“Mr. Thaw was very much agitated. He said Hummel was a blackmailer and he said, I think, that there was something bad in the air and he impressed me that he was going to see Mr. Longfellow, his lawyer.”
Mrs. Thaw testified to going to her own lawyer and relating her experiences with Hummel. Her lawyer, she said, was greatly incensed at what she told him of her experiences in Hummel’s office. Mrs. Thaw said:
“My lawyer, too, told me that Hummel was a shyster.” A laugh went around the room. Hummel was at this time under conviction in a divorce scandal. Mrs. Thaw continued:
“Mr. Thaw told me that I had no business to speak again with Stanford White. He accused me of having been imprudent with Mr. White since I came back from Europe, and I said that it was a lie. He said it would look to people as if I was a blackmailer by going to Hummel’s office.”
“Did you tell of another incident?”
“Yes, I told him of one day when White came to the hotel Navarre and he was terribly mad, and walked up and down the room with a camp chair in his hand. ‘My child,’ he said, ‘what did you tell Mr. Hummel about me?’ I said I had not said anything, and then Mr. White said I must have told Hummel, because Hummel had just squeezed $1,000 out of him and he was not going to send another $1,000.”
The witness, continuing, said that she did not know what she had signed when she signed the paper at the request of Mr. White in his office in Madison Square garden.
“I called Mr. White up on the telephone after I had talked to Mr. Thaw, and I demanded of Mr. White that he put the paper in the fire. He said he did not have it—but that it was in Mr. Hummel’s office. I said: ‘Very well,’ and told him I was going down to Mr. Hummel’s office immediately. He told me to not talk about the matter over the telephone, and I said I did not care who heard me. Then White said he would meet me on the corner and I met him.
“When I met him we went down to Mr. Hummel’s office. He showed me the paper and showed me my signature and asked if it was mine, and I said it was. Then they put the paper in a big jardiniere and burned it. Afterward I told Mr. Thaw all about it and also saw Mr. Longfellow and told him.
“How did Mr. Thaw treat you from that time until he proposed marriage?”