# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 66

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."
Remembering Mr. Harding's remark about making me White House stenographer, a remark made to me one night in the earlier days when we had dined at the Manhattan and I had lovingly prophesied the position he now held, I said to him, "Sweetheart, couldn't you let me come down here and work?" I told him it would help to make me happier, inasmuch as it didn't seem possible for me to remain in Chicago and be only a third parent to Elizabeth Ann. It was during that visit, I remember, that his woman stenographer came in. I was sitting in a chair near Mr. Harding's desk and Mr. Harding was seated in his chair at the desk. The stenographer came across the room and Mr. Harding looked up and smiled and said, "Can't read it?" She pointed to the words she couldn't make out (in his handwriting so familiar to me!) and he read them for her. After she had gone out and closed the door, I said wistfully, "Oh, I wish I could work for you, darling!" Mr. Harding smiled—the old smile of indulgence and love I liked to think he smiled best at me—but shook his head. "It would never do, dearie," he said. Then he went on to picture in the face of his refusal how he would love to have me, and how, if I were his stenographer he would give me all his dictation just to have me with him, and he feared the nation's business would suffer! Thus it was that he would picture for me the things he would love to do, making their impossibility a thing of unspeakable disappointment to me, and causing me to exclaim more than once, "Oh, I wish you weren't in this position!"
We talked over the situation with regard to Elizabeth Ann and I explained to Mr. Harding how difficult it had become to really work out the three-cornered parentage. He said, "Well, just wait, dearie. Some of these days I'll take her myself," but that prospect was at least four years off, which to me seemed an eternity.
I showed him snapshots of Elizabeth Ann we had taken, and particularly one which to me is the image of her father. He was delighted with everything. We had to talk so fast, too, in order ​to say everything to each other; and even then I never failed to leave without realizing I had forgotten dozens of things I meant to say to him. It wasn't at all as it had been in the days when he was Senator. And his statement to me, repeated substantially every time I went to the White House, only added to my sorrow after I had left him—"I find myself longing to take baby girls in my arms, dearie—I never used to feel so deeply moved," he would say, and the lights in his eyes were divine.
Mr. Harding gave me several hundred dollars and admonished me to be careful in spending it so that people wouldn't talk about me. Then I left him. I do not really know the usual length of my visits with Mr. Harding in the White House, but I do know that it is not possible for sweethearts to spend three-fourths of their time in making up for lost kisses and have much time left to discuss serious affairs. These visits were never satisfying in length of time.