“No, Frank, I don’t think I shall be able to write any more.  What is the good of it?  I cannot force myself to write.”

“And your ’Ballad of a Fisher Boy’?” I asked.

“I have composed three or four verses of it,” he said, smiling at me, “I have got them in my head,” and he recited two or three, one of which was quite good, but none of them startling.

Not having seen him for some days, I noticed that he was growing stout again:  the good living and constant drinking seemed to ooze out of him; he began to look as he looked in the old days in London just before the catastrophe.

One morning I asked him to put the verses on paper which he had recited to me, but he would not; and when I pressed him, cried: 

“Let me live, Frank; tasks remind me of prison.  You do not know how I abhor even the memory of it:  it was degrading, inhuman!”

“Prison was the making of you,” I could not help retorting, irritated by what seemed to me a mere excuse.  “You came out of it better in health and stronger than I have ever known you.  The hard living, regular hours and compulsory chastity did you all the good in the world.  That is why you wrote those superb letters to the ‘Daily Chronicle,’ and the ’Ballad of Reading Gaol’; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep you there.”

For the first time in my life I saw angry dislike in his eyes.

“You talk poisonous nonsense, Frank,” he retorted.  “Bad food is bad for everyone, and abstinence from tobacco is mere torture to me.  Chastity is just as unnatural and devilish as hunger; I hate both.  Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.”

To all this M——­ giggled applause, which naturally excited the combative instincts in me—­always too alert.

“All great artists,” I replied, “have had to practise chastity; it is chastity alone which gives vigour and tone to mind and body, while building up a reserve of extraordinary strength.  Your favourite Greeks never allowed an athlete to go into the palaestra unless he had previously lived a life of complete chastity for a whole year.  Balzac, too, practised it and extolled its virtues, and goodness knows he loved all the mud-honey of Paris.”

“You are hopelessly wrong, Frank, what madness will you preach next!  You are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend chastity and ‘skilly,’ though I admit,” he added laughing, “that your ‘skilly’ includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne, Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot.  But surely you are getting too puritanical.  It’s absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional love against my ideal passion.”

He provoked me:  his tone was that of rather contemptuous superiority.  I kept silent:  I did not wish to retort as I might have done if M——­ had not been present.

But Oscar was determined to assert his peculiar view.  One or two days afterwards he came in very red and excited and more angry than I had ever seen him.