knocked him heels over head.  Queensberry got up in a sad mess:  he had a swollen nose and black eye and his shirt was all stained with blood spread about by hasty wiping.  Any other man would have continued the fight or else have left the club on the spot; Queensberry took a seat at a table, and there sat for hours silent.  I could only explain it to myself by saying that his impulse to fly at once from the scene of his disgrace was very acute, and therefore he resisted it, made up his mind not to budge, and so he sat there the butt of the derisive glances and whispered talk of everyone who came into the club in the next two or three hours.  He was just the sort of person a wise man 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 letter with him, and of course he came to understand it properly.  A little later a man called Wood told me he had found some letters which I had written to Lord Alfred Douglas in a suit of clothes which Lord Alfred had given to him.  He gave me back some of the letters and I gave him a little money.  But the letter, a copy of which had been sent to Beerbohm Tree, was not amongst them.

“Some time afterwards a man named Allen called upon me one night in Tite Street, and said he had got a letter of mine which I ought to have.