# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 13

Before I had an opportunity to get another letter to him, Mr. Harding came over to New York. He telephoned me at school and made an appointment for me to meet him at the Manhattan Hotel, at Madison Avenue and 42nd Street. What a sweet shock to hear his voice! . . .
He was standing on the steps of the hotel when I reached there.
It must be remembered that I was but sixteen years of age when I had last seen Mr. Harding (the time I called at his house to congratulate him upon his election to the Senate) and, although I looked very young when I met him at the Manhattan Hotel, still I had had the advantage of the intervening two years, and the added advantage of having lived with the Carters from whom I had learned a great deal, and I am sure Mr. Harding's agreeable surprise was genuine. Certainly he could not have been more cordial.
He invited me to come back to the reception room near 43rd Street. It was about 10:30 in the morning. We sat down upon a settee and it was not difficult for me to talk to him for he invited confidence. We became immediately reminiscent of my childhood and my adoration of him, and he seemed immensely pleased that I still retained such feelings. I could not help being perfectly frank.
Some kind of convention in New York at that time had made hotel accommodations very scarce, and Mr. Harding confessed that he was obliged to take the one room available in the Manhattan Hotel—the bridal chamber! He asked me to come up there with him so that we might continue our conversation without interruptions or annoyances.
The bridal chamber of the Manhattan Hotel was, to me, a very lovely room, and, in view of the fact that we had scarcely closed the door behind us when we shared our first kiss, it ​seemed sweetly appropriate. The bed, which we did not disturb, stood upon a dais, and the furnishings were in keeping with the general refinement of atmosphere. I shall never, never forget how Mr. Harding kept saying, after each kiss, "God! . . . God, Nan!" in high diminuendo, nor how he pleaded in tense voice, "Oh, dearie, tell me it isn't hateful to you to have me kiss you!" And as I kissed him back I thought that he surpassed even my gladdest dreams of him.
Between kisses we found time to discuss my immediate need for a position and I found Mr. Harding less inclined to recommend me in Washington. In fact, he frankly confessed to me, he preferred to have me in New York where he could come over to see me and where he would feel more at liberty to be with me. There were no intimacies in that bridal chamber beyond our very ardent kisses, and, Mr. Harding, having been acquainted with my plans for going to Chicago after graduation to visit my sister, tucked $30 in my brand new silk stocking and was "sorry he had no more that time to give me." Inasmuch as I received my carfare and small spending money from Mrs. Carter in amounts of $1.00, $.75, $1.25 or whatever change she happened to have on hand, to have $30 all at one time to "spend as I chose" seemed to me almost too good to be true! I had always been very grateful to the Carters for the way in which they took me into their home as one of them, but of course I would not have been my natural self had I not thought wistfully over Mr. Harding's statement to me, "Why didn't you ask me to send you to school, Nan?" and his emphatic "You bet!" after I had inquired with wide eyes, "Oh, would you have done that?"
The first letter I received from Senator Harding I had shown to Mrs. Emma Laird Phelps with whom I was working in the Paderewski connection, and she read it with what I thought seemed avidity.
"A typical letter, my dear," she said, shrugging her shoulders.
"Typical of what?" I inquired.
​"Why, that man has an object—can't you see that?" she said easily.
"What kind of object do you mean?" I queried wonderingly.
Her explanation must have been very vague for I can't remember it at all, but I suppose the affectional things that actually did transpire upon our first visit together were things which she would have said proved such 'object' on Mr. Harding's part. But they were all too spontaneous, too sincere to have been premeditated.
Mrs. Phelps afterward asked me one time to give her a letter that she might use to gain a conference with Mr. Harding and I am sure, while I never gave her such a letter, that she changed her mind completely about Mr. Harding's possible purposes toward me so graciously did she voice her admiration of him to me many times.
Upon this first visit, Mr. Harding and I had luncheon at the Manhattan Hotel, in the dining-room on the 43rd Street side. Then we took a taxi uptown to see Mrs. Phelps—to her apartment on 116th Street.
The entrance hall to Mrs. Phelps' apartment was dimly lighted, and when we emerged into the living-room which is on 116th Street Mr. Harding turned to Mrs. Phelps. Except for their acknowledgments of introductions nothing had been said by any of us, and now Mr. Harding remarked pleasantly, "Well, Mrs. Phelps, we people with big noses always seem to get along, don't we?" I had not been long enough in New York and was still too unsuspecting to realize the significance of that remark, though I am confident Mr. Harding meant it all good-naturedly, and I am not at all sure even now that Mrs. Phelps is a Jewess. Within the past year and a half I have been in Mrs. Phelps' apartment and she asked me if I remembered when President Harding, then Senator, had sat in "that chair," indicating an easy rocker.
From Mrs. Phelps Mr. Harding obtained the information that I was rather more than a good stenographer.
​On the way back downtown in the taxi to the Y. W. C. A. where Mr. Harding next talked with Miss Anderson about my school work, he put his arm around me.
"Nan," he queried kindly, "just how fast do you think you could take dictation?"
"Oh, I don't know, not so very fast," I answered frankly.
"Well, look here, I'll dictate a letter to you and you tell me whether you 'get' all of it." The "letter" as it was dictated verbatim I do not recall, but the trend of it is easy rememberable:
"My darling Nan: I love you more than the world, and I want you to belong to me. Could you belong to me, dearie? I want you . . . and I need you so . . ."
I remember the letter did not run into length because I silenced him with the kisses he pleaded for. He would tremble so just to sit close to me, and I adored every evidence of his enthusiasm.
"Do people address you as 'Judge' or 'Senator'?" asked Miss Anderson after I had presented Mr. Harding to her.
"No, I have never been a judge," he answered, "I guess I'm just plain Mr. Harding." He smiled. Miss Anderson suggested that we sit in one of the little waiting-rooms.
It will be remembered that this visit was in late May of 1917 and our whole United States was full of "the war." It was entirely logical that the general trend of conversation should bear upon the various aspects of the war. But how it drifted into a discussion of babies I do not recall. Mr. Harding vouchsafed the information he had recently acquired in Washington, that the Germans were actually attempting to create children by injecting male serum, taken at the proper temperature, into the female without the usual medium of sexual contact. He denounced this method of propagation as "German madness" and affirmed that in his belief children should come only through mutual love-desire. I shall never forget the expressions of his face and Helen Anderson's. Surely she must have thought he was talking strangely to speak of these things ​so frankly and upon such short acquaintance. But I, though I confess it did not occur to me then, understand these processes of his mind to have been the direct result of contemplations concerning me, and it is not unlikely that even as early as that very first visit Warren Harding was entertaining the possibility of becoming the father of a real love-child. Certainly his face was a study.
Miss Anderson assured him of my readiness for a position and we went from the Y. W. C. A. to Judge Elbert H. Gary's office at 71 Broadway, Empire Building. I remember we stood quite a few minutes waiting for a Broadway street car, and it must have taken us about forty-five minutes to go from 14th Street to Rector Street. I remember how Mr. Harding suddenly seemed to come to himself somewhere in lower Broadway and exclaim, as we were getting off the car, "Why, Nan, why didn't we take a taxi!" and his surprise was so genuine that I knew he had not realized where he had been during that ride downtown.