was in her manner toward me almost an affection as I took her arm and led her over to where my friend stood who wished to meet her. And so, there in the White House, I felt entirely free from any apprehensions regarding Mrs. Harding’s attitude toward me should we meet there.
“Sure, go along, Nan, and see the place!” said Mr. Harding when I was ready to leave, or rather when he told me it was time for me to go. As I look back upon that visit now, it is as though he might have said to me, “Sure, visitors are allowed to go through the prison! Go along!” for as a prison he soon regarded the White House.
Mr. Harding was much worn within the first year after his inauguration
That was the first time Mr. Harding had seen my squirrel coat and he remarked that it was very beautiful. “But, Nan, darling, do be careful! How in the world do you explain these expensive-looking things?” I assured him I had not been approached for any explanations and I was sure I could handle the situation if I were. As a matter of fact, later on, when I went to school at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I did feel obliged to make certain explanations, and I simply named my sister as the donor of all things beyond reasonable possibility of my own acquirement.
And so this particular visit ended with Mr. Ferguson, of the secret service, taking me through the White House reception rooms, the private dining-room, and many others which I was told were usually barred from public view. We made our exit by the entrance which is on the left of the portico as one enters the White House.
69
I was growingly introspective those days and especially after a trip to the White House. I would ponder morbidly a future, four years of which (Mr. Harding’s presidential years) seemed unalterably mapped out beyond hope of change, wherein I seemed to be shut out from the happiness I so longed to share with the two people I loved more than all else. I was selfish to the point of forgetting that the man down in Washington whom I loved and who loved me, as he kept writing me, “more than the world,” was also bearing a burden of loneliness such as he never dreamed would be his lot. So far he had not complained to me, though I felt the presence of much unrest and unhappiness even as early as the visits I made to him that fall. His was an attitude of constant hopefulness; mine of constant regret for the conditions of our entire situation.