"What could I say, Frank? Why should I belabour the beaten? The man is a wasp
and delights in using his sting. I have done more perhaps than anyone to make
him famous. I had no wish to hurt him."

Was it magnanimity or weakness or, as I think, a constitutional, a feminine
shrinking from struggle and strife. Whatever the cause, it was clear that
Oscar was what Shakespeare called himself, "an unhurtful opposite."

It is quite possible that if he had been attacked face to face, Oscar would have
given a better account of himself. At Mrs. Grenfell's (now Lady Desborough)
he crossed swords once with the Prime Minister and came off victorious. Mr.
Asquith began by bantering him, in appearance lightly, in reality, seriously,
for putting many of his sentences in italics.

"The man who uses italics," said the politician, "is like the man who raises his
voice in conversation and talks loudly in order to make himself heard."

It was the well-known objection which Emerson had taken to Carlyle's overwrought
style, pointed probably by dislike of the way Oscar monopolised conversation.

Oscar met the stereotyped attack with smiling good-humour.

"How delightful of you, Mr. Asquith, to have noticed that! The brilliant phrase,
like good wine, needs no bush. But just as the orator marks his good things by
a dramatic pause, or by raising or lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the
writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak,
like a jeweller--an excusable love of one's art, not all mere vanity, I like to
think"--all this with the most pleasant smile and manner.