“I was a boy at a concert in the Antient Concert Rooms in Brunswick Street in Dublin. Everybody was in evening dress; and — unless I am mixing up this concert with another (in which case I doubt if the Wildes would have been present)— the Lord Lieutenant³³ was there with his blue waistcoated courtiers. Wilde was dressed in snuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil. He was currently reported to have a family in every farmhouse³⁴; and the wonder was that Lady Wilde didn’t mind — evidently a tradition from the Travers case, which I did not know about until I read your account, as I was only eight in 1864.

“Lady Wilde was nice to me in London during the desperate days between my arrival in 1876 and my first earning of an income by my pen in 1885, or rather until, a few years earlier, I threw myself into Socialism and cut myself contemptuously loose from everything of which her at-homes — themselves desperate affairs enough, as you saw for yourself — were part. I was at two or three of them; and I once dined with her in company with an ex-tragedy queen named Miss Glynn, who, having no visible external ears, reared a head like a turnip³⁵. Lady Wilde talked about Schopenhauer; and Miss Glynn told me that Gladstone formed his oratorical³⁶ style on Charles Kean.

“I ask myself where and how I came across Lady Wilde; for we had no social relations in the Dublin days. The explanation must be that my sister, then a very attractive girl who sang beautifully, had met and made some sort of innocent conquest of both Oscar and Willie. I met Oscar once at one of the at-homes; and he came and spoke³⁷ to me with an evident intention of being specially³⁸ kind to me. We put each other out frightfully; and this odd difficulty persisted between us to the very last, even when we were no longer

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