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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
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