This was why he had drawn away from the girl, after seducing her.

And it was not unnatural under the circumstances that she should become vindictive and revengeful.
Such inferences as these, I drew from the comments of the Irish papers at the time; but naturally I wished if possible to hear some trustworthy contemporary on the matter.

Fortunately such testimony was forthcoming.
A Fellow of Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best opinion of the time in an excellent pithy letter.

He wrote to me that the trial simply established, what every one believed, that "Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without a defender!) and that his wife was a highfalutin' pretentious creature whose pride was as extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate verse-making....

Even when a young woman she used to keep her rooms in Merrion Square in semi-darkness; she laid the paint on too thick for any ordinary light, and she gave herself besides all manner of airs." This incisive judgment of an able and fairly impartial contemporary observer[2] corroborates, I think, the inferences which one would naturally draw from the newspaper accounts of the trial.