life, under the condition that the allowance was to be forfeited if Oscar ever lived under the same roof with Lord Alfred Douglas.  Having forfeited the allowance Oscar got Robert Ross to ask his wife to continue it and in spite of the forfeiture Mrs. Wilde continually sent Oscar money through Robert Ross, merely stipulating that her husband should not be told whence the money came.  Ross, too, who had also sent him L150 a year, resumed his monthly payments as soon as he left Douglas.

My friendship with Oscar Wilde, which had been interrupted after he left prison by a silly gibe directed rather against the go-between he had sent to me than against him, was renewed in Paris early in 1898.  I have related the little misunderstanding in the Appendix.  I had never felt anything but the most cordial affection for Oscar and as soon as I went to Paris and met him I explained what had seemed to him unkind.  When I asked him about his life since his release he told me simply that he had quarrelled with Bosie Douglas.

I did not attribute much importance to this; but I could not help noticing the extraordinary change that had taken place in him since he had been in Naples.  His health was almost as good as ever; in fact, the prison discipline with its two years of hard living had done him so much good that his health continued excellent almost to the end.

But his whole manner and attitude to life had again changed:  he now resembled the successful Oscar of the early nineties:  I caught echoes, too, in his speech of a harder, smaller nature; “that talk about reformation, Frank, is all nonsense; no one ever really reforms or changes.  I am what I always was.”

He was mistaken:  he took up again the old pagan standpoint; but he was not the same; he was reckless now, not thoughtless, and, as soon as one probed a little beneath the surface, depressed almost to despairing.  He had learnt the meaning of suffering and pity, had sensed their value; he had turned his back upon them all, it is true, but he could not return to pagan carelessness, and the light-hearted enjoyment of pleasure.  He did his best and almost succeeded; but the effort was there.  His creed now was what it used to be about 1892:  “Let us get what pleasure we may in the fleeting days; for the night cometh, and the silence that can never be broken.”

The old doctrine of original sin, we now call reversion to type; the most lovely garden rose, if allowed to go without discipline and tendance, will in a few generations become again the common scentless dog-rose of our hedges.  Such a reversion to type had taken place in Oscar Wilde.  It must be inferred perhaps that the old pagan Greek in him was stronger than the Christian virtues which had been called into being by the discipline and suffering of prison.  Little by little, as he began to live his old life again, the lessons learned in prison seemed to drop from him and be forgotten.  But in reality the high