To call him out of this bitter way of regret I quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet: 

    “For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
      Give salutation to my sportive blood? 
    Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
      Which in their wills count bad what I think good?”

“His complaint is exactly yours, Oscar.”

“It’s astonishing, Frank, how well you know him, and yet you deny his intimacy with Pembroke.  To you he is a living man; you always talk of him as if he had just gone out of the room, and yet you persist in believing in his innocence.”

“You misapprehend me,” I said, “the passion of his life was for Mary Fitton, to give her a name; I mean the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets, who was Beatrice, Cressida and Cleopatra, and you yourself admit that a man who has a mad passion for a woman is immune, I think the doctors call it, to other influences.”

“Oh, yes, Frank, of course; but how could Shakespeare with his beautiful nature love a woman to that mad excess?”

“Shakespeare hadn’t your overwhelming love of plastic beauty,” I replied; “he fell in love with a dominant personality, the complement of his own yielding, amiable disposition.”

“That’s it,” he broke in, “our opposites attract us irresistibly—­the charm of the unknown!”

“You often talk now,” I went on, “as if you had never loved a woman; yet you must have loved—­more than one.”

“My salad days, Frank,” he quoted, smiling, “when I was green in judgment, cold of blood.”

“No, no,” I persisted, “it is not a great while since you praised Lady So and So and the Terrys enthusiastically.”

“Lady ——­,” he began gravely (and I could not but notice that the mere title seduced him to conventional, poetic language), “moves like a lily in water; I always think of her as a lily; just as I used to think of Lily Langtry as a tulip, with a figure like a Greek vase carved in ivory.  But I always adored the Terrys:  Marion is a great actress with subtle charm and enigmatic fascination:  she was my ’Woman of no importance,’ artificial and enthralling; she belongs to my theatre—­”

As he seemed to have lost the thread, I questioned again.

“And Ellen?”

“Oh, Ellen’s a perfect wonder,” he broke out, “a great character.  Do you know her history?” And then, without waiting for an answer, he continued: 

“She began as a model for Watts, the painter, when she was only some fifteen or sixteen years of age.  In a week she read him as easily as if he had been a printed book.  He treated her with condescending courtesy, en grand seigneur, and, naturally, she had her revenge on him.

“One day her mother came in and asked Watts what he was going to do about Ellen.  Watts said he didn’t understand.  ’You have made Ellen in love with you,’ said the mother, and it is impossible that could have happened unless you had been attentive to her.’