“I spent much more in entertaining Oscar Wilde than he did in entertaining me”; but this is preposterous self-deception.  An earlier confession of his was much nearer the truth:  “It was a sweet humiliation to me to let Oscar Wilde pay for everything and to ask him for money.”

There can be no doubt that Lord Alfred Douglas’ habitual extravagance kept Oscar Wilde hard up, and drove him to write without intermission.

There were other and worse results of the intimacy which need not be exposed here in so many words, though they must be indicated; for they derived of necessity from that increased self-assurance which has already been recorded.  As Oscar devoted himself to Lord Alfred Douglas and went about with him continually, he came to know his friends and his familiars, and went less into society so-called.  Again and again Lord Alfred Douglas flaunted acquaintance with youths of the lowest class; but no one knew him or paid much attention to him; Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, was already a famous personage whose every movement provoked comment.  From this time on the rumours about Oscar took definite form and shaped themselves in specific accusations:  his enemies began triumphantly to predict his ruin and disgrace.

Everything is known in London society; like water on sand the truth spreads wider and wider as it gradually filters lower.  The “smart set” in London has almost as keen a love of scandal as a cathedral town.  About this time one heard of a dinner which Oscar Wilde had given at a restaurant in Soho, which was said to have degenerated into a sort of Roman orgy.  I was told of a man who tried to get money by blackmailing him in his own house.  I shrugged my shoulders at all these scandals, and asked the talebearers what had been said about Shakespeare to make him rave as he raved again and again against “back-wounding calumny”; and when they persisted in their malicious stories I could do nothing but show disbelief.  Though I saw but little of Oscar during the first year or so of his intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas, one scene from this time filled me with suspicion and an undefined dread.

I was in a corner of the Cafe Royal one night downstairs, playing chess, and, while waiting for my opponent to move, I went out just to stretch my legs.  When I returned I found Oscar throned in the very corner, between two youths.  Even to my short-sighted eyes they appeared quite common:  in fact they looked like grooms.  In spite of their vulgar appearance, however, one was nice looking in a fresh boyish way; the other seemed merely depraved.  Oscar greeted me as usual, though he seemed slightly embarrassed.  I resumed my seat, which was almost opposite him, and pretended to be absorbed in the game.  To my astonishment he was talking as well as if he had had a picked audience; talking, if you please, about the Olympic games, telling how the youths wrestled and were scraped with strigulae and threw the discus and ran races and won the myrtle-wreath.  His impassioned eloquence brought the sun-bathed palaestra before one with a magic of representment.  Suddenly the younger of the boys asked: