, caused by 'a certain morbid process in the
sphenoid bone of the skull--viz., an excessive development of the
anterior lobe of the pituitary body' (this is from the nearest
encyclopedia). 'When this condition does not become active until after
the age of twenty-five, by which time the long bones are consolidated,
the result is acromegaly, which chiefly manifests itself in an
enlargement of the hands and feet.' I never saw Lady Wilde's feet; but
her hands were enormous, and never went straight to their aim when
they grasped anything, but minced about, feeling for it. And the
gigantic splaying of her palm was reproduced in her lumbar region.

"Now Oscar was an overgrown man, with something not quite normal about
his bigness--something that made Lady Colin Campbell, who hated him,
describe him as 'that great white caterpillar.' You yourself describe
the disagreeable impression he made on you physically, in spite of his
fine eyes and style. Well, I have always maintained that Oscar was a
giant in the pathological sense, and that this explains a good deal of
his weakness.

"I think you have affectionately underrated his snobbery, mentioning
only the pardonable and indeed justifiable side of it; the love of
fine names and distinguished associations and luxury and good
manners.[2] You say repeatedly, and _on certain planes_, truly, that
he was not bitter and did not use his tongue to wound people. But this
is not true on the snobbish plane. On one occasion he wrote about T.P.
O'Connor with deliberate, studied, wounding insolence, with his
Merrion Square Protestant pretentiousness in full cry against the
Catholic. He repeatedly declaimed against the vulgarity of the British
journalist, not as you or I might, but as an expression of the odious
class feeling that is itself the vilest vulgarity. He made the mistake
of not knowing his place. He objected to be addressed as Wilde,
declaring that he was Oscar to his intimates and Mr. Wilde to others,
quite unconscious of the fact that he was imposing on the men with
whom, as a critic and journalist, he had to live and work, the
alternative of granting him an intimacy he had no right to ask or a
deference to which he had no claim. The vulgar hated him for snubbing
them; and the valiant men damned his impudence and cut him. Thus he
was left with a band of devoted satellites on the one hand, and a
dining-out connection on the other, with here and there a man of
talent and personality