out of it better in health
and stronger than I have ever known you. The hard living, regular hours
and compulsory chastity did you all the good in the world. That is why
you wrote those superb letters to the 'Daily Chronicle,' and the 'Ballad
of Reading Gaol'; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep
you there."

For the first time in my life I saw angry dislike in his eyes.

"You talk poisonous nonsense, Frank," he retorted. "Bad food is bad for
everyone, and abstinence from tobacco is mere torture to me. Chastity is
just as unnatural and devilish as hunger; I hate both. Self-denial is
the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity."

To all this M---- giggled applause, which naturally excited the
combative instincts in me--always too alert.

"All great artists," I replied, "have had to practise chastity; it is
chastity alone which gives vigour and tone to mind and body, while
building up a reserve of extraordinary strength. Your favourite Greeks
never allowed an athlete to go into the palaestra unless he had
previously lived a life of complete chastity for a whole year. Balzac,
too, practised it and extolled its virtues, and goodness knows he loved
all the mud-honey of Paris."

"You are hopelessly wrong, Frank, what madness will you preach next! You
are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend
chastity and 'skilly,' though I admit," he added laughing, "that your
'skilly' includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne,
Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot. But surely you are getting too
puritanical. It's absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional
love against my ideal passion."

He provoked me: his tone was that of rather contemptuous superiority. I
kept silent: I did not wish to retort as I might have done if M---- had
not been present.

But Oscar was determined to assert his peculiar view. One or two days
afterwards he came in very red and excited and more angry than I had
ever seen him.

"What do you think has happened, Frank?"

"I do not know. Nothing serious, I hope."

"I was sitting by the roadside on the way to Cannes. I had taken out a
Vergil with me and had begun reading it. As I sat there reading, I
happened to raise my eyes, and who should I see but George
Alexander--George Alexander on a bicycle. I had known him intimately in
the old days, and naturally I got up delighted to see him, and went
towards him. But he turned his head asid