reen spinster, for smiling a
little she questioned him:

"'Speranza' is Lady Wilde?" she asked with a slight American accent.

Lady Wilde informed the company with all the impressiveness she had at
command that she did not expect Oscar that afternoon; "he is so busy
with his new poems, you know; they say there has been no such
sensation since Byron," she added; "already everyone is talking of
them."

"Indeed, yes," sighed the green lily, "do you remember, dear Speranza,
what he said about 'The Sphinx,' that he read to us. He told us the
written verse was quite different from what the printed poem would be
just as the sculptor's clay model differs from the marble. Subtle,
wasn't it?"

"Perfectly true, too!" cried a man, with a falsetto voice, moving
into the circle; "Leonardo himself might have said that."

The whole scene seemed to me affected and middle-class, untidy, too,
with an un-English note about it of shiftlessness; the aesthetic
dresses were extravagant, the enthusiasms pumped up and exaggerated. I
was glad to leave quietly.

It was on this visit to Lady Wilde, or a later one, that I first heard
of that other poem of Oscar, "The Harlot's House," which was also said
to have been written in Paris. Though published in an obscure sheet
and in itself commonplace enough it made an astonishing stir. Time and
advertisement had been working for him. Academic lectures and
imitative poetry alike had made him widely known; and, thanks to the
small body of enthusiastic admirers whom I have already spoken of, his
reputation instead of waning out had grown like the Jinn when released
from the bottle.

The fuglemen were determined to find something wonderful in everything
he did, and the title of "The Harlot's House," shocking Philistinism,
gave them a certain opportunity which they used to the uttermost. On
all sides one was asked: "Have you seen Oscar's latest?" And then the
last verse would be quoted:--"Divine, don't ye think?"

"And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl."

In spite of all this extravagant eulogy Oscar Wilde's early plays and
poems, like his lectures, were unimportant. The small remnant of
people in England who really love the things of the spirit were
disappointed in them, failed to find in them the genius so loudly and
so arrogantly vaunted.

But, if Oscar Wilde's early writings were failures, his talk was more
su