Mr. Charles Hawtrey, the actor, gave a dinner to Lord Queensberry to
celebrate their triumph. Some forty Englishmen of good position were
present at the banquet--a feast to celebrate the ruin and degradation of
a man of genius.

Yet there are true souls in England, noble, generous hearts. I remember
a lunch at Mrs. Jeune's, where one declared that Wilde was at length
enjoying his deserts; another regretted that his punishment was so
slight, a third with precise knowledge intimated delicately and with
quiet complacence that two years' imprisonment with hard labour usually
resulted in idiocy or death: fifty per cent., it appeared, failed to win
through. It was more to be dreaded on all accounts than five years'
penal servitude. "You see it begins with starvation and solitary
confinement, and that breaks up the strongest. I think it will be
enough for our vainglorious talker." Miss Madeleine Stanley (now Lady
Middleton) was sitting beside me, her fine, sensitive face clouded: I
could not contain myself, I was being whipped on a sore.

"This must have been the way they talked in Jerusalem," I remarked,
"after the world-tragedy."

"You were an intimate friend of his, were you not?" insinuated the
delicate one gently.

"A friend and admirer," I replied, "and always shall be."

A glacial silence spread round the table, while the delicate one smiled
with deprecating contempt, and offered some grapes to his neighbour; but
help came. Lady Dorothy Nevill was a little further down the table: she
had not heard all that was said, but had caught the tone of the