“The last time I saw him was at that tragic luncheon of yours at the Cafe Royal; and I am quite sure our total of meetings from first to last did not exceed twelve, and may not have exceeded six.

“I definitely recollect six:  (1) At the at-home aforesaid. (2) At Macmurdo’s house in Fitzroy Street in the days of the Century Guild and its paper ‘The Hobby Horse.’ (3) At a meeting somewhere in Westminster at which I delivered an address on Socialism, and at which Oscar turned up and spoke.  Robert Ross surprised me greatly by telling me, long after Oscar’s death, that it was this address of mine that moved Oscar to try his hand at a similar feat by writing ’The Soul of Man Under Socialism.’ (4) A chance meeting near the stage door of the Haymarket Theatre, at which our queer shyness of one another made our resolutely cordial and appreciative conversation so difficult that our final laugh and shake-hands was almost a reciprocal confession. (5) A really pleasant afternoon we spent together on catching one another in a place where our presence was an absurdity.  It was some exhibition in Chelsea:  a naval commemoration, where there was a replica of Nelson’s Victory and a set of P. & O. cabins which made one seasick by mere association of ideas.  I don’t know why I went or why Wilde went; but we did; and the question what the devil we were doing in that galley tickled us both.  It was my sole experience of Oscar’s wonderful gift as a raconteur.  I remember particularly an amazingly elaborate story which you have no doubt heard from him:  an example of the cumulation of a single effect, as in Mark Twain’s story of the man who was persuaded to put lightning conductor after lightning conductor at every possible point on his roof until a thunderstorm came and all the lightning in the heavens went for his house and wiped it out.

“Oscar’s much more carefully and elegantly worked out story was of a young man who invented a theatre stall which economized space by ingenious contrivances which were all described.  A friend of his invited twenty millionaires to meet him at dinner so that he might interest them in the invention.  The young man convinced them completely by his demonstration of the saving in a theatre holding, in ordinary seats, six hundred people, leaving them eager and ready to make his fortune.  Unfortunately he went on to calculate the annual saving in all the theatres of the world; then in all the churches of the world; then in all the legislatures; estimating finally the incidental and moral and religious effects of the invention until at the end of an hour he had estimated a profit of several thousand millions:  the climax of course being that the millionaires folded their tents and silently stole away, leaving the ruined inventor a marked man for life.