Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

Cornish denied it, but other members testified to frequent lapses on the part of the physical director into vulgarity which was, to say the least, below the standards set by good taste.

“This club isn’t large enough to hold us both,” Molineux said, and at about that time Weeks invited him to join the New York Athletic Club where he felt that things would be far more pleasant.

He gave in his resignation, which was accepted, and quit the place.

The new club did not offer living quarters and for this reason Molineux took some rooms in a building of the factory at Newark which were made quite comfortable and which were convenient in the event of late hours in his office. But for the most part, his social activities and club membership brought him to New York each night.

There was one result at least, of Molineux’s adversion to Cornish. The athletic director was asked to live outside the club and his rooms were turned over to the use of a member.

He went to live with a Mrs. Katherine Adams, a distant relative whom he called aunt, in her flat on Eighty-Sixth Street.

Here in the Adams flat also lived Mrs. Laura Rodgers, and her son, daughter and grandson of Mrs. Adams. Mrs. Rodgers, separated from her husband, had an excellent alimony, which with what Cornish paid, allowed the family to live in ease.

A “Persecuted Saint”

Later, the investigation tried to prove that the athlete was unduly interested in the divorcee. This theory, however, failed to gain any ground and the idea was dismissed after three days.

Now, of course, Cornish never saw Molineux, who gave the Knickerbocker Club a wide berth. Occasionally he would hear of him at some athletic meet, or from some of the members. He saw Barnet, who frequently ran into the young chemist socially and with whom a social friendship was maintained.

These were happy days for Molineux, for he had by this time formed an acquaintance with a certain Miss Blanche Cheeseborough, an acquaintance fast ripening into a romance.

Molineux, usually aloof and detached where women were concerned became at once infatuated when he met her.

Miss Cheeseborough has been described in the press in more various ways probably than any other woman ever appearing in the news. In those days it was not the duty of the reporter to call the woman of whom he wrote beautiful, unless she happened to merit the term.

Miss Cheeseborough therefore was called everything ranging from downright ugly to exceedingly lovely. Some called her plain, referring disparagingly to the glass eye, the result of an accident in childhood; others referred to the eye as just the point which gave her charm.

She was in her early twenties, undeniably prepossessing, and endowed with the quality called style.

“Plain until she smiles,” one man wrote of her, “and then a vague dimple appears in the corner of her mouth, her upper lip lifting curiously like that of a teasing puppy.”

Some one who saw her later under difficult circumstances said that she had the look of a “persecuted saint.” All agreed that she was poised, mysterious, inscrutable, fascinating to a degree.

And, consequently, Roland Molineux had many rivals.

Her life history, too, is interesting. She had come to New York from Rhode Island with her parents who died subsequently, leaving her in the ostensible care of two married sisters.

Many Rivals

She was living with one of them, at the time she met Molineux, in an over-furnished, over-elaborate apartment on the West Side.

Although her parents left her no money, she subsisted well, mainly on the bounty of her brothers and sisters. She had a job, singing in the choir of a Brooklyn church which paid her ten dollars a week.

She was quiet and modest and her shy little manners of speech made her known and loved by the church members. She dressed quietly on Sundays and thanked the Sunday school superintendent for a modest bouquet of flowers and for lemonade which was tendered her at the simple Sunday school picnics.

During the days when Molineux pressed his suit, Blanche was most charming. He was not a jealous admirer, for he presented many of his friends, including Barnet, who also became infatuated.

The number of rivals swelled and swelled.

“Was Barnet in love with Miss Cheeseborough?” Molineux was asked later and he replied that naturally he did not know what was in the other’s mind.

“I can hardly blame him if he admired her,” Molineux added. “Every one did,” he explained.

Mercury Poison

Molineux proposed to Miss Cheese-borough on Thanksgiving Day and while she did not immediately accept him, she did so later. Barnet, fluttering about, did not, as far as the evidence went, propose at all.

The relations between the two men were markedly cordial — there was never, apparently, any break between them.