He might have said that as we often eat or drink or smoke for pleasure, so we may indulge in other sensualities.

If he had argued that his sin was comparatively venial and so personal-peculiar that it carried with it no temptation to the normal man, I should not have disputed his point.
Moreover, love at its highest is independent of sex and sensuality.
Since Luther we have been living in a centrifugal movement, in a wild individualism where all ties of love and affection have been loosened, and now that the centripetal movement has come into power we shall find that in another fifty years or so friendship and love will win again to honor and affinities of all sorts will proclaim themselves without shame and without fear.

In this sense Oscar might have regarded himself as a forerunner and not as a survival or "sport." And it may well be that some instinctive feeling of this sort was at the back of his mind though too vague to be formulated in words.

For even in our dispute (see Page 500) he pleaded that the world was becoming more tolerant, which, one hopes, is true.

To become more tolerant of the faults of others is the first lesson in the religion of Humanity.
_The End._ _A letter from Lord Alfred Douglas to Oscar Wilde that I reproduce here speaks for itself and settles once for all, I imagine, the question of their relations.