y, I
should not have given twopence for the chance of your keeping your
temper. And Wilde, even in his ruin--which, however, he did not yet
fully realize--kept his air of authority on questions of taste and
conduct. It was practically impossible under such circumstances that
Douglas should have taken the stage in any way. Everyone thought him a
horrid little brat; but I, not having met him before to my knowledge,
and having some sort of flair for his literary talent, was curious to
hear what he had to say for himself. But, except to echo Wilde once or
twice, he said nothing.[8] You are right in effect, because it was
evident that Wilde was in his hands, and was really echoing him. But
Wilde automatically kept the prompter off the stage and himself in the
middle of it.

[Footnote 7: This is an inimitable picture, but Shaw's fine sense of
comedy has misled him. The scene took place absolutely as I recorded
it. Douglas went out first saying--"Your telling him to run away shows
that you are no friend of Oscar's." Then Oscar got up to follow him.
He said good-bye to Shaw, adding a courteous word or two. As he turned
to the door I got up and said:--"I hope you do not doubt my
friendship; you have no reason to."

"I do not think this is friendly of you, Frank," he said, and went on
out.]

[Footnote 8: I am sure Douglas took the initiative and walked out
first.

_I have no doubt you are right, and that my vision of the exit is
really a reminiscence of the entrance. In fact, now that you prompt my
memory, I recall quite distinctly that Douglas, who came in as the
follower, went out as the leader, and that the last word was spoken by
Wilde after he had gone.--G.B.S._]

"What your book needs to complete it is a portrait of yourself as good
as your portrait of Wilde. Oscar was not combative, though he was
supercilious in his early pose. When his snobbery was not in action,
he liked to make people devoted to him and to flatter them exquisitely
with that end. Mrs. Calvert, whose great final period as a stage old
woman began with her appearance in my _Arms and the Man_, told me one
day, when apologizing for being, as she thought, a bad rehearser, that
no author had ever been so nice to her except Mr. Wilde.

"Pugnacious people, if they did not actually terrify Oscar, were at
least the sort of people he could not control, and whom he feared as
possibly able to coerce him. You suggest that the Queensberry
pugnacity was somethin