at I had known Willie James years ago at Cannes.
"My own name is James," he said. "Will you think me inquisitive if I
venture to ask yours?" I, told him, and he at once "placed" me. "I
should think," he said, "you must know Baltimore well." I asked him why
he thought so. "Well," he said, "in the book of yours that I like
best--in _The Old Order Changes_--you introduce an American colonel--a
Southerner, and you describe him on one occasion as absorbed in the
perusal of the Baltimore _Weekly Sun_. That paper's a real paper, and,
because you introduced its name, I thought that you must know
Baltimore." The name, so far as I was concerned, was entirely my own
invention.

Lloyd Bryce, who knew of my arrival, and who had, during my absence,
left Long Island for New York, asked me next day to dine with him. This
was the first of a new series of hospitalities. The company was
extremely entertaining. It comprised Mr. Jerome, celebrated in the legal
world, and at that time especially celebrated in connection with a
sensational case which was exciting the attention of the public from New
York to San Francisco. This was the trial of Thaw for the murder of
Stanford White, of which dramatic incident Evelyn Nesbit was the
heroine. She was, at least in appearance, little more than a schoolgirl.
She had lived with Stanford White, however, on terms of precocious
intimacy. Subsequently Thaw, a rich "degenerate," had married her, but
the thought of Stanford White was always ready to sting him into moods
of morbid jealousy. He took her one evening after dinner to a roof
garden in New York. Stanford White was by accident sitting at a table in
front of him. Watching his wife closely, Thaw detected, or thought he
detected, signs of a continued understanding between her and her late
"protector." Quietly leaving her side, he approached Stanford White from
behind and shot him dead with a pistol before the whole of the assembled
company. The defense was that his rival had given him outrageous
provocation, and that he himself was temporarily, if not chronically,
insane. Every attempt was made by the partisans of his wife to enlist
public feeling in her favor; to prove that Stanford White was the
aggressor, and that her husband's deed was unpremeditated. The trial was
protracted, and the story, as it was brought to light, was one which
could hardly be equaled outside Balzac's novels. Had the heroine of this
drama not been a beautiful young woman, sh