Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he did his work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though he had no need to work--were above work. He liked to pose as one who did not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the quarterly appeared, he won an increase of notoriety--or obloquy, which was much the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the winter came on, he was to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did not relish, indeed that scared him--and as a fact, it was most scandalously unfair gossip. Meanwhile the Christmas number of _Today_ produced his very fine night-piece _Les Passades_. [Illustration: NIGHT PIECE] Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue--as playwright and wit and man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the _Salome_, with its erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a false impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never were. Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer of Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had “invented Beardsley” deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley delighted in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of what was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so happened that Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his Court, where young talent was allowed to be brought into the presence and introduced. It came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satellites to go over to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in hero-worship, and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as Wilde had signified his condescension to that end--but the gross patronage of Wilde on the occasion wounded the young fellow’s conceit to the quick. It had flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde; but he never became an intimate--he never again sought to bask in the radiance. To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue a novel called _The Green Carnation_ of which Wilde and his associates were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination. The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very well in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to pass by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He sprang at opportunity--and struck hard. With the reckless courage so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he struck--and he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of the healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support of his vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threatening public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had arrived at a state of elegant decay.