Residing down the hall from Roland on the second floor of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club was a thirty-two-year-old bon vivant named Henry Crossman Barnet. Brown-haired, blue-eyed, with a small, neatly trimmed mustache and a decided paunch, he had joined the club, as one commentator put it, “with a pleasant hope of reducing his weight.”1 With his robust appetites and cheerful aversion to exercise, however, he had quickly abandoned that goal. Still, though he made little use of its impressive athletic facilities, the social life of the club perfectly suited his temperament. A thoroughly gregarious creature, he was well-liked by men and possessed an easy charm that made him—despite his fleshy cheeks and pudgy frame—highly attractive to women.
“Barney,” as he was known around the club, had formed a warm friendship with Roland, based partly on their shared dislike of Harry Cornish. To be sure, Barnet wasn’t weirdly fixated on the swaggering athletic director, the way Roland was. Still, he had his complaints. Cornish, he felt, was doing a poor job of managing the club facilities and was especially lax about supervising the janitorial staff. The pool area was always a mess after swim meets, and the hallway floors weren’t kept clean enough—a particular problem for Barnet, who liked to walk barefoot between his apartment and the bathroom.2
One evening in early November 1897, Roland took Blanche to the Metropolitan Opera to hear the Banda Rossa, a highly popular touring group that had only recently recorded their sprightly rendition of “Funiculi Funicula” for Mr. Edison’s latest technological marvel, the phonograph.3 During intermission, Roland spotted Barnet in the foyer, called him over, and introduced him to Blanche.
“From this encounter,” Blanche would later write with atypical understatement, “a friendship developed that came to have great significance.”4
Following the concert, the three of them proceeded to Delmonico’s, where they were joined by the popular playwright Clyde Fitch, whose presence, as Blanche recalled, “gave the evening an additional bit of that glamor and brilliancy that so appealed to me.” As the supper progressed, she found herself drawn to Barnet. Though he possessed none of Roland’s cultivated wit, there was something about him—a “forcible, virile” quality—strangely absent from the infinitely more athletic Molineux.5
The following night, Barnet dined with the two of them again, this time at the club. By the time the coffee and liqueur were served, “a delightful camaraderie,” in Blanche’s words, had developed among them.
The subject of the forthcoming Club Carnival arose, and Roland—who was to perform on the horizontal bars as part of the festivities—asked Barney if he would mind serving as Blanche’s escort until the show was concluded. Barnet was only too happy to oblige.6
Blanche, too, was secretly pleased. From her very “first meeting with Henry Barnet”—as she confessed many years later—she “was conscious that he possessed a little more than the average qualifications for holding one’s interest. I sensed a hidden strength and a brute force in him, and it was as natural as breathing that I should capitulate to that!”7
On the night of the carnival, after thrilling to Roland’s typically dazzling routine, the three of them repaired to his room to share a bottle of champagne. Though Blanche, who had never seen Roland perform before, gushed over his skill, her thoughts were really on Barnet. Indeed, by that time—less than a week after their first encounter—she was already entertaining highly charged fantasies about him. “Mentally, I had already yielded to him, and I was secretly thrilled at the thought of surrender.”8
It didn’t take long for Roland to sense the growing attraction between Blanche and Barnet, and he was quick to stake his claim. One evening shortly after the carnival, while the three of them dined at the club, Barney, in his jocular way, began telling Mollie how much he envied him.
“Congratulations, old man,” he exclaimed, clapping him on the shoulder. “What a lucky fellow you are.”
“Why, what does that mean?” said Blanche, feeling a sudden rush of irritation. “Roland and I are not going to be married.”
“Oh, yes, we are,” Roland coolly replied.
“But we are not even engaged!” said Blanche, laughing to soften her petulant tone.
“True, but we are going to be,” said Roland, casting a pointed look first at Blanche, then at Barnet.
Blanche instantly understood what was going on. Roland had been observing her “growing infatuation for Barnet.” He was “determined to leave no one in doubt concerning his feelings for me, and he would discourage any interest that might develop elsewhere.”9
But Blanche was not about to be pressured into marriage. She was not in love with Roland. Nor, for that matter, with his friend. But she was determined to act on the powerful physical attraction she felt for Barnet.
She knew, of course, that she was playing with fire. But the element of danger only made the situation more “exciting and alluring.” And why shouldn’t she fling herself into an affair with the virile Barnet? After all, she told herself, “I was free, free as air and owed no allegiance to anyone.”10
She made that position unmistakably clear on Thanksgiving Day, when Roland got down on one knee and formally proposed to her.
Blanche—trying to take the sting out of the rejection by assuring him that she might feel otherwise in the future—turned him down.