[Illustration: "Speranza": Lady Wilde as a Young Woman]

"When my father was dying it was the same thing. I always see her
sitting there by his bedside with a sort of dark veil over her head:
quite silent, quite calm. Nothing ever troubled her optimism. She
believed that only good can happen to us. When death came to the man she
loved, she accepted it with the same serenity and when my sister died
she bore it in the same high way. My sister was a wonderful creature, so
gay and high-spirited, 'embodied sunshine,' I used to call her.

"When we lost her, my mother simply took it that it was best for the
child. Women have infinitely more courage than men, don't you think? I
have never known anyone with such perfect faith as my mother. She was
one of the great figures of the world. What she must have suffered over
my sentence I don't dare to think: I'm sure she endured agonies. She had
great hopes of me. When she was told that she was going to die, and that
she could not see me, for I was not allowed to go to her,[5] she said,
'May the prison help him,' and turned her face to the wall.

"She felt about the prison as you do, Frank, and really I think you are
both right; it has helped me. There are things I see now that I never
saw before. I see what pity means. I thought a work of art should be
beautiful and joyous. But now I see that that ideal is insufficient,
even shallow; a work of art must be founded on pity; a book or poem
which has no pity in it, had better not be written....

"I shall be very lonely when I come out, and I can't stand loneliness
and solitude; it is intolerable to me, hateful, I have had too much of
it....