Page:Saltus - Oscar Wilde, an idler's impression.djvu/28

, who, in the voice of an immortal, was reading the fantasies of the damned. In his hand was a manuscript, and we were supping on "Salome."

As the banquet proceeded, I experienced that sense of sacred terror which his friends, the Greeks, knew so well. For this thing could have been conceived only by genius wedded to insanity and, at the end, when the tetrarch, rising and bundling his robes about him, cries: “Kill that woman!” the mysterious divinity whom the poet may have evoked, deigned perhaps to visit me. For, as I applauded, I shuddered, and told him that I had.

Indifferently he nodded and, assimilating Hugo with superb unconcern, threw out: "It is only the shudder that counts."

That was long before the crash. After it, Mrs. Wilde said that he was mad and had been for three years, “quite mad” as the poor woman expressed it.

It may be that she was right. St. George, I believe, fought a dragon with a