Page:The Great Harry Thaw Case.djvu/243

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  • strate the truth, which will leave no hook upon which to hang

a doubt, that Evelyn Nesbit told the story she swears she did in Paris in 1903.

"In the first place, you have the undoubted, undisputed fact that Mr. Thaw in September of that year, when Evelyn's mother returned to New York—that Mr. Thaw narrated that story in a letter to his counsel, Mr. Longfellow. In the first letter he says:

"Mistress Nesbit sails to-morrow for New York. Her daughter can't be with her, because Miss N. was beguiled by a blackguard when she was but fifteen years of age. The child was drugged.

"And in a later letter to Mr. Longfellow he says: 'Her position could not be worse. She was poisoned at fifteen and three-quarters. Also since.'

"Now, gentlemen, bear in mind that these two letters were written by Mr. Thaw in Paris to his counsel, Mr. Longfellow, in New York. I ask you who is the blackguard referred to in these letters if not Stanford White? What is the superhuman negligence of the mother, if not her trip to Pittsburg, leaving her daughter alone in New York?

"How was the child beguiled, if not by Stanford White's paternal kindness and show of parental goodness?

"I leave it to you as to what these two letters can refer to if not to the story Evelyn Nesbit says she told Harry in Paris in June, 1903.

"She told how she had learned this young woman's name. He said he desired to shield her from the awful consequences of the deed. What was it the child that had come from Pittsburg, that had first posed as an artist's model, and had then gone on the stage—what was it she had told Harry Thaw and what had he told his mother?

"The learned prosecutor says that he invented it all. After inventing did he go home and tell his mother—the