The president's daughter

One evening Mr. and Mrs. Votaw and I sat talking before bedtime, and our conversation drifted into religion. We had talked pro and con about this phase and that for perhaps an hour or more when Mrs. Votaw excused herself and went on upstairs to bed. Mr. Votaw and I talked on until one o’clock. His fervency struck me as being that of a man genuinely convinced that he had found the truth, and I expressed the wish that I, too, some day would find a religion that would fill me as satisfyingly. Mine up to this time had become merely a philosophy of my own, from conning religious books, and influenced predominately by the bitter-sweet experiences I had met up with in life. I must always have been innately religious, else I would not always have longed to know that something which satisfies the soul. But I had witnessed on all sides the hypocrisy which makes people live lives they despise and practise religions insincerely for the mere sake of upholding conventional standards. I had therefore turned into my own mental paths.

My independent thinking was of course inspired by my intimate knowledge of Mr. Harding’s apparent unhappiness with his legal wife and his evident preference, in his relations with me, for subterfuge, which seemed to promote peace of mind, rather than open rebellion and consequent turmoil. “She’d raise hell!” had been Mr. Harding’s frequent statement to me, and, even though she seemed not to love him in the way a man has the right to expect to be loved by his wife, I knew, without Mr. Harding’s telling me, that she would not release him to another. And, though I had been surrounded ever since a child with an atmosphere of strictest convention, I had found with Warren Harding that the realest happiness is of the spirit, and far transcends in its sublimity the exquisiteness of physical rapture. And stress of circumstances, preventing our more frequent trysts, and fraught with pain, had brought me to a realization that our love was a thing divine. The love I bore Warren Harding, my love for the spirit which was he, was the most God-like instinct I possessed—a thing not of this world.

To Mr. Votaw I said, as I realized anew these things, “To me, Mr. Votaw, Warren Harding was spiritual, almost an immortal.” Tears were in my throat. “Bah!” he replied, with a slight grimace, “don’t you believe it! Warren was as material as any of us.” I marvelled that he had not understood that I only meant that Warren Harding’s soul had finely shone through the veil of his material body.

How little the world knew the true Warren Harding!