would avoid and a clever one would use--a dangerous, sharp, ill-handled tool.

Disliking his father, I did not care to meet Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar's newest
friend.

I saw Oscar less frequently after the success of his first play; he no longer
needed my editorial services, and was, besides, busily engaged; but I have one
good trait to record of him. Some time before I had lent him L50; so long as he
was hard up I said nothing about it; but after the success of his second play,
I wrote to him saying that the L50 would be useful to me if he could spare it.
He sent me a cheque at once with a charming letter.

He was now continually about again with Lord Alfred Douglas who, it appeared,
had had a disagreement with Lord Cromer and returned to London. Almost
immediately scandalous stories came into circulation concerning them:

"Have you heard the latest about Lord Alfred and Oscar? I'm told they're being
watched by the police," and so forth and so on interminably. One day a story
came to me with such wealth of weird detail that it was manifestly at least
founded on fact. Oscar was said to have written extraordinary letters to
Lord Alfred Douglas: a youth called Alfred Wood had stolen the letters from
Lord Alfred Douglas' rooms in Oxford and had tried to blackmail Oscar with them.
The facts were so peculiar and so precise that I asked Oscar about it. He met
the accusation at once and very fairly, I thought, and told me the whole story.
It puts the triumphant power and address of the man in a strong light, and so I
will tell it as he told it to me.

"When I was rehearsing 'A Woman of No Importance' at the Haymarket," he began,
"Beerbohm Tree showed me a letter I had written a year or so before to Alfred
Douglas. He seemed to think it dangerous, but I laughed at him and read the