extraordinary pleasure. Besides, the boy admired him, hung upon his lips with
his soul in his eyes; showed, too, rare intelligence in his appreciation,
confessed that he himself wrote verses and loved letters passionately. Could
more be desired than perfection perfected?

And Alfred Douglas on his side was almost as powerfully attracted; he had
inherited from his mother all her literary tastes--and more: he was already a
master-poet with a singing faculty worthy to be compared with the greatest.
What wonder if he took this magical talker, with the luminous eyes and charming
voice, and a range and play of thought beyond his imagining, for a world's
miracle, one of the Immortals. Before he had listened long, I have been told,
the youth declared his admiration passionately. They were an extraordinary pair
and were complementary in a hundred ways, not only in mind, but in character.
Oscar had reached originality of thought and possessed the culture of
scholarship, while Alfred Douglas had youth and rank and beauty, besides
being as articulate as a woman with an unsurpassable gift of expression.
Curiously enough, Oscar was as yielding and amiable in character as the boy
was self-willed, reckless, obstinate and imperious.

Years later Oscar told me that from the first he dreaded Alfred Douglas'
aristocratic, insolent boldness:

"He frightened me, Frank, as much as he attracted me, and I held away from him.
But he wouldn't have it; he sought me out again and again and I couldn't resist
him. That is my only fault. That's what ruined me. He increased my expenses
so that I could not meet them; over and over again I tried to free myself from
him; but he came back and I yielded--alas!"

Though this is Oscar's later gloss on what actually happened, it is fairly
accurate. He was never able to realise how his meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas