through, forced myself to read it in Italian to get the full savour and significance of it.  Dante, too, had been in the depths and drunk the bitter lees of despair.  I shall want a little library when I come out, a library of a score of books.  I wonder if you will help me to get it.  I want Flaubert, Stevenson, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas pere, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Anatole France, Theophile Gautier, Dante, Goethe, Meredith’s poems, and his ‘Egoist,’ the Song of Solomon, too, Job, and, of course, the Gospels.”

“I shall be delighted to get them for you,” I said, “if you will send me the list.  By the by, I hear that you have been reconciled to your wife; is that true?  I should be glad to know it’s true.”

“I hope it will be all right,” he said gravely, “she is very good and kind.  I suppose you have heard,” he went on, “that my mother died since I came here, and that leaves a great gap in my life....  I always had the greatest admiration and love for my mother.  She was a great woman, Frank, a perfect idealist.  My father got into trouble once in Dublin, perhaps you have heard about it?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I have read the case.” (It is narrated in the first chapter of this book.)

“Well, Frank, she stood up in court and bore witness for him with perfect serenity, with perfect trust and without a shadow of common womanly jealousy.  She could not believe that the man she loved could be unworthy, and her conviction was so complete that it communicated itself to the jury:  her trust was so noble that they became infected by it, and brought him in guiltless.[4] Extraordinary, was it not?  She was quite sure too of the verdict.  It is only noble souls who have that assurance and serenity....

[Illustration:  “Speranza”:  Lady Wilde as a Young Woman]

“When my father was dying it was the same thing.  I always see her sitting there by his bedside with a sort of dark veil over her head:  quite silent, quite calm.  Nothing ever troubled her optimism.  She believed that only good can happen to us.  When death came to the man she loved, she accepted it with the same serenity and when my sister died she bore it in the same high way.  My sister was a wonderful creature, so gay and high-spirited, ‘embodied sunshine,’ I used to call her.

“When we lost her, my mother simply took it that it was best for the child.  Women have infinitely more courage than men, don’t you think?  I have never known anyone with such perfect faith as my mother.  She was one of the great figures of the world.  What she must have suffered over my sentence I don’t dare to think:  I’m sure she endured agonies.  She had great hopes of me.  When she was told that she was going to die, and that she could not see me, for I was not allowed to go to her,[5] she said, ‘May the prison help him,’ and turned her face to the wall.

“She felt about the prison as you do, Frank, and really I think you are both right; it has helped me.  There are things I see now that I never saw before.  I see what pity means.  I thought a work of art should be beautiful and joyous.  But now I see that that ideal is insufficient, even shallow; a work of art must be founded on pity; a book or poem which has no pity in it, had better not be written....