Some time before I had lent him L50; so long as he was hard up I said nothing about it; but after the success of his second play, I wrote to him saying that the L50 would be useful to me if he could spare it.

He sent me a cheque at once with a charming letter.
He was now continually about again with Lord Alfred Douglas who, it appeared, had had a disagreement with Lord Cromer and returned to London.

Almost immediately scandalous stories came into circulation concerning them: "Have you heard the latest about Lord Alfred and Oscar?
I'm told they're being watched by the police," and so forth and so on interminably.

One day a story came to me with such wealth of weird detail that it was manifestly at least founded on fact.

Oscar was said to have written extraordinary letters to Lord Alfred Douglas: a youth called Alfred Wood had stolen the letters from Lord Alfred Douglas' rooms in Oxford and had tried to blackmail Oscar with them.
The facts were so peculiar and so precise that I asked Oscar about it.
He met the accusation at once and very fairly, I thought, and told me the whole story.