# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 147

Under date of December 9th I was obliged to write to Tim Slade and tell him that a circumstance had arisen which would make it impossible for me to count upon some money I had hitherto been counting upon, to supplement any amounts I might receive from the Harding family or from my salary. This supplemental fund was promised by a friend who at the last minute failed me, and it was going to be even more difficult for me to manage financially from then on. I had my rent paid up to January 10, 1926, and this being December 9, 1925, I had a month's leeway before having to raise the rent of the furnished apartment which we occupied. Tim had been in New York on December 8th, the previous day in fact, but I had not known then of the emergency.
I received no answer from Tim to that letter and was surprised that I did not. On the date on which I mailed the letter to Tim I received a letter from Daisy Harding. I had written her quite at length about Elizabeth Ann's school work, and how proud I was of the way in which she was progressing day by day under my mother's excellent tutelage. Miss Harding sent the rest of Elizabeth Ann's kindergarten money, and $15 had been added to the amount, which, she wrote, would be a little Christmas gift for Elizabeth Ann and me.
She wrote that she was going to Battle Creek, after which she would join her husband in the South. This letter too had an affectionate ending, "Lots of love . . ., A. V. H. L." There was nothing in the letter that seemed to require immediate response. ​However, I answered it on December 11th. I wrote of Tim Slade's having been over again to New York and that I felt sure he was the genuine person I had up to this time judged him to be.
It was upon the occasion of a trip of Tim's made in early January, about the twelfth, that he gave me the first money I had ever received from him, in amount $100. It was accepted by me in the strictest business sense. I sent him a promissory note for the amount, at his own suggestion, dating it January 14th, and promising to repay him in three months. I told him at the time that it did not look as though the Hardings were willing to do anything in a substantial way to help me to keep Elizabeth Ann, but that I was still "hoping against hope." I told him about Daisy Harding's assurance that she would help me as soon as she realized anything on her Florida property. I explained to Tim that I was sure she didn't have any cash or she would have helped me that winter even more than the $175 or so she had already sent. I frankly expressed my resentment at the attitude the Votaws had assumed, but Tim said it was no more than he had expected. He repeated what he had said long before, "They don't want to part with their money." But I could not believe that this was the reason they were keeping aloof, and insisted it must be because they did not believe my story. And that hurt me more than their unwillingness to help financially.
Tim Slade is not the type of man one would expect to be wordily sympathetic, but his apparent "hard-heartedness" was construed by me always as merely an unrelenting attitude toward the members of the Harding family who had received Mr. Harding's generous legacies, and who guarded this money to the point of refusing to share it with their brother's own child.
So when Tim came over to New York, very often he would say, "Well, I talked with Hoke Donithen," (a lawyer from Marion who, Tim said, benefitted largely from the Harding administration) "and I put the fear of the Lord into him!" And despite my seriousness, Tim's boyish enthusiasm and apparent sponsorship of my cause would make me smile. But in the case ​of Mr. Donithen, as in the case of Mr. Crissinger, Tim evidently failed, for nothing seemed to be developing from his efforts.
When I confided to him that I would need help now more than I had in the past, inasmuch as the loan upon which I had depended had failed me, he asked me if $100 a month extra would enable me to keep Elizabeth Ann and mother with me as I had planned to do. I assured him it would be a very great help and I thought would enable me to carry out my plans. However, though he promised to send me $100 each month, as a loan, he did not do so, and I have written Tim several times for help when I have not heard from him at all, not even an acknowledgement of my letters to him. But he had said to me, "Whenever you don't hear from me, you'll know I'm broke."