Upon another occasion, when five hundred school children gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to sing and leave flowers as their part of the Dedication services, a heavy storm prevented the arrival of speakers, and the children marched over to the White House to sing for the President. Mrs. Harding saw them and gave orders that they all be brought in, dripping and soaked as they were. After they had finished their songs and been thanked as a group, Mrs. Harding greeted each of them most warmly, and as they passed her they put their flowers at her feet. By the time the last wet little one had gone, she was waist deep in a bank of dripping flowers, and drenched to the skin. Her only comment in reply to the remarks about her lovely dress was terse: “What’s a gown amount to compared to a child’s disappointment?” This is the reason why the soldiers and the children, as well as the general public, prayed for her recovery--some kneeling on the White House steps--and kept a steady stream of inquiry and flowers pouring into the mansion during her critical illness of September, 1922. In the acute stages, her husband kept vigil in a chair outside her door when the physicians would not allow him to remain longer at her bedside. To all letters of sympathy and inquiry about her condition, President Harding placed his signature upon the replies, and there were bushels upon bushels of them. The first group of any size received by Mrs. Harding after her six months of illness and sickroom seclusion was that of about thirty women writers of the Capital City, most of whom represented large papers and magazines, while the rest were well-known free-lance writers. Next to the pleasure of again seeing Mrs. Harding, for whom each one had a feeling of warm friendship, all appreciated the little personal touch of being received in her own sitting room, the large oval apartment above the Blue Room--the room that was replete with historic associations of the first levees in the mansion under Mrs. John Adams, and that later was made the coziest spot in the building by Mrs. Fillmore and her library. Great, comfortable, chintz-covered chairs, davenports, mahogany bookcases, shaded lamps, and a fire crackling cheerily in the fireplace above which hung Laszlo’s sketch of Mrs. Harding herself, all made the place most homelike and attractive. This atmosphere was emphasized by the winter sunshine streaming through the three south windows that look toward the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the lovely Potomac. Major Baldinger and Lieutenant Taylor, both of whom she proudly introduced as “two of my boys from the Marion _Star_,” were there as military and naval aides.