little
unpleasantly; he was gross and puffed up. But he gave one or two
splendid snapshots of actors and their egregious vanity. It seemed to
him a great pity that actors should be taught to read and write: they
should learn their pieces from the lips of the poet.

"Just as work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country,"
he said laughing, "so education is the curse of the acting classes."

Yet even when making fun of the mummers there was a new tone in him of
arrogance and disdain. He used always to be genial and kindly even to
those he laughed at; now he was openly contemptuous. The truth is that
his extraordinarily receptive mind went with an even more abnormal
receptivity of character: unlike most men of marked ability, he took
colour from his associates. In this as in love of courtesies and
dislike of coarse words he was curiously feminine. Intercourse with
Beardsley, for example, had backed his humorous gentleness with a sort
of challenging courage; his new intimacy with Lord Alfred Douglas,
coming on the top of his triumph as a playwright, was lending him
aggressive self-confidence. There was in him that [Greek: hubris]
(insolent self-assurance) which the Greek feared, the pride which
goeth before destruction. I regretted the change in him and was
nervously apprehensive.

After dinner we all went out by the door which gives on the
Embankment, for it was after 12.30. One of the party proposed that we
should walk for a minute or two--at least as far as the Strand, before
driving home. Oscar objected. He hated walking; it was a form of penal
servitude to the animal in man, he declared; but he consented,
nevertheless, under protest, laughing. When we were going up the steps
to the Strand he again objected, and quoted Dante's famous lines:

"Tu proverai si come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui; e com' e duro calle
Lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale."

The impression made by Oscar that evening was not only of
self-indulgence but of over-confidence. I could not imagine what had
given him this insolent self-complacence. I wanted to get by myself
and think. Prosperity was certainly doing him no good.

All the while the opposition to him, I felt, was growing in force. How
could I verify this impression, I asked myself, so as to warn him
effectually?

I decided to give a lunch to him, and on purpose I put on the
invitations: "To meet Mr. Oscar Wilde and hear a new story." Out of a
dozen