“Lady Windermere’s Fan” was a success in every sense of the word, and during its run London was at Oscar’s feet.  There were always a few doors closed to him; but he could afford now to treat his critics with laughter, call them fogies and old-fashioned and explain that they had not a decalogue but a millelogue of sins forbidden and persons tabooed because it was easier to condemn than to understand.

I remember a lunch once when he talked most brilliantly and finished up by telling the story now published in his works as “A Florentine Tragedy.”  He told it superbly, making it appear far more effective than in its written form.  A well-known actor, piqued at being compelled to play listener, made himself ridiculous by half turning his back on the narrator.  But after lunch Willie Grenfell (now Lord Desborough), a model English athlete gifted with peculiar intellectual fairness, came round to me: 

“Oscar Wilde is most surprising, most charming, a wonderful talker.”

At the same moment Mr. K. H——­ came over to us.  He was a man who went everywhere and knew everyone.  He had quiet, ingratiating manners, always spoke in a gentle smiling way and had a good word to say for everyone, especially for women; he was a bachelor, too, and wholly unattached.  He surprised me by taking up Grenfell’s praise and breaking into a lyric: 

“The best talker who ever lived,” he said; “most extraordinary.  I am so infinitely obliged to you for asking me to meet him—­a new delight.  He brings a supernal air into life.  I am in truth indebted to you”—­all this in an affected purring tone.  I noticed for the first time that there was a touch of rouge on his face; Grenfell turned away from us rather abruptly I thought.

At this first roseate dawn of complete success and universal applause, new qualities came to view in Oscar.  Praise gave him the fillip needed in order to make him surpass himself.  His talk took on a sort of autumnal richness of colour, and assumed a new width of range; he now used pathos as well as humour and generally brought in a story or apologue to lend variety to the entertainment.  His little weaknesses, too, began to show themselves and they grew rankly in the sunshine.  He always wanted to do himself well, as the phrase goes, but now he began to eat and drink more freely than before.  His vanity became defiant.  I noticed one day that he had signed himself, Oscar O’Flahertie Wilde, I think under some verses which he had contributed years before to his College magazine.  I asked him jokingly what the O’Flahertie stood for.  To my astonishment he answered me gravely: 

“The O’Flaherties were kings in Ireland, and I have a right to the name; I am descended from them.”

I could not help it; I burst out laughing.

“What are you laughing at, Frank?” he asked with a touch of annoyance.

“It seems humorous to me,” I explained, “that Oscar Wilde should want to be an O’Flahertie,” and as I spoke a picture of the greatest of the O’Flaherties, with bushy head and dirty rags, warming enormous hairy legs before a smoking peat-fire, flashed before me.  I think something of the sort must have occurred to Oscar, too, for, in spite of his attempt to be grave, he could not help laughing.