“When he threw the kimono over me he left the room. I screamed harder than ever. I don’t remember much of anything after that.
“He took me home and I sat up all night crying.”
Regard for the morals of the young prevents the publication of the awful details disclosed at this point in the evidence. The yellowest of yellow journals omitted the hideous details flashed over the wires, and with all the shocking evidence published, the public has no conception of awful facts revealed by this pitiful tragedy.
“What did he say afterward?”
“He made me swear that I would never tell my mother about it. He said there was no use in talking and the greatest thing in this world was not to get found out. He said the girls in the theaters were foolish to talk. He laughed afterward.
“He said it was all right—that there was ‘nothing so nice as young girls and nothing so loathsome as fat ones. You must never get fat.’”
The black heart of Stanford White was disclosed in all its hideousness at last! The final shred of respectability had been torn from his reputation. The almost fainting Evelyn had completed the human sacrifice. Her life story, tragic beyond human comprehension, had been told under oath—told to a jury that gasped at every sentence, shuddered at every disclosure. It was the coup d’etat of the defense! the staggering blow reserved to overwhelm Jerome and his allies. What a story it was that the poor little victim of a sybaritic brute told! What a tale of Nero’s time it seemed to be! Tiberius and Caligula planned dens and stage settings such as Evelyn Nesbit described in the haunts of Stanford White. Did Tiberius and Caligula ever plan darker, more foul conspiracies against helpless little girls than the plots of the great architect seemed to have been? And with the telling of the heart-rending story came new thoughts, new lights upon the shadowy life of the man who died before the pistol of Harry Thaw.
No one ever denied that Stanford White, no matter what he may have been, was a generous giver, a good Samaritan in the time of need. He supported Evelyn, her mother, and her brother, in royal fashion.
What was to be deduced from the largess of White, both to the Nesbits and to scores of others?
Was the licentious architect a Jekyll and a Hyde?