# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 16

During the remainder of my visit with my sister Elizabeth at the Colonial Hotel in Chicago, I analysed my feelings as best I could. What a maze of emotions! I knew I loved Warren Harding more than anything in all the world. However, up to this time I had kept my virginity, despite his very moving appeals to become his completely. Mr. Harding had explained to me that were we to be found on the train coming from Connersville to Chicago, sleeping together in one section, we would invite as severe censure as though we had shared love's sweetest intimacy; and the trip itself would be sufficient to incriminate us.
But in my own eyes, I was safe so long as my virginity was sustained. It seems to me unbelievable now when I think back on my ignorance about certain things. I had early reached this conclusion: people got married and undressed and slept together; therefore, one must be undressed in order for any harm to come to them. I remember that this belief was so strong in my mind that when, during our ride together from Connersville to Chicago, I experienced sweet thrills from just having Mr. Harding's hands upon the outside of my nightdress, I became panic-stricken. I inquired tearfully whether he really thought I would have a child right away. Of course this absurdity amused him greatly, but the fact that I was so ignorant seemed to add to his cherishment of me for some reason. And I loved him so dearly.
I had never had, as most girls do have I suppose, a single talk with or from my mother on sex. As a matter of fact, I did not know how babies came into the world, and I frankly told Mr. Harding so. I remember once during one of our "kissing tours", as he jocularly called them, I asked him what under the sun people were given navels for! I shall never forget how it amused, and then saddened him, nor his face as he told me ​that that was where I had been attached to my mother. It was all so wonderful and beautiful when he told me. It was he who told me of course what my body functions would be if I were to yield myself to him. He said, "You ask me whatever you want to know; I'll tell you."
In my father's medical library were many books on women and women's diseases. My sister Elizabeth and I had girl friends who were enormously interested in coming up to my father's office and poring over these books in his absence, studying with inconceivable interest the lurid pictures portraying various intimate parts of woman's anatomy, all of course highly colored, but it was to me no less than repulsive to even glance at those medical pictures. I never spent one solitary second looking at them. When I came to the age when all girls experience that normal function which makes of them potential mothers, I was most painfully embarrassed and told my sister Elizabeth, who in turn communicated it to my mother, and even she dwelt very briefly upon it, merely cautioning me not to get my feet unnecessarily wet when I was ill each month.
I told Mr. Harding that I was aware that there was a lovely mystery connected with life itself, but I had early decided that it was a mystery for one's husband to reveal, and I had been perfectly content not to pry into it. I accepted my puberty as a necessity, even as a sacred necessity to a cause which should later reveal itself. Mr. Harding confessed to me that he had never possessed a woman who had hitherto been possessed of no man, and perhaps that fact concerning me made me the more desirable to him, in addition to his love for me. He told me about his early amours, and he confessed that it had been many years since his home situation had been satisfying.
Mr. Harding told me that he knew of no man except his brother "Deac" who married, having had no previous experience with women. "Brother Deac" was a male virgin, he said, before he married.
​The fact that at home we girls were held down, even to not being allowed to attend parties where boys were until we were quite seventeen—at least that applied to me—indicates the measures that my mother and father had taken to guard us. "And no young man is going to visit my girls after ten o'clock at night," my father used to say. If we expressed sentiments concerning boys—and my sister Elizabeth was early a "man hater" so this refers to me mainly—we were told that they were joshing us, "making fun of us." So the outlets for my inclinations in this direction were confined to raving about Mr. Harding, and about moving picture actors to whom there was not quite so much parental objection inasmuch as they were only on the screen and in the flesh safely distanced from me.
Of course there was the perfectly logical plea from Mr. Harding that if I loved him so deeply I would consent to belong to him, not merely to be with him, trying him by continued denial. I think I made up to Warren Harding everything I ever denied him—and I was afterward so glad I had not plunged headlong into a relationship which was of such vastness and which I can now look back upon with absolutely no regrets. In the history of lovers, there was, I am sure, none to compare with Warren Gamaliel Harding. And to him I was, or so he has often said, "the sweetheart incomparable."