d he have evoked the goddess then? For
Pheme typified what modern occultism terms the impact--the premonition
that surges and warns. It was Wilde's fate to die three times--to die
in the dock, to die in prison, to die all along the boulevards of
Paris. Often since I have wondered could the goddess then have been
lifting, however slightly, some fringe of the crimson curtain, behind
which, in all its horror, his destiny crouched. If so, he braved it.

I had looked away. I looked again. Before me was a fat pauper, florid
and over-dressed, who, in the voice of an immortal, was reading the
fantasies of the damned. In his hand was a manuscript, and we were
supping on "Salome."

As the banquet proceeded, I experienced that sense of sacred terror
which his friends, the Greeks, knew so well. For this thing could have
been conceived only by genius wedded to insanity and, at the end, when
the tetrarch, rising and bundling his robes about him, cries: "Kill
that woman!" the mysterious divinity whom the poet may have evoked,
deigned perhaps to visit me. For, as I applauded, I shuddered, and
told him that I had.

Indifferently he nodded and, assimilating Hugo with superb unconcern,
threw out: "It is only the shudder that counts."

That was long before the crash. After it, Mrs. Wilde said that he was
mad and had been for three years, "quite mad" as the poor woman
expressed it.

It may be that she was right. St. George, I believe, fought a dragon
with a spear. Whether or not he killed the brute I have forgotten.
But Wilde fought poverty, which is perhaps more brutal, with a pen.
The fight, if indolent, was protracted. Then, abruptly, his inkstand
became a Vesuvius of gold. London that had laughed at him, laughed
with him and laughed colossally. A penny-a-liner was famous. The
international hurdle-race of the stage had been won in a canter and
won by a hack. A sub-editor was top of the heap.

The ascent was perhaps too rapid. The spiderous Fates that sit and
spin are jealous of sudden success. It may be that Mrs. Wilde was
right. In any event, for some time before the crash he saw few of his
former friends. After his release few of his former friends saw him.
But personally, if I may refer to myself, I am not near sighted. I saw
him in Paris, saw too, and to my regret, that he looked like a drunken
coachman, and told him how greatly I admired the "Ballad,"--that poem
which tells of his life, or rather of his death, in jail. Half