present at the banquet--a feast to celebrate the ruin and degradation of
a man of genius.
Yet there are true souls in England, noble, generous hearts. I remember
a lunch at Mrs. Jeune's, where one declared that Wilde was at length
enjoying his deserts; another regretted that his punishment was so
slight, a third with precise knowledge intimated delicately and with
quiet complacence that two years' imprisonment with hard labour usually
resulted in idiocy or death: fifty per cent., it appeared, failed to win
through. It was more to be dreaded on all accounts than five years'
penal servitude. "You see it begins with starvation and solitary
confinement, and that breaks up the strongest. I think it will be
enough for our vainglorious talker." Miss Madeleine Stanley (now Lady
Middleton) was sitting beside me, her fine, sensitive face clouded: I
could not contain myself, I was being whipped on a sore.
"This must have been the way they talked in Jerusalem," I remarked,
"after the world-tragedy."
"You were an intimate friend of his, were you not?" insinuated the
delicate one gently.
"A friend and admirer," I replied, "and always shall be."
A glacial silence spread round the table, while the delicate one smiled
with deprecating contempt, and offered some grapes to his neighbour; but
help came. Lady Dorothy Nevill was a little further down the table: she
had not heard all that was said, but had caught the tone of the
conversation and divined the rest.
"Are you talking of Oscar Wilde?" she exclaimed. "I'm glad to hear you
say you are a friend. I am, too, and shall always be proud of having
known him, a most brilliant, charming man."
"I think of giving a dinner to him when he comes out, Lady Dorothy," I
said.
"I hope you'll ask me," she answered bravely. "I should be glad to come.
I always admired and liked him; I feel dreadfully sorry for him."
The delicate one adroitly changed the conversation and coffee came in,
but Miss Stanley said to me:
"I wish I had known him, there must have been great good in him to win
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