“Does this ‘dementia Americana’ flaunt the woman it loves for two long years through the capitals of Europe and then kill? ‘Dementia Americana’ never hides behind the skirts of a woman; ‘dementia Americana’ never puts a woman on the stand to lay bare her shame to protect it; no woman could in the category where ‘dementia Americana’ prevails.
“‘When I discharged those shots into his head,’ said Thaw, ‘I didn’t know I was discharging shots. I didn’t know it was Stanford White. I didn’t know I was killing him, nor did I know it was wrong.’
“It was wrong under the law. When the anarchists threw the bombs in Chicago they had no personal grievance against any of the four policemen who were killed. It is not a question whether the slayer justified himself, not the form of his own conscience. It is the law of the land that must be satisfied.
“Let me first deal with the dead man. A middle-aged man, care-gray already, a man with a wife and children, a man of position in the community, a man of genius. He comes into the life of this girl. He assists her and her family. Does he make a single insidious advance until the night mentioned here?
“Does he give her a single rich gift? Why, it was stipulated here that the gifts were trifles—a hat, a coat. Did he try to dazzle her with rich gifts? Did he try to see if she would yield to drink? No. Night after night at dinners he would tell her she could have but one glass of champagne. In the company of actresses, and those miserable persons about town who seem to think that the society of a chorus girl is the only one for them, did he not seek to protect her from them?
“This angel child, as Delmas depicted her—this chaste, good being, cannot recall the time within three months of it when this brute ruined her.
“When she could not fix the time of her life’s wreck my learned friend from the Pacific slope concluded, ‘Why don’t you prove an alibi for Stanford White? The doors are thrown wide open.’ When the people called Wittans to testify that there was no such drug as she described the door was closed. When Eichemeyer, the photographer, was called to fix the date of the event—it occurred the night of the day after this picture was taken—the door was closed.
“The learned judge ruled justly. I offered this not as new evidence, but to call the story of the ‘angel child.’
“Maidens know well enough to appreciate the distinction between right and wrong—their blushes, their reserve, their shrinking would impress upon them indelibly the time when any such attempt is made to destroy their purity. Was she brought up more carefully than your own daughters?
“And yet she meets him again and again and again. She meets him eight or ten times at the tower. She meets him in the Twenty-fourth street place because she believed others would be there. And then all these subsequent attacks were attacks with liquor. After all these, there was marked for identification, with greatest ostentation, a number of letters written by Stanford White—this great ogre!