"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!
"And yet you will recall that on one occasion a Mr. P. called at the Twenty-fourth street house and found the angel child downstairs undressing.
"Was there one of these letters put in evidence! Is it credible that if a single one of these letters contained the slightest intimation of indecency that it would not have been put in evidence?
"Could there have been these successive ill-treatments month after month and yet not a single line in all those letters except words of tender appreciation? Contrast those letters with this, for instance: 'Men celebrated for licking toes,' the letter of this most modern St. George, who leads the angel child up to the true light. After days of description of the baseness and debauchery of Stanford White, it seems as if the spirit of Stanford White itself would have come here to say to Evelyn Thaw: 'What! Not one word of kindness—not one word to say for me?'"
Here Jerome's voice broke, his chin quivered, and he sobbed for a moment. Drying his eyes, he continued:
"The law will not allow it." (Jerome, still talking of
