“What do you think has happened, Frank?”

“I do not know.  Nothing serious, I hope.”

“I was sitting by the roadside on the way to Cannes.  I had taken out a Vergil with me and had begun reading it.  As I sat there reading, I happened to raise my eyes, and who should I see but George Alexander—­George Alexander on a bicycle.  I had known him intimately in the old days, and naturally I got up delighted to see him, and went towards him.  But he turned his head aside and pedalled past me deliberately.  He meant to cut me.  Of course I know that just before my trial in London he took my name off the bill of my comedy, though he went on playing it.  But I was not angry with him for that, though he might have behaved as well as Wyndham,[29] who owed me nothing, don’t you think?

“Here there was nobody to see him, yet he cut me.  What brutes men are!  They not only punish me as a society, but now they are trying as individuals to punish me, and after all I have not done worse than they do.  What difference is there between one form of sexual indulgence and another?  I hate hypocrisy and hypocrites!  Think of Alexander, who made all his money out of my works, cutting me, Alexander!  It is too ignoble.  Wouldn’t you be angry, Frank?”

“I daresay I should be,” I replied coolly, hoping the incident would be a spur to him.

“I’ve always wondered why you gave Alexander a play?  Surely you didn’t think him an actor?”

“No, no!” he exclaimed, a sudden smile lighting up his face; “Alexander doesn’t act on the stage; he behaves.  But wasn’t it mean of him?”

I couldn’t help smiling, the dart was so deserved.

“Begin another play,” I said, “and the Alexanders will immediately go on their knees to you again.  On the other hand, if you do nothing you may expect worse than discourtesy.  Men love to condemn their neighbours’ pet vice.  You ought to know the world by this time.”

He did not even notice the hint to work, but broke out angrily: 

“What you call vice, Frank, is not vice:  it is as good to me as it was to Caesar, Alexander, Michelangelo and Shakespeare.  It was first of all made a sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times, by the Goths—­the Germans and English—­who have done little or nothing since to refine or exalt the ideals of humanity.  They all damn the sins they have no mind to, and that’s their morality.  A brutal race; they overeat and overdrink and condemn the lusts of the flesh, while revelling in all the vilest sins of the spirit.  If they would read the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew and apply it to themselves, they would learn more than by condemning a pleasure they don’t understand.  Why, even Bentham refused to put what you call a ‘vice’ in his penal code, and you yourself admitted that it should not be punished as a crime; for it carries no temptation with it.  It may be a malady; but, if so, it appears only to attack the highest natures.  It is disgraceful to punish it.  The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment.”