“She would not have broken the vow which she pledged. She would have kept the purest thing from the pollution of those double-minded, lying, deceitful, treacherous persons.
“‘I am changed, but not in truth or faithfulness. Alone I cannot settle down. I am not responsible now, so I am frivolous and not at all as I was before. I can do no more than make the best of it, which was far from bad except for regrets—every loss, every illness, every opportunity missed—all these together are but as the raging sea of water to a battling ship. Everything is trivial to me now.’
“Pages neither of poetry nor oratory contain a more simple story of anguish than the one of this young man, seeing the object of his affections won from him by this man who had wrecked her life.
“All was lost to him and the world appeared to him flat. He had nothing to live for—all the ambitions of his life were gone and whatever could happen was but as a glass of water in the sea in which a ship was battling. He left New York in November for his mother’s home in Pittsburg in this condition.
“Up to that time Harry Thaw had been a man of cheerful and sanguine temperament. His mother saw a change had come over her son the moment he crossed the door. His manner was entirely different. He had an absent-minded look, as if he had lost everything.
“She told how she then in the dark of night had found him sitting up on his bed fully dressed—how she questioned him. ‘It’s no use,’ he said, ‘I cannot sleep.’ The mother was allowed to peep into the heart of the suffering son by the story she brought out, little by little.
“But even then he would not tell the girl’s name, and then you remember the scene in the church and while the organ pealed; how the sob broke from his throat and the tears gushed from his eyes, and how when his mother asked him why he had sobbed he answered, ‘But for him she might have been with us today.’
“That was the condition of his mind; that one thing was ever in his mind.
“He could not, he would not forget—great, courageous, indomitable man, who believes he has a mission to fulfill, to make one more effort to rescue her from the hands of vice into which Stanford White had lured her. He came back to New York and met her in a drug store, where the artificial means were found to supply the beauty she possessed, and he said: ‘Oh, these things are not for you.’ And you remember how, afterward, they met as mere acquaintances in the street and passed the time of day.
“Here again no words of mine could supply the picture that is furnished by the words of the wife herself as they fell from her lips on the stand. She says that when they met at the Cafe Beaux Arts: ‘I said I was going to a play, and Mr. Thaw said I looked badly and wished I would not go to the play. He would pay me my salary I would lose—that he would send it through a third party. He begged me merely for the sake of my health not to go to the theater.