WOMAN'S WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 273, 15 May 1912, Page 6

WOMAN'S WORLD

(Conducted by "Eileen"). DESERTED HUSBANDS TRACEDY OF OVERHEARD GOSSIP. The most sensational elopement in Washington society for many years resulted recently in the suicide of the deserted husband, Mr. Philip Hichborn, soil of the late Rear-Admiral Hicliborn. Mr. Hichborn's wife was formerly Miss Eleanor Hoyt, daughter of the late Solicitor-General of the State Department, and is now believed to be in France. She left the United States

si'.- v. o .i with Mr. Horace Wylie, a young lawyer 'well known in Washington, with whom she had previously eloped, and from whom she bad refused to be separated. Mrs. Hichborn and Mr. Wylie, who is married and has three children, left Washington together in December two years ago. Every effort was made to ■conceal the scandal. Eventually, at the intercession of Mrs. Hichborn's mother, the two returned to their homes, Mr. Hichborn and Mrs. Wylie having agreed to forgive the elopement and to continue for appearances' sake the married life which their partners had abandoned It was apparently impossible to continue this. Last April Mr. Wylie settled the bulk of his fortune on his wife and j children, and he and Mrs. Hichborn returned to Europe. The latter's broken- I hearted husband, reft- 'ng the advice of j his friends to obtain divorce, devoted I himself to his little daughter. | Recently he went for a walk and visited one of his clubs. There he overheard the gossip that Mrs. Hichborn had become a mother in Europe. Mr. Hicliborn I returned 'home, locked himself in his I room, and there he was presently found with a bullet in his brain. In a note which he left beside liiin he said: "I'm not to blame for this; my Imind has given way." Both families are connected with the best-known families in Washington.

UNWILLING BRIDE. COUNTESS SHOT ON EVE OF BETROTHAL. Countess Katinka Andrassy, a lovely girl of nineteen and belle of the Buda- ! pest season, is lying in the hospital there \ with a bullet wound in her side. The countess lives with her step-father, Count Julius Andrassy, who married his deceased brother's wife. Relatives had urged the girl to marry a man whom she did not love. After a long resistance she finally gave way, and the betrothal was about to be proclaimed. The girl, seeing no hope of escape, went with her maid and purchased a revolver. She then returned home and shot herself in the region of the heart. Hej relatives made efforts to keep the affair secret, and did not notify the authorities, but had the unconscious girl wrapped in a sheet and conveyed to a distant hospital in a motor car. The physicians have extracted the bullet, but consider that her condition is very critical.

LOVE TRAGEDIES MURDER AND SUICIDE TERMINATE FOUR ROMANCES. Nearly every day brings from Italy a grim story of love and death. Four such occurred in the last few days of March. In a bedroom in a Naples hotel a young nobleman, the Marquis Salvatore Volpicella, was shot dead by a German adventuress, a lady whose real name is still withheld from the police, but who, according to the German Consul, belongs to one of the leading aristocratic families in Berlin. Having killed the Marquis, she straightway shot herself. The quarrel appears to have originated over Volpicella's relations with a young actress, Olga Gentili, whose photograph was discovered torn to shreds on the table. A melodramatic development of the affair has since happened in Signorina Gentili's sudden elopement from Naples with a sea captain, so that the celebrated theatrical company wherein she was the leading lady had been obliged to suspend its performances. Signor Francesco Borsetti, a manuficturer in Turin, about the same time murdered a favorite music-hall artist, Maria Rossi, in her sleep at a boardinghouse in Naples, and after the lapse of some hours turned a Browning revolver upon himself.

Borsetti was not long ago married to a distinguished Piedmontese heiress. The singers' efforts to free herself from his attention being in vain, she at length transferred her residence to Southern Italy, where Borsetti's visit was prompted by rumors of her fickleness. While she was asleep on the night of the tragedy, Borsetti seems to have searched her belongings.

In Milan a jealous girl who had an officer lover in Tripoli, went to the family residence, whither he had just returned, and demanded her love-letters. As the young officer turned to fetch them from the cabinet the girl pulled out a pistol and shot him in the head. She then shot herself through the heart. She had been practising at a shooting saloon for some weeks.

Another Milanese military officer took a young lady belonging to a well-to-do family for a trip on Lake Garda. Towards evening they climbed one of the rugged mountains by its banks, and there on a jutting rock the officer killed his companion and afterwards himself, in fulfilment, as it now transpires, of a previously written joint agreement.

ROMANCE OF AN ITALIAN GIRL The celebrated woman journalist known as Mantra, whose career is tinged with romance, has died suddenly in Rome. Donna Gina Sobrero, for that was her real name, was the daughter of a Piedmontese colonel 'and a Neapolitan baroness, Colonna di Stigliano. When a girl of fifteen, studying at the Regina Margherita College, in Turin, she met the notorious adventurer Wilcox, a native of Honolulu, who boasted royal lineage and claimed to be King of the Sandwich Islands. Signorina Sobrero, stirred by the pseudo prince's personality and the legends of chivalry associated with his name, ended by marrying him and accompanying him on a honeymoon voyage back to the land where she expected to reign as queen. On her arrival she learned that the youthful pretender's nearest title to the throne was that of having a father, who, as a skilful carpenter, had been employed in constructing a Oiandsome wooden throne for the monarch. After a long period of martyrdom at the hands of her brutal spouse, this refined, highly educated young lady succeeded in escaping to California with her infant daughter. Finally she went back to Italy, where her lawsuit for the annulment of her marriage created immense interest, terminating in a favorable judgment on the score of mistaken personality. I