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Show Like Hawthorne's Scarlet. Woman. Hardly'has Buffalo society recovered from the exposure incident to the Burdick murder mystery and its scandalous disclosures than rascality and general "cussedne8&', has cropped out in a new form to torture-the society lights connected witlLthis disgusting dis-gusting scandal. Driven from Buffalo by anonymous anony-mous jersecution, Mrs. Gertrude Paine, whose intimacy inti-macy with the principals in the Burdick murder mystery brought her into publicity, says that she will never return to her home there. "Unsigned letters have come to me continually since the ending end-ing of the' Burdick inquest," said Jlrs. Paine, "and they have gotten me into such a nervous state that I ami almost a vaeek physically and mentally. These lejters all warn me that I 'must' take the greatest care to protect myself; that I must not go out alone and never after nightfall. Of course, it has worried me nearly to death, for I feel probajbly some one is anxious for my death, as they were for Edward Bur-dick's. Bur-dick's. If Arthur, Pennell was alive I might think tliat I had cause to be frightened, but I cannot see who is. left possibly to want my death. After, Burdick Bur-dick was murdered I used to think that I had great cause to be thankful that my life was not taken in connection with that scandal, for Arthur Pennell thought that I knew far too much about his private affairs and those of Mrs. Burdick.. He believed this so implicitly that he had detectives following me for weeks." The anonymous letter-writer is a most cowardly scoundrel, but in this case he is probably inflicting deserved punishment on Mrs. .Paine. Every society woman or society man who figured in this nauseating scandal, whether or not they-escaped exposure, should be branded as was the woman in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." They hare already al-ready been marked b the decent people of Buffalo. Mrs. Paine is not entitled to sympathy. She is sira ply being punished by one of the black-hearted members of the immoral set to which she belonged and which made things hum in Buffalo's social cesspool cess-pool until the hand of an assassin cut short the carousals ca-rousals of this clique of moral lepers. |