“Yes, he came to see my mother, told her that I would be all right in New York, and that he would take care of me.”
Mrs. Thaw said she met White in September, 1901, in a studio in East Twenty-second street. The door opened of itself, she said, and the house looked at first as if no one lived there. She said that she went upstairs and met Mr. White, a photographer, and another man.
The witness whispered the name of the man to Mr. Jerome, who wrote it down.
“There was a lot of expensive gowns there.”
“I went into the dressing-room to put on the dress. Mr. White knocked at the door and asked if I needed any help. I said, ‘No.’”
Mrs. Thaw related in detail her experience in the photographic studio and said she posed until she was very tired and that White, who had come in, ordered food and they had something to eat. The photographer left, she said, and after they had lunched she went into a dressing room to remove her kimono and put on her dress.
“I shut the door while I was inside,” added the witness. “Mr. White came to the door, knocked and asked me if I wanted any help. I said: ‘No.’”
The former artist’s model testified that she drank but one glass of champagne and when she was dressed she got into a carriage and was taken back to the hotel.
“The next night,” she continued, “I got a note from Mr. White asking me to come down to the studio for luncheon after the theater with some of his friends. A carriage would call for me, and would take me home after the party, he wrote. I went down to the Twenty-fourth street studio again and found Mr. White and no one else there.
“‘What do you think,’ he said to me, ‘the others have turned us down.’ Then I told him I had better go home, and he told me that I had better sit down and have some fruit. So I took off my hat and coat. Mr. White told me he had other floors in the garden, and that I had not seen all of his place. He would take me around and show me, he said.
“So he took me up some stairs to the floor above, where there were very beautiful decorations,” went on Mrs. Thaw. “I played for him, and he took me into another room. That room was a bedroom. On a small table stood a bottle of champagne and one glass. Mr. White poured out just one glass for me, and I paid no attention to it. Mr. White went away, came back and said: ‘I decorated this room, myself.’ Then he asked me why I was not drinking my champagne and I said I did not like it; it tasted bitter. But he persuaded me to drink it and I did.