Finally her advisers decided for her, and Mrs.Wilde wrote this decision to Oscar's solicitors shortly before his release: Oscar's probation was to last at least a year.

I do not know enough about Mrs.Wilde and her relations with her family and with her husband even to discuss her inaction: I dare not criticise her: but she did not go to her husband when if she had gone boldly she might have saved him.

She knew Lord Alfred Douglas' influence over him; knew that it had already brought him to grief.

Gide says, and Oscar himself told me afterwards, that he had come out of prison determined not to go back to Alfred Douglas and the old life.

It seems a pity that his wife did not act promptly; she allowed herself to believe that a time of probation was necessary.