Willie's friend seemed amused at the lyrical outburst of the green spinster, for smiling a little she questioned him: "'Speranza' is Lady Wilde ?" she asked with a slight American accent.
Lady Wilde informed the company with all the impressiveness she had at command that she did not expect Oscar that afternoon; "he is so busy with his new poems, you know; they say there has been no such sensation since Byron," she added; "already everyone is talking of them." "Indeed, yes," sighed the green lily, "do you remember, dear Speranza, what he said about 'The Sphinx,' that he read to us.

He told us the written verse was quite different from what the printed poem would be just as the sculptor's clay model differs from the marble.

Subtle, wasn't it ?" "Perfectly true, too!" cried a man, with a falsetto voice, moving into the circle; "Leonardo himself might have said that." The whole scene seemed to me affected and middle-class, untidy, too, with an un-English note about it of shiftlessness; the aesthetic dresses were extravagant, the enthusiasms pumped up and exaggerated.

I was glad to leave quietly.
It was on this visit to Lady Wilde, or a later one, that I first heard of that other poem of Oscar, "The Harlot's House," which was also said to have been written in Paris.

Though published in an obscure sheet and in itself commonplace enough it made an astonishing stir.