Page:Tex; a chapter in the life of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (IA texchapterinlife00mcke).pdf/25

 in contraband, assimilating the procedure of a government department and being paid stealthily each week, like a member of some criminal association, with a furtive bundle of notes.

It was his first experience of the public service, almost his only taste of responsibility; and it marked the end of the cloistered life.

Though he brought to his new work a varied knowledge of affairs, Teixeira had participated but little in them since his marriage in 1900. The friends of his youth, when he was living in the Temple,—John Gray and Ernest Dowson, William Wilde (whose widow he married) and William Campbell,—such acquaintances as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, Robert Ross and Bernard Shaw, Leonard Smithers and Frank Harris, were for the most part scattered or dead; and, though he kept touch with J. T. Grein, Edgar Jepson, Alfred Sutro and a few more, he seemed at this time, after Campbell's death, to lack opportunity and inclination for making new friends.

His gregarious years, and the varied experience which they brought, belonged to an