If you have nothing to do on Wednesday, will you come and dine at
the Hotel de Florence, Rupert Street, at 7.45--morning dress, and
chianti yellow or red!
I am charmed to see your book is having so great a success. It is
strong and fine and true. Your next book will be a great book.
Truly yours,
OSCAR WILDE.
This letter, it will be observed, is undated. Apparently Wilde
never dated his letters, for of all the letters of his which I have
preserved not a solitary one bears a date, other perhaps than the
name of the day of the week on which it was written, and that only
rarely. He had the impudence once at a dinner-party, when taken to
task by a great lady for not having answered a letter, to reply:
“But, my dear lady, I never answer or write letters. Ask my friend
there, whose faithful correspondent I am.” Then turning to me, he
said, “Tell Lady ---- when you heard from me last.”
As I had heard from him that morning, I dissembled by saying:
“How can I answer that, Wilde, for among my other discoveries of the
eccentricities of genius I have discovered that genius, at least as
represented by you, never dates its letters. I never had one from you
that was dated.”
Not long after the receipt of this first letter, I proposed to write
what I may call a “grown-up fairy story,” and asked Wilde whether
I might borrow as sub-title a phrase I had once heard him use of a
fairy tale of his own making--“A Story for Children from Eight to
Eighty.” He replied as follows, then, as always, with a capital _D_
for “dear”:
16 TITE STREET,
CHELSEA, S.W.