Your letter was delightful, red and yellow wine to me; but I am sad and out of sorts.  Bosie, you must not make scenes with me.  They kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life.  I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion.  I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me.  I would sooner (’here a word is indecipherable,’ Mr. Carson went on, ’but I will ask the witness’)[13]—­than have you bitter, unjust, hating....  I must see you soon.  You are the divine thing I want, the thing of genius and beauty; but I don’t know how to do it.  Shall I come to Salisbury?  My bill here is L49 for a week.  I have also got a new sitting-room....  Why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy?  I fear I must leave—­no money, no credit, and a heart of lead.

     YOUR OWN OSCAR.

Oscar said that it was an expression of his tender admiration for Lord Alfred Douglas.

“You have said,” Mr. Carson went on, “that all the statements about persons in the plea of justification were false.  Do you still hold to that assertion?”

“I do.”

Mr. Carson then paused and looked at the Judge.  Justice Collins shuffled his papers together and announced that the cross-examination would be continued on the morrow.  As the Judge went out, all the tongues in the court broke loose.  Oscar was surrounded by friends congratulating him and rejoicing.

I was not so happy and went away to think the matter out.  I tried to keep up my courage by recalling the humorous things Oscar had said during the cross-examination.  I recalled too the dull commonplaces of Mr. Carson.  I tried to persuade myself that it was all going on very well.  But in the back of my mind I realised that Oscar’s answers, characteristic and clever as many of them were, had not impressed the jury, were indeed rather calculated to alienate them.  He had taken the purely artistic standpoint, had not attempted to go higher and reach a synthesis which would conciliate the Philistine jurymen as well as the thinking public, and the Judge.

Mr. Carson was in closer touch with the jury, being nearer their intellectual level, and there was a terrible menace in his last words.  To-morrow, I said to myself, he will begin to examine about persons and not books.  He did not win on the literary question, but he was right to bring it in.  The passages he had quoted, and especially Oscar’s letters to Lord Alfred Douglas, had created a strong prejudice in the minds of the jury.  They ought not to have had this effect, I thought, but they had.  My contempt for Courts of law deepened:  those twelve jurymen were anything but the peers of the accused:  how could they judge him?

* * * * *

The second day of the trial was very different from the first.  There seemed to be a gloom over the Court.  Oscar went into the box as if it had been the dock; he had lost all his spring.  Mr. Carson settled down to the cross-examination with apparent zest.  It was evident from his mere manner that he was coming to what he regarded as the strong part of his case.  He began by examining Oscar as to his intimacy with a person named Taylor.