From the home on Wyoming Avenue, occupied while Mr. Harding was in the Senate, came all of the household goods, and soon the bareness and cheerlessness that followed upon the exodus of the Wilsons with all of their lovely foreign gifts disappeared. Mrs. Harding was a housekeeper of the most efficient type, and with her husband resumed the custom of holding daily receptions. She kept Miss Harlan as her secretary and was unusually approachable. She had bulbs planted all over the lawns where the Wilson sheep had roamed. She sent away to a factory for bird houses for the trees. The advent of a new Mistress of the White House is always the signal for the limelight to be turned upon her by the world at large. No detail of her life, family history, characteristics, accomplishments, limitations, or appearance is overlooked, and trying beyond description is the ordeal of the first few weeks of every woman who finds herself elevated to this position. The price of residence in the White House is the loss of personal liberty and of freedom of speech and action. For every waking minute of the twenty-four hours, the man and the woman who accept this high honour must ever keep before them the rules, restrictions, and customs which tradition has fastened upon the place. To independent folk, much of this is exceedingly irksome. Mrs. Harding, close to her husband in age, for thirty years his companion, co-worker, partner, sweetheart, wife, and adviser, the one person who believed in him more completely than any other human being, and who inspired him to real achievement, was as distinct among women as her husband was among men. As in the case of her husband, all the events of her life contributed to equipping her for the discharge of her White House obligations, and not even her most bitter critic will deny that she established a régime that will go down in history as a tribute to her as a citizen and as a charming, gracious hostess. Mrs. Harding, born Florence Kling, the daughter of Amos and Louisa Bouton Kling, disappointed her wealthy father immeasurably by being born a girl. He bitterly resented that fact. Her mother’s health became so fragile during her little-girlhood that she and her father came to depend upon each other for outdoor companionship which the mother could not share. Being obsessed with disgust over the ignorance of the majority of women in business matters brought to his attention daily in his banking affairs, Mr. Kling decided to take a hand in his daughter’s education and add another study to a programme already filled with the useful and ornamental branches usually planned to fit out a girl. Among these was a study of music that was encouraged and developed to an almost professional degree, and the five hours of daily piano practice carried in its wake much besides the ability to interpret the old masters.