Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/222

194 detective to enmesh me. Attired as a Beau Brummel, the sneak first scraped acquaintance and then insinuated himself into my confidence. Soon he succeeded in seducing me where it was possible for a confederate to employ a camera without my suspecting anything. It was on the basis of that photograph that I was sentenced. My accomplice, who had been the sole occasion of the so-called felony, and who alone had proceeded deliberately and wilfully, received merely the thanks of the court and of society.

You inquire about the element of suffering during my incarceration. The first week in the Tombs jail, I lay awake half of every night in mental anguish, for I realized I was a martyr. Every one was accusing me of deepdyed depravity when my life was actually on a high ethical plane. All the journals announced in big headlines that I had been surprised in a double life—intimating wilful immorality. "Immorality"!

"Immorality!" That was the keynote of all newspaper accounts of myself, as if hitherto "immorality" had been an unknown quantity with Knickerbockers. People could not get through singing the refrain: "At last a New Yorker has been discovered who is infected with immorality!!!" The journals stated that I had been incarcerated in the Tombs to await trial, the evidence against me being so incontrovertible and the felony charged so revolting that bail had been refused. At the time I was unenlightened as to what that evidence was and a thousand possibilities coursed through my stream of thought, none of which, however, emerged in my subsequent trial.

I was terribly browbeaten by the plebeian police. They resorted to subterfuge and endeavored by every