# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 3

About this time we were asked in school by Miss Harding to write an essay on Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, the particular chapter we had to cover being "The Combat with the Templar." I think we were given something like a ​week to complete the writing. I worked upon little else during that time—dreaming over it and sitting up with it into the "wee sma' hours of the morning." I prefaced my composition with "Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall," a quotation I had heard my mother repeat. The fatal day arrived, and I handed in my composition with fear and trembling—albeit with sufficient confidence in its worth to make me wish I had kept a copy of it to read over to myself. I was not conscious that I was being discussed by the pupils in Miss Harding's other classes until someone informed me that she had read my essay to all of her classes. And then she even read it before my own class! But what was most gloriously compensating for my labor was her statement to me in private that she had taken my essay over to "brother Warren's" and had read it aloud to him and to Mrs. Harding as a sample of what her better pupils could do. Then my happiness knew no bounds.
Upon the sloping walls of my modest little bedroom hung three or four pictures of Mr. Harding, cut from the election posters and all the same except that I had varied the style of the frames in which they were set, which frames I had purchased with careful reference to size and suitability from Marion's one and only five-and-ten-cent store! One of these pictures hung directly in front of my bed so that when I awoke in the morning I looked into the handsome face of him whom I loved, and saw his likeness the last thing before turning off my light.
One day father came home and said he had ridden some distance on the street car with Mr. Harding. I was immediately all aflutter and demanded to know just what had been said. Father said he had outlined for Mr. Harding my advancing campaign in his behalf—in short, they had discussed "this foolish talk" of mine. But evidently Mr. Harding's verdict as to what should be done with me was not strictly condemnatory for his words were, "Bring her into my office sometime! Perhaps if she sees me——"
​If I saw him! Unknown to a living soul, I had been for many weeks shadowing the Republican candidate for Governor. His desk, in the newspaper office, which looked down upon East Center Street, was very near the window, and one of my hero's favorite positions seemed to be to sit in his easy swivel chair with his feet on the windowsill. Across from the Star Building was Vail's, the photographer's, studio. Many were the times I stood in Vail's doorway, sometimes an hour at a stretch, watching those feet from across the street, knowing that when the owner removed them from my sight he would likely use them to carry him home. Then I would follow him to his home on Mt. Vernon Avenue, about a block behind, in a state of high rapture, until he turned into the grounds of the big green house and disappeared. This was an indulgence I did not dare boast about—partly because I was becoming growingly sensitive to the ridicule such confessions usually brought down upon me at home (and my love was too sacred to be made the subject of ridicule), and partly because my tardiness in reaching home from school could not be explained thus to an oftentimes impatient mother who could have found many chores for me had I come directly home.