Harding. I saw them together but once, and it seemed passing strange that
this incident should be the one remembered in connection with the name. But
the associations were rapidly progressing, and I mentally reviewed parts of
three or four years during which I was working and closely associating with
this Mr. Harding. Here I began to see some light. This Mr. Harding was in
all respects, at least as far as I knew him a man of good morals, but he was
much less particular in his social habits than I was. He was engaged to a
young lady all the time I was with him, and wrote letters to her constantly;
but this fact did not prevent him from paying attentions to other young
women, and I was aware that he was more familiar with them than
conventionality would warrant. In fact he made no attempt to be secret in
the matter, and often poked fun at me for my over sensitivity on the
subject. Here was the key to a whole lot of meaning. The first year I was
with him, I had no sweetheart or any lady friend on whom to center my
affection or to whom I could write. There were a number of young men in our
"squad," as it was called, and nearly all of them had correspondents and it
was a joke among us that I was "out in the cold world with no one to love."
In reality, this was not so much a joke for me at the time, as I tried to
give the impression that it was, and I longed for the very thing of which we
joked. The fact that I was out on the street on a cold winter night in this
dream symbolized being "out in the cold world," as we had used the term
then.

I now took up the letters "W. H." again, and the words "White Horse" came in
response to the stimulus. With little hesitation I placed this as connected
with the Knights of the White Horse of whom Tennyson writes in his poems of
"King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table." I got very little out of this,
but still the White Horse was a band of men who were unrestrained in their
desires and bore about the same relation to King Arthur's Knights that
Harding did to me. However, the associations did not stop here but went on,