“Everyone came round me, Frank, and made me talk.  I hardly danced at all.  I went as Prince Rupert, and I talked as he charged but with more success, for I turned all my foes into friends.  I had the divinest evening; Oxford meant so much to me....

“I wish I could tell you all Oxford did for me.

“I was the happiest man in the world when I entered Magdalen for the first time.  Oxford—­the mere word to me is full of an inexpressible, an incommunicable charm.  Oxford—­the home of lost causes and impossible ideals; Matthew Arnold’s Oxford—­with its dreaming spires and grey colleges, set in velvet lawns and hidden away among the trees, and about it the beautiful fields, all starred with cowslips and fritillaries where the quiet river winds its way to London and the sea....  The change, Frank, to me was astounding; Trinity was as barbarian as school, with coarseness superadded.  If it had not been for two or three people, I should have been worse off at Trinity than at Portora; but Oxford—­Oxford was paradise to me.  My very soul seemed to expand within me to peace and joy.  Oxford—­the enchanted valley, holding in its flowerlet cup all the idealism of the middle ages.[3] Oxford is the capital of romance, Frank; in its own way as memorable as Athens, and to me it was even more entrancing.  In Oxford, as in Athens, the realities of sordid life were kept at a distance.  No one seemed to know anything about money or care anything for it.  Everywhere the aristocratic feeling; one must have money, but must not bother about it.  And all the appurtenances of life were perfect:  the food, the wine, the cigarettes; the common needs of life became artistic symbols, our clothes even won meaning and significance.  It was at Oxford I first dressed in knee breeches and silk stockings.  I almost reformed fashion and made modern dress aesthetically beautiful; a second and greater reformation, Frank.  What a pity it is that Luther knew nothing of dress, had no sense of the becoming.  He had courage but no fineness of perception.  I’m afraid his neckties would always have been quite shocking!” and he laughed charmingly.

“What about the inside of the platter, Oscar?”

“Ah, Frank, don’t ask me, I don’t know; there was no grossness, no coarseness; but all delicate delights!

    “‘Fair passions and bountiful pities and loves without pain,’"[4]

and he laughed mischievously at the misquotation.

“Loves?” I questioned, and he nodded his head smiling; but would not be drawn.

“All romantic and ideal affections.  Every successive wave of youths from the public schools brought some chosen spirits, perfectly wonderful persons, the most graceful and fascinating disciples that a poet could desire, and I preached the old-ever-new gospel of individual revolt and individual perfection.  I showed them that sin with its curiosities widened the horizons of life.  Prejudices and prohibitions are mere walls to imprison the soul.  Indulgence may hurt the body, Frank, but nothing except suffering hurts the spirit; it is self-denial and abstinence that maim and deform the soul.”