How clearly I saw it then, as now, I need not tell you.  But I said to myself, “At all costs I must keep love in my heart.  If I go into prison without love, what will become of my soul?” The letters I wrote to you at that time from Holloway were my efforts to keep love as the dominant note of my own nature.  I could, if I had chosen, have torn you to pieces with bitter reproaches.  I could have rent you with maledictions.

The sins of another were being placed to my account.  Had I so chosen, I could on either trial have saved myself at his expense, not from shame indeed, but from imprisonment.[54] Had I cared to show that the crown witnesses—­the three most important—­had been carefully coached by your father and his solicitors, not in reticences merely, but in assertions, in the absolute transference deliberate, plotted, and rehearsed, of the actions and doings of someone else on to me, I could have had each one of them dismissed from the box by the judge, more summarily than even wretched perjured Atkins was.  I could have walked out of court with my tongue in my cheek, and my hands in my pockets, a free man.  The strongest pressure was put upon me to do so, I was earnestly advised, begged, entreated to do so by people, whose sole interest was my welfare, and the welfare of my house.  But I refused.  I did not choose to do so.  I have never regretted my decision for a single moment, even in the most bitter periods of my imprisonment.  Such a course of action would have been beneath me.  Sins of the flesh are nothing.  They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured.  Sins of the soul alone are shameful.  To have secured my acquittal by such means would have been a life-long torture to me.  But do you really think that you were worthy of the love I was showing you then, or that for a single moment I thought you were?  Do you really think that any period of our friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you, or that for a single moment I thought you were?  I knew you were not.  But love does not traffic in a market place, nor use a huckster’s scales.  Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive.  The aim of love is to love; no more, and no less.  You were my enemy; such an enemy as no man ever had.  I had given you my life; and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away.  In less than three years you had entirely ruined me from every point of view.

After my terrible sentence, when the prison dress was on me, and the prison house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life, crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain.  But I would not hate you.  Every day I said to myself, “I must keep love in my heart to-day, else how shall I live through the day?” I reminded myself that you meant no evil to me at any rate....

It all flashed across me, and I remember that for the first and last time in my entire prison life, I laughed.  In that laugh was all the scorn of all the world.  Prince Fleur de lys!  I saw that nothing that had happened had made you realise a single thing.  You were, in your own eyes, still the graceful prince of a trivial comedy, not the sombre figure of a tragic show.