production." Moreover, when Lady Wilde was staying at Bray, Miss Travers sent
boys to offer the pamphlet for sale to the servants in her house. In fine
Miss Travers showed a keen feminine ingenuity and pertinacity in persecution
worthy of a nobler motive.
But the defence did not rely on such annoyance as sufficient provocation for
Lady Wilde's libellous letter. The plea went on to state that Miss Travers
had applied to Sir William Wilde for money again and again, and accompanied
these applications with threats of worse pen-pricks if the requests were not
acceded to. It was under these circumstances, according to Lady Wilde, that
she wrote the letter complained of to Dr. Travers and enclosed it in a sealed
envelope. She wished to get Dr. Travers to use his parental influence to
stop Miss Travers from further disgracing herself and insulting and annoying
Sir William and Lady Wilde.
The defence carried the war into the enemy's camp by thus suggesting that Miss
Travers was blackmailing Sir William and Lady Wilde.
The attack in the hands of Serjeant Armstrong was still more deadly and
convincing. He rose early on the Monday afternoon and declared at the beginning
that the case was so painful at the beginning that he would have preferred not
to have been engaged in it--a hypocritical statement which deceived no one, and
was just as conventional-false as his wig. But with this exception the story he
told was extraordinarily clear and gripping.
Some ten years before, Miss Travers, then a young girl of nineteen, was
suffering from partial deafness, and was recommended by her own doctor to go to
Dr. Wilde, who was the chief oculist and aurist in Dublin. Miss Travers went
to Dr. Wilde, who treated her successfully. Dr. Wilde would accept no fees from
her, stating at the outset that as she was the daughter of a brother-physician,
he thought it an honour to be of use to her. Serjeant Armstrong assured his
hearers that in spite of Miss Travers' beauty he believed that at first Dr.
Wilde took nothing but a benevolent interest in the girl. Even when his
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