to draw in and the weather
became unsettled, the dreariness of a life passed in solitude, indoors,
and without a library became insupportable. He was being drawn in two
opposite directions. I did not know it at the time; indeed he only told
me about it months later when the matter had been decided irrevocably;
but this was the moment when his soul was at stake between good and
evil. The question was whether his wife would come to him again or
whether he would yield to the solicitations of Lord Alfred Douglas and
go to live with him.

Mr. Sherard has told in his book how he brought about the first
reconciliation between Oscar and his wife; and how immediately
afterwards he received a letter from Lord Alfred Douglas threatening to
shoot him like a dog, if, by any words of his, Wilde's friendship was
lost to him, Douglas.

Unluckily Mrs. Wilde's family were against her going back to her
husband; they begged her not to go; talked to her of her duty to her
children and herself, and the poor woman hesitated. Finally her advisers
decided for her, and Mrs. Wilde wrote this decision to Oscar's
solicitors shortly before his release: Oscar's probation was to last at
least a year. I do not know enough about Mrs. Wilde and her relations
with her family and with her husband even to discuss her inaction: I
dare not criticise her: but she did not go to her husband when if she
had gone boldly she might have saved him. She knew Lord Alfred Douglas'
influence over him; knew that it had already brought him to grief. Gide
says, and Oscar himself told me afterwards, that he had come out of
prison determined not to go back to Alfred Douglas and the old life. It
seems a pity that his wife did not act promptly; she allowed herself to
believe that a time of probation was necessary. The delay wounded
Oscar, and all the while, as he told me a little later, he was resisting
an influence which had dominated his life in the past.

"I got a letter almost every day, Frank, begging me to come to
Posilippo, to the villa which Lord Alfred Douglas had rented. Every day
I heard his voice calling, 'Come, come, to sunshine and to me. Come to
Naples with its wonderful museum of bronzes and Pompeii and Paestum, the
city of Poseidon: I am waiting to welcome you. Come.'

"Who could resist it, Frank? love calling, calling with outstretched
arms; who could stay in bleak Berneval and watch the sheets of rain
falling, falling--and the grey mist shrouding the gre