OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 27

Through mutual recognition of the trouble we might cause each other and the ensuing unhappiness that might befall, we early decided to destroy all love-letters. It goes without saying that this was a difficult thing for us to do, and we both clung to each other's most recent letters as long as possible. Mr. Harding had a drawer in his desk in the Senate Office which he always kept locked and George Christian, his private secretary, had been instructed to destroy the contents, burn them I believe Mr. Harding said, if anything happened to him. Many of the heart-revealments of which I have spoken and will speak were put in writing by Mr. Harding—and declarations much stronger as well—and he himself admitted that nowhere except in French had he ever read anything comparable to the love-letters we used to write to each other.
When he wrote to me he enclosed his letter in an inside envelope which he invariably stamped with postage also, sometimes on the back as a seal, and when I wrote to him I enclosed and sealed my letter as many as three times, buying for this purpose envelopes of graduated sizes. I wrote on a small-sized note pad, ruled, and always used a pencil. Usually I addressed the innermost envelope to "Dean Renwick" so that if a letter were opened it gave the impression that it had been sent to someone merely in Mr. Harding's care and was not meant for him personally.
​He told me laughingly how he had once received a letter which was meant for a Rev. Harding, although the contents, he said, were far from religious. Also he said he had received mail for the Mr. Harding who was the Governor of the Federal Reserve, as well as mail meant for the Mr. Harding who was once the Governor of Iowa.
We lost several letters in transit. One that Mr. Harding addressed to me at the Steel Corporation, in a blue envelope, contained $30 in cash. It never reached me.
I sent Mr. Harding a letter one time, as he asked me to do, to Atlanta, Georgia. I have forgotten the occasion of his visit to that city. I put the letter in an inside envelope, as we always did, addressed it to him correctly at Washington, then in another outside envelope addressed to him as we had decided to address it, "Mr. A. Y. Jerose, General Delivery, Atlanta, Georgia," each part of this name having for us an intimate meaning. Then I mailed it so it would reach him during his stay there. We puzzled a long time over the disappearance of that letter for it never reached him in Atlanta. Nor did the inside envelope which was addressed to him correctly in Washington. I remember we decided that someone in the dead letter office must have got hold of it, and we wondered what they thought if they read it.
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 38

On September 22nd, just one month before the baby was born, I made a trip to Washington, stopping while there at the Capitol Park Hotel near the Railroad Station. I telephoned Mr. Harding immediately upon my arrival, at the Senate Offices, and he told me afterward that the man who answered the phone was Heber Herbert Votaw, his brother-in-law, "Carrie's husband." When he heard me on the other end of the wire he seemed so pleased and said that he would come right over. Which he did.
I shall never forget how he rejoiced to see me, even in the shape I was in! I remember we sat by the window, I on his lap, and talked about everything. It was while we were sitting with our cheeks together looking down upon the passing automobiles that he sighted Senator Newberry's car. With some pride he told me the occupant was the richest man in the Senate, and said what he would like to do for me "if he had Senator Newberry's money." I forthwith assured him he could have done no more that summer to make me happy if he had had the combined riches of all his senatorial colleagues.
He provided me with ample funds to tide me over my confinement period and to buy our baby's layette, found out about trains for me as he always did, and took me to the station. There he bought me magazines—I even remember distinctly that they ​were Smart Set and Harper's Bazaar—and candy and fruit, then sat in the station and talked to me until my train was called. At that time Mrs. Votaw, his missionary sister, "Carrie," was on the Washington police force in the capacity of welfare director—as Mr. Harding explained to me with a sly smile, "one who cares for fallen girls"—and we had quite a bit of fun wondering just what his sister would say could she see me at that time with him! I told him I certainly had fallen—for him! He took me to the train, kissed me adorably, asked me to tell him I was happy, and stood on the platform talking to me through the window until the train pulled out.
I went to Philadelphia, where I stopped at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel over night and did my shopping at Wanamaker's the following day. My baby's clothes cost me the outrageous price of $75, which I knew afterwards was far too much to spend for clothes which were so soon outgrown. But it was heaps of fun to pick them out.
Then I returned to Asbury Park.
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 46

Before Elizabeth Ann's birth, during the early days when Mr. Harding and I referred to our coming baby as "the young lieutenant," we had discussed many times the possibility of giving the baby over to his sister in California, Mrs. Charity Remsberg. Mr. Harding said that, of all of his relatives, he was sure she would understand the situation best, and also she had children of her own. I entered into this and other discussions very seriously, and I marvel now to think how I could have done so. For, months before Elizabeth Ann actually came, I had fully determined within my heart that I could never, never give her up—I could never allow our darling baby to be reared and loved by anyone but myself or her father.
However, I talked over these possibilities with Mr. Harding both in person and in letters. He was disposed also to consider the Scobeys—Mr. Fred Scobey and his wife of San Antonio, Texas. Mr. Harding had told me once upon a visit to New York how Mr. Scobey had mailed a letter from Mr. Harding, addressed to me. He said he thought afterward it hadn't been exactly wise to entrust it to him, for, he said, Mr. Scobey had been a bit convivial that afternoon. I remember how I said, "Oh, sweetheart, why will you do foolish things like that?—why, he might have looked at it!" I was amazed at such daring on Mr. Harding's part. It was then that Mr. Harding told me what I recalled afterward, in later years, so vividly, "Why, Nan, Scobey's the best friend I've got!" Of course I took his statement very literally.
​The Scobeys had quite a bit of money, Mr. Harding said, and I think he said they had no children of their own. He was sure they would love our baby and he said he would "have no hesitancy" in telling Mr. Scobey that he was the father of the child.
We also discussed an institutional home where the baby might be placed until of such age that I, through some unforeseen favorable circumstance, might be able to take our child myself. It was then that Mr. Harding first discussed with utter frankness the probability of Mrs. Harding's death far in advance of his own, in which event he said with undisguised enthusiasm, "I'd take the baby myself and make her a real Harding!" Later he repeated that statement very emphatically to me in the White House, telling me how he wished to make Elizabeth Ann a "real Harding." Of course that plan met with a hug and a kiss from me and much worded enthusiasm. But Destiny thwarted the plans Warren Harding had for his child, although during those days we were completely oblivious of its presence.
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 50

July 22nd, 1920, Warren G. Harding formally accepted the nomination for the Presidency of the United States, delivering his acceptance speech at Marion, Ohio, to the thousands gathered in Garfield Park to hear him. I never had the privilege of hearing Mr. Harding in his supreme moments, though I bought all the available newspapers and thrilled second-handedly at his speeches. In the public utterances of my beloved hero were instanced variously the characteristics which I knew so well dominated his life movements, and I need not cite passages to illustrate the sincerity by which he seemed to be actuated in his every purpose. However, in the papers which I have retained, now becoming yellow and worn, as well as in my huge Harding scrapbook which contains clippings from many newspapers dating from the time of his senatorship to his death, I find marked passages which have moved me deeply and in which I have seen the character of the real Warren Harding. "These are the things I so love in him," I think as I read them over. His humbleness, kindness, good will, generosity, sympathy, honor, trust in mankind, honesty, fidelity to friends—these qualities mark the Warren Harding the people love and revere. The concluding paragraph of his speech, accepting the Presidential nomination, is as follows:
   "I would not be my natural self if I did not utter my consciousness of my limited ability to meet your full expectations, or to realize the aspirations within my own breast, but I will gladly give all that is in me, all of heart, soul, and mind, and abiding love of country, to service in our common cause. I can only pray to the Omnipotent God that I may be as worthy in service as I know myself to be faithful in thought and purpose. One cannot give more. Mindful of the vast responsibilities, I must be frankly humble, but I have that confidence in the consideration and support of all true Americans which makes me wholly unafraid. With an unalterable faith and in a hopeful spirit, with a hymn of service in my heart, I pledge fidelity to our country and to God, and accept the nomination of the Republican party for the presidency of the United States."
These inherent qualities of nobility in Warren Harding were readily discernible even to those who knew him slightly, but the friends who knew him intimately as a man as well as a President carry in their hearts the memory of sincerity and loyalty in the numberless manifestations of his service to others. And what more meetly parallels the above quoted paragraph, and others of similar manfulness, than the text upon which the President's lips rested when he took the oath of office? This text, kissed by the President as a seal of his oath, is the eighth verse of the sixth chapter of Micah and reads: "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 52

I wanted very much to see Mr. Harding, of course, not having been with him since June, and when I wrote to him in Marion that I would leave Chicago for our home town the night of election and see him there, I immediately had his hearty approval and his worded assurance by letter that he was "hungry" to see me. That was the word he used.
At campaign headquarters they knew of my intended visit to Marion and, before I left, Mr. Witt handed me a letter of appreciation. I have this letter pasted in my Harding scrapbook. It commends my "faithfulness, efficiency and initiative" in the campaign work at the Republican National Headquarters. I do not remember how Mr. Witt happened to give me this letter, but I recall very vividly one story which the Ohio Democrats, in casting about for propaganda, were endeavoring to circulate. It stirred me to such bitter indignation that my expressed desire to work overtime, or all night if necessary, to effect its immediate repudiation, may have been so marked as to excite wonder on the part ​of those about me. The remembrance of my zealous belligerence may have prompted Mr. Witt's letter of appreciation.
The story to which I allude had to do with the propaganda of a statement that Mr. Harding's family had a strain of colored blood in their veins. I do not know how the promoters supported their story nor whence its origin; I only know that my being revolted at such a suggestion. The first time it reached my ears was one morning when my boss at campaign headquarters received an out-of-town telephone call, apprising him that such a story had been circulated in that particular town, and requesting suitable literature as a means of refutation. Well I remember how he turned to us in the office, repeating what had been said to him over the phone, and how someone in the office said, "Tell them it's a damned lie," and how I reiterated with all the intensity of one who knew better than anyone else the falsity of such story, "Yes, tell them it's a damned lie!" I was defending my own baby.
The following day as I entered the headquarters I found, stacked outside along the corridor and inside our offices, great piles of genealogical sheets, tracing, in diagram form, the Harding stock back to Stephen Harding, who was born about 1624.
It is needless to comment upon the reaction of this piece of unfair and unsuccessful propaganda. All one needs to do is to recall the Harding majority, unprecedented in the history of national elections.
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 53

The evening of the election, November 2nd, 1920 (Mr. Harding's birthday), I took a midnight train for Marion, Ohio, with a view to returning to New York and even possibly to the United States Steel Corporation. I had an idea if I could get back to New York I might work out some plan whereby I could have our baby with me, though my ideas as to how such a plan would develop were vague. My sister Elizabeth again promised to watch over her for me, and I myself planned to re​turn to Chicago for Christmas anyway. But the hurt I experience every time I leave Elizabeth Ann is a hurt of indescribable poignancy, just as the homesickness I experience in being separated from her is torture in the raw, like a thing one can stand only so long before breaking.
My train pulled into Marion about seven the following morning. About half-past six I called the porter and asked with pardonable excitement in spite of inward assurance, "Well, porter, who is our new President?" He grinned from ear to ear. "Harding's the man, Miss," he replied. I sprang out of bed with a thumping heart and dressed quickly.
Everybody in Marion had been up all night and had only just retired about six that morning. So I was informed by the first girl friend I telephoned upon my arrival. She herself had just gotten into bed. So I told her to return to her sleep, and, in spite of her insistence that I come right up to her home, I went to the Marion Hotel for the time being. I had told none of my friends of my coming and did not intend to impose upon them, but when I talked with Mrs. Sinclair over the phone she said she would not permit me to remain even for one night in the hotel, where I had, by this time, settled myself and had my breakfast. She told me to go out to her sister's, because she herself had company. I did not call up Daisy Harding until the next day, knowing she must be exhausted with excitement and company.
Mrs. Sinclair's sister lived on a street in which several houses had been converted into temporary clerical headquarters during the famous Front Porch campaign period, and she lived beyond these houses in the house almost at the end of the street.
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 56

Those were exciting days for Marion, Ohio. I remained in our home town visiting various friends of mine for about two weeks, long enough I remember to harm me physically, for I tried my best to be one of the "devils" into which it seemed that a good many of the younger society people had developed during the campaign period. I was almost back in the weakened condition I had partially pulled myself out of through early-to-bed hours in Chicago. However, I was determined upon proceeding to New York.
While in Marion, I kept the $500 bills in my silver mesh-bag, as I have already stated. This was, I must say, more money than I had ever received from Mr. Harding at one time, but I had told him that I wanted to buy a coat, and that one item might require a goodly part of one of the $500 bills. I remember one night when I was visiting Annabel Mouser Fairbanks, we had been up well into the morning, and when I retired I very carelessly, though not intentionally so by any means, left my mesh-bag downstairs on the chair where I had been sitting during the evening, "keeping it right with me." Wilfred Schaffner and John Fairbanks, Annabel's husband, remained up playing cards long after Annabel and I had retired. The next day John said to me, "Say, you are a fine one to leave a bunch of money around like that? You can see right through that mesh-bag! Don't you know we never lock our doors? What are you going to do with all that money, anyway?" I explained it was money I was to invest for my brother-in-law in stocks when I reached New York.
About the middle of November I reached New York and stayed two weeks with a girl friend, whose apartment was at the Poinciana at Amsterdam and 120th Street, the apartment where Mr. Harding and I went to spend an afternoon in January of 1919.
​Although I did look into the matter of positions while in New York, my enthusiasm about actually taking a position waned with my fading strength, and at the end of two weeks, thinking myself in no physical condition to remain in the East alone, and having consulted a doctor who confirmed my belief and ordered me back to Chicago to complete rest for a month at least, I took the train back to that city.
However, I did buy a squirrel coat and some Christmas gifts for my family and for Mrs. Woodlock and her daughter Ruth and Aunt Emma, which shopping expeditions took all my surplus strength.
It seems to me that Mr. and Mrs. Harding and some friends of theirs went South during the month of December, 1920, to visit the Scobeys, returning to Marion about a month later. Of the Scobeys I have already spoken. Mr. Harding and I had discussed them as possible foster parents for our baby who had not been born when we had entertained such thoughts. About the middle of January Mr. Harding wrote to me from Marion, suggesting that we endeavor to hit upon a suitable plan of action in connection with settling more or less permanently the all-important question of Elizabeth Ann. That question had been paramount in my thoughts. It was probably the main cause of my continued physical weakness; and I agreed with him that something would have to be done.
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 71

Enroute to New York, Scott Willits, my brother-in-law, my sister Elizabeth and Elizabeth Ann, stopped in Washington. They went almost immediately to the office of Mrs. Heber Herbert Votaw, youngest sister of President Harding whose husband, Heber Herbert Votaw, had been appointed by Mr. Harding as Superintendent of Prisons. Mrs. Votaw was prominent in welfare work of some kind. Mrs. Votaw, or Carrie Harding
​as you may recall, was my sister's favorite among the Harding sisters back home in Marion. In her office they were introduced to Colonel Forbes who, my sister told me, took quite a fancy to Elizabeth Ann. Mrs. Votaw entertained them at the Senate Dining-Room for luncheon, where, Elizabeth said, Vice-President Coolidge sat across from them at the next table. In the afternoon Mrs. Votaw took them through the White House, and, Elizabeth said, voiced her regret that her brother, the President, was attending a conference. Otherwise, Mrs. Votaw told them, they might have gone in to see him. And also otherwise, I have often thought wistfully, he might have seen his own little daughter whom he never once saw in the almost four years she had been living at the time he passed on in San Francisco. A queer topsy-turvy set of circumstances—the President's own sister escorting the President's own child, unknown to her as such, through his home and grounds!
I almost devoured Elizabeth Ann when she landed with Scott and Elizabeth in New York. She was but two-and-a-half, and the best-natured child imaginable. I shall never forget how she became sleepy during our gaddings, and actually walked along the street so asleep that the sympathetic interest of pedestrians was drawn to her. I would take her on my lap every chance I got, hugging her to me, and worshipping the little face which bore to me such a pathetic resemblance to her father. And, oh, the joy of taking her to bed with me, and of doing the little things for her which she told me in her baby way she wanted done—her back rubbed or her "pidda" fixed this or that way. I think there is nothing comparable to the pleasure it gives a mother to wait upon her baby, though in the extreme it may possibly be poor training for the child.
Scott sailed for Bremen on the America (1922) and I gave up my work at Columbia, having completed the first semester with a B grade, and returned with Elizabeth and the baby to Chicago to remain the year Scott was to be abroad. That spring and summer I resumed my treatments with Dr. Barbour and in the fall, feeling much stronger, sought a suitable secretarial posi​tion. I did some part-time work during that summer, but for the most part I remained at home helping as I could with the house work and taking care of my precious darling.
# The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 73

My baby was ill. As I try to recall now the exact time of her illness my memory fails me—even to the month. But the memory of the terror of that experience shall stay with me forever.
​I had not been home long from a sojourn in the hospital, where I had a slight throat operation, when I began to notice that Elizabeth Ann was not as lively as usual. Then one morning I looked at her closely. Her eyes drooped unnaturally. The circles under her eyes, too, which are a Harding facial characteristic, were darker than usual, and she dragged her dolls and books through the hall with listlessness.
Scott was still abroad and Elizabeth and I were alone with the baby in the apartment at that time. How can I forget how I hung upon every word that fell from Dr. Barbour's lips, every expression that crossed his face when he came to see Elizabeth Ann! To this day I do not know what Elizabeth Ann's trouble was. I doubt if I asked Dr. Barbour at that time. I was a coward. I felt her life was in my doctor's hands and I looked to him. But whatever the trouble, it was serious. She slept most of the time—a heavy, dead sleep from which she seemed scarcely able to open her eyes. Each hour, when medicine time came, I prayed she would swallow the liquid, and when she opened her eyes I demanded of her sharply that she take it. It was like nothing that I have ever known—that sickness of my child. I held her in my arms. Her lips were dry, almost colorless, it seemed. Her eyes always closed. The doctor had ordered that her chest be covered with a white paste-like stuff and then swathed in flannels. She submitted to this treatment with closed eyes and a limpness of body that sent my heart racing with terror. All day I would lie beside her. Often when I awoke in the middle of the night she would be talking. I knew the fever made her talk aloud. God! What days those were! I myself was such an invalid that through the day Elizabeth, my sister, alternately tended me and the baby. But like nervous people, I felt improved as evening came on, and this made it possible for me to care for Elizabeth Ann through the night while my sister slept.
What joy to watch her recover! What sweet pain in my heart to see her sit up in a chair! What gratitude I felt to Dr. Barbour for his excellent ministry! And how often I sobbed myself to sleep, out of sheer thankfulness to God for sparing her to me! ​And, as a normal two-and-a-half does not require many weeks to regain lost baby plumpness and pink cheeks, soon Elizabeth Ann was opening sparkling eyes in the morning and closing play-tired ones at night. Elizabeth and I would stand over her crib. We needed not the spoken word to read the great relief and gratitude in each other's eyes.