She was embarrassed and started to apologize, but I told her never to regret a genuine show of feelings. Then we shook hands and she scooted off to study while I walked back to Bailey Hall to meet Cortland. I got to two-sixteen, which was my idea of a typical classroom, at eleven-fifteen, and quietly slipped through a door at the rear. Cortland was standing next to a desk up front, facing about twenty students. I took a seat in the back. “…and so,” he was saying, “with Theodore Roosevelt newly in his grave, the Republicans, supremely confident of victory in the nineteen-twenty election, turned to a virtual nonentity from Ohio named Warren Harding.” “Thus proving they could win with anybody,” piped up a guy in a turtleneck sweater, drawing a scattering of laughs. “The humorous aspects notwithstanding, you make a salient point, Mr. Andrews,” Cortland said with a thin smile. “The truth was, with World War I just ended and the country sated with sick old Wilson’s sanctimoniousness, not to mention Europe’s problems and the League of Nations, the party could indeed have picked almost anyone.
