enigma. This was why he had drawn away from the girl, after seducing
her. And it was not unnatural under the circumstances that she should
become vindictive and revengeful.

Such inferences as these, I drew from the comments of the Irish papers
at the time; but naturally I wished if possible to hear some
trustworthy contemporary on the matter. Fortunately such testimony was
forthcoming.

A Fellow of Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best
opinion of the time in an excellent pithy letter. He wrote to me that
the trial simply established, what every one believed, that "Sir
William Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and
cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without a defender!) and
that his wife was a highfalutin' pretentious creature whose pride was
as extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate
verse-making.... Even when a young woman she used to keep her rooms in
Merrion Square in semi-darkness; she laid the paint on too thick for
any ordinary light, and she gave herself besides all manner of airs."

This incisive judgment of an able and fairly impartial contemporary
observer[2] corroborates, I think, the inferences which one would
naturally draw from the newspaper accounts of the trial. It seems to
me that both combine to give a realistic photograph, so to speak, of
Sir William and Lady Wilde. An artist, however, would lean to a more
kindly picture. Trying to see the personages as they saw themselves he
would balance the doctor's excessive sensuality and lack of
self-control by dwelling on the fact that his energy and perseverance
and intimate adaptation to his surroundings had brought him in middle
age to the chief place in his profession, and if Lady Wilde was