# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 172

Those who have not known Warren Harding intimately—and I feel with all gratitude and humbleness that I was privileged to know him more intimately than any other human being—cannot fully appreciate those "deeper lights" of his eyes. They were expressive of the heights of every emotion experienced by a human heart, and of the greatest sadnesses ever written into the life of a man. I have read in their depths these as well as varying intermediate expressions. When he spoke to me of our child there was in his eyes the longing for open, acknowledged fatherhood, and my heart cried out against the cruelties of both the political and social orders which prevented Warren G. Harding from ever once looking into the eyes of his own little girl. The great pity of it! The injustice of a man-made law which would impose the necessity for renunciation of a desire so natural, so fine, and so normally impelling as that implanted in his heart as her parent!
"Nan darling," he would say, "I find myself longing to take little girls in my arms. I never used to feel so deeply moved," and with this sweet confession there was wistfulness and pathos in his eyes. And so, on the way home from my visits to the White House, I would resolve that he should see her, even if I had to take her at Easter-time when all little children were permitted to play and roll eggs on the White House lawn. He might even pick her up and fondle her unremarked!
In my Harding book of clippings the following appears in a paper of March 28, 1921, a few days after Easter:
   "President Harding was a witness of the happy childhood panorama before him, and he took part in a pretty incident shortly before the gates were opened to the children.
   "Little Winifred Hiser, six years old, in a new spring dress, and bearing on her arm a basket of eggs, waited in the walk leading from the White House to the executive offices. She is a daughter of an employe of ​the boiler rooms. As she stood there the President came down the path to his office, intent on starting his daily work.
   "Perhaps she epitomized for the President the great crowd of children which shortly were to shout and run and laugh through the grounds. President Harding bent down and kissed the little maid twice, and asked her about the fine time she was going to have."
But such an experience for his own little girl never seemed possible. It might have, but for Fear, that monster that hounded us continually, and finally made him I loved the victim of its vicious poisoning. Fear of exposure! Fear of the Republican Party! Fear of the Democratic Party! Fear of society's condemnation! Fear of our respective families! Fear of a national scandal! Yes, fear it was that stayed the hand of Warren Harding, and fear it was that prevented the realization of the holy dream I had visualized as sweetheart and mother. I used to think that if only I could see her go on his lap, and hear him talk to her in the kindly, sweet voice I used to hear him use when he talked with children everywhere, I would be the proudest and most completely happy woman in God's world. It made my throat ache so terribly just to think of the apparent hopelessness of my hopes. It made the whole attempt at secrecy so unworthwhile, so really wrong, so unnecessary! And, above all, so futile in the face of its unfair demands upon us.