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 The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

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 Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray
       13 chapter version

 Author: Oscar Wilde

 Posting Date: February 9, 2013 [EBook #4078]
 Release Date: May, 2003
 First Posted: November 12, 2001
 Last Updated: January 29, 2005

 Language: English

 Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.

 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY ***














 THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY


 by

 Oscar Wilde





 1890, 13-CHAPTER VERSION



 CONTENTS

  Chapter I: 3-12
  Chapter II: 12-22
  Chapter III: 22-32
  Chapter IV: 32-36
  Chapter V: 36-43
  Chapter VI: 43-52
  Chapter VII: 52-58
  Chapter VIII: 58-64
  Chapter IX: 65-77
  Chapter X: 77-81
  Chapter XI: 81-86
  Chapter XII: 86-93
  Chapter XIII: 94-100



 CHAPTER I

 [3] The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the
 light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came
 through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more
 delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

 From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was
 lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton
 could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored
 blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able
 to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and
 then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long
 tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window,
 producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of
 those pallid jade-faced painters who, in an art that is necessarily
 immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.  The sullen
 murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass,
 or circling with monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires
 of the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more
 oppressive, and the dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a
 distant organ.

 In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
 full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
 and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist
 himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago
 caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many
 strange conjectures.

 As he looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully
 mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and
 seemed about to linger there.  But he suddenly started up, and, closing
 [4] his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to
 imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he
 might awake.

 "It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said
 Lord Henry, languidly.  "You must certainly send it next year to the
 Grosvenor.  The Academy is too large and too vulgar.  The Grosvenor is
 the only place."

 "I don't think I will send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head
 back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at
 Oxford.  "No: I won't send it anywhere."

 Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement
 through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful
 whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette.  "Not send it anywhere?
 My dear fellow, why?  Have you any reason?  What odd chaps you painters
 are!  You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you
 have one, you seem to want to throw it away.  It is silly of you, for
 there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and
 that is not being talked about.  A portrait like this would set you far
 above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous,
 if old men are ever capable of any emotion."

 "I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit
 it.  I have put too much of myself into it."

 Lord Henry stretched his long legs out on the divan and shook with
 laughter.

 "Yes, I knew you would laugh; but it is quite true, all the same."

 "Too much of yourself in it!  Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you
 were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with
 your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young
 Adonis, who looks as if he was made of ivory and rose-leaves.  Why, my
 dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an
 intellectual expression, and all that.  But beauty, real beauty, ends
 where an intellectual expression begins.  Intellect is in itself an
 exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.  The moment one
 sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something
 horrid.  Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions.
 How perfectly hideous they are!  Except, of course, in the Church.  But
 then in the Church they don't think.  A bishop keeps on saying at the
 age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen,
 and consequently he always looks absolutely delightful.  Your
 mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose
 picture really fascinates me, never thinks.  I feel quite sure of that.
 He is a brainless, beautiful thing, who should be always here in winter
 when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we
 want something to chill our intelligence.  Don't flatter yourself,
 Basil: you are not in the least like him."

 "You don't understand me, Harry.  Of course I am not like him.  I know
 that perfectly well.  Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him.  You
 shrug your shoulders?  I am telling you the truth.  There is a fatality
 about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality
 that [5] seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings.  It
 is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the
 stupid have the best of it in this world.  They can sit quietly and
 gape at the play.  If they know nothing of victory, they are at least
 spared the knowledge of defeat.  They live as we all should live,
 undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin
 upon others nor ever receive it from alien hands.  Your rank and
 wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are,--my fame, whatever it may
 be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks,--we will all suffer for what the
 gods have given us, suffer terribly."

 "Dorian Gray? is that his name?" said Lord Henry, walking across the
 studio towards Basil Hallward.

 "Yes; that is his name.  I didn't intend to tell it to you."

 "But why not?"

 "Oh, I can't explain.  When I like people immensely I never tell their
 names to any one.  It seems like surrendering a part of them. You know
 how I love secrecy.  It is the only thing that can make modern life
 wonderful or mysterious to us.  The commonest thing is delightful if
 one only hides it.  When I leave town I never tell my people where I am
 going.  If I did, I would lose all my pleasure.  It is a silly habit, I
 dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into
 one's life.  I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?"

 "Not at all," answered Lord Henry, laying his hand upon his shoulder;
 "not at all, my dear Basil.  You seem to forget that I am married, and
 the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception
 necessary for both parties.  I never know where my wife is, and my wife
 never knows what I am doing.  When we meet,--we do meet occasionally,
 when we dine out together, or go down to the duke's,--we tell each
 other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.  My wife is
 very good at it,--much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets
 confused over her dates, and I always do.  But when she does find me
 out, she makes no row at all.  I sometimes wish she would; but she
 merely laughs at me."

 "I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry," said Basil
 Hallward, shaking his hand off, and strolling towards the door that led
 into the garden.  "I believe that you are really a very good husband,
 but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an
 extraordinary fellow.  You never say a moral thing, and you never do a
 wrong thing.  Your cynicism is simply a pose."

 "Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,"
 cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the
 garden together, and for a time they did not speak.

 After a long pause Lord Henry pulled out his watch.  "I am afraid I
 must be going, Basil," he murmured, "and before I go I insist on your
 answering a question I put to you some time ago."

 "What is that?" asked Basil Hallward, keeping his eyes fixed on the
 ground.

 "You know quite well."

 "I do not, Harry."

 [6] "Well, I will tell you what it is."

 "Please don't."

 "I must.  I want you to explain to me why you won't exhibit Dorian
 Gray's picture.  I want the real reason."

 "I told you the real reason."

 "No, you did not.  You said it was because there was too much of
 yourself in it.  Now, that is childish."

 "Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every
 portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not
 of the sitter.  The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.  It is
 not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on
 the colored canvas, reveals himself.  The reason I will not exhibit
 this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown with it the secret
 of my own soul."

 Lord Harry laughed.  "And what is that?" he asked.

 "I will tell you," said Hallward; and an expression of perplexity came
 over his face.

 "I am all expectation, Basil," murmured his companion, looking at him.

 "Oh, there is really very little to tell, Harry," answered the young
 painter; "and I am afraid you will hardly understand it.  Perhaps you
 will hardly believe it."

 Lord Henry smiled, and, leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy
 from the grass, and examined it.  "I am quite sure I shall understand
 it," he replied, gazing intently at the little golden white-feathered
 disk, "and I can believe anything, provided that it is incredible."

 The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac
 blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid
 air.  A grasshopper began to chirrup in the grass, and a long thin
 dragon-fly floated by on its brown gauze wings.  Lord Henry felt as if
 he could hear Basil Hallward's heart beating, and he wondered what was
 coming.

 "Well, this is incredible," repeated Hallward, rather
 bitterly,--"incredible to me at times.  I don't know what it means.
 The story is simply this.  Two months ago I went to a crush at Lady
 Brandon's. You know we poor painters have to show ourselves in society
 from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.
 With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody,
 even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.  Well,
 after I had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge
 overdressed dowagers and tedious Academicians, I suddenly became
 conscious that some one was looking at me.  I turned half-way round,
 and saw Dorian Gray for the first time.  When our eyes met, I felt that
 I was growing pale.  A curious instinct of terror came over me.  I knew
 that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was
 so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole
 nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.  I did not want any external
 influence in my life.  You know yourself, Harry, how independent I am
 by nature.  My father destined me for the army.  I insisted on [7]
 going to Oxford.  Then he made me enter my name at the Middle Temple.
 Before I had eaten half a dozen dinners I gave up the Bar, and
 announced my intention of becoming a painter.  I have always been my
 own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray.
 Then--But I don't know how to explain it to you. Something seemed to
 tell me that I was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life.  I had
 a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and
 exquisite sorrows.  I knew that if I spoke to Dorian I would become
 absolutely devoted to him, and that I ought not to speak to him.  I
 grew afraid, and turned to quit the room.  It was not conscience that
 made me do so: it was cowardice.  I take no credit to myself for trying
 to escape."

 "Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience
 is the trade-name of the firm.  That is all."

 "I don't believe that, Harry.  However, whatever was my motive,--and it
 may have been pride, for I used to be very proud,--I certainly
 struggled to the door.  There, of course, I stumbled against Lady
 Brandon.  'You are not going to run away so soon, Mr. Hallward?' she
 screamed out.  You know her shrill horrid voice?"

 "Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry,
 pulling the daisy to bits with his long, nervous fingers.

 "I could not get rid of her.  She brought me up to Royalties, and
 people with Stars and Garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras
 and hooked noses.  She spoke of me as her dearest friend.  I had only
 met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me.  I
 believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at
 least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the
 nineteenth-century standard of immortality. Suddenly I found myself
 face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely
 stirred me.  We were quite close, almost touching.  Our eyes met again.
 It was mad of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him.
 Perhaps it was not so mad, after all.  It was simply inevitable.  We
 would have spoken to each other without any introduction.  I am sure of
 that.  Dorian told me so afterwards.  He, too, felt that we were
 destined to know each other."

 "And how did Lady Brandon describe this wonderful young man?  I know
 she goes in for giving a rapid précis of all her guests.  I remember
 her bringing me up to a most truculent and red-faced old gentleman
 covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear, in a
 tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to everybody in
 the room, something like 'Sir Humpty Dumpty--you know--Afghan
 frontier--Russian intrigues: very successful man--wife killed by an
 elephant--quite inconsolable--wants to marry a beautiful American
 widow--everybody does nowadays--hates Mr. Gladstone--but very much
 interested in beetles: ask him what he thinks of Schouvaloff.'  I
 simply fled.  I like to find out people for myself.  But poor Lady
 Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods.
 She either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about
 them except what one wants to know.  But what did she say about Mr.
 Dorian Gray?"

 [8] "Oh, she murmured, 'Charming boy--poor dear mother and I quite
 inseparable--engaged to be married to the same man--I mean married on
 the same day--how very silly of me!  Quite forget what he does--afraid
 he--doesn't do anything--oh, yes, plays the piano--or is it the violin,
 dear Mr. Gray?'  We could neither of us help laughing, and we became
 friends at once."

 "Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best
 ending for one," said Lord Henry, plucking another daisy.

 Hallward buried his face in his hands.  "You don't understand what
 friendship is, Harry," he murmured,--"or what enmity is, for that
 matter.  You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to
 every one."

 "How horribly unjust of you!" cried Lord Henry, tilting his hat back,
 and looking up at the little clouds that were drifting across the
 hollowed turquoise of the summer sky, like ravelled skeins of glossy
 white silk.  "Yes; horribly unjust of you.  I make a great difference
 between people.  I choose my friends for their good looks, my
 acquaintances for their characters, and my enemies for their brains. A
 man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.  I have not got
 one who is a fool.  They are all men of some intellectual power, and
 consequently they all appreciate me.  Is that very vain of me?  I think
 it is rather vain."

 "I should think it was, Harry.  But according to your category I must
 be merely an acquaintance."

 "My dear old Basil, you are much more than an acquaintance."

 "And much less than a friend.  A sort of brother, I suppose?"

 "Oh, brothers!  I don't care for brothers.  My elder brother won't die,
 and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else."

 "Harry!"

 "My dear fellow, I am not quite serious.  But I can't help detesting my
 relations.  I suppose it comes from the fact that we can't stand other
 people having the same faults as ourselves.  I quite sympathize with
 the rage of the English democracy against what they call the vices of
 the upper classes.  They feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and
 immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of
 us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserves. When poor
 Southwark got into the Divorce Court, their indignation was quite
 magnificent.  And yet I don't suppose that ten per cent of the lower
 orders live correctly."

 "I don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is
 more, Harry, I don't believe you do either."

 Lord Henry stroked his pointed brown beard, and tapped the toe of his
 patent-leather boot with a tasselled malacca cane.  "How English you
 are, Basil!  If one puts forward an idea to a real Englishman,--always
 a rash thing to do,--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is
 right or wrong.  The only thing he considers of any importance is
 whether one believes it one's self.  Now, the value of an idea has
 nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses
 it.  Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is,
 the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it [9]
 will not be colored by either his wants, his desires, or his
 prejudices.  However, I don't propose to discuss politics, sociology,
 or metaphysics with you.  I like persons better than principles.  Tell
 me more about Dorian Gray.  How often do you see him?"

 "Every day.  I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day.  Of
 course sometimes it is only for a few minutes.  But a few minutes with
 somebody one worships mean a great deal."

 "But you don't really worship him?"

 "I do."

 "How extraordinary!  I thought you would never care for anything but
 your painting,--your art, I should say.  Art sounds better, doesn't it?"

 "He is all my art to me now.  I sometimes think, Harry, that there are
 only two eras of any importance in the history of the world.  The first
 is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the
 appearance of a new personality for art also.  What the invention of
 oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinoüs was to late
 Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.
 It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, model from him.
 Of course I have done all that.  He has stood as Paris in dainty armor,
 and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear.  Crowned
 with heavy lotus-blossoms, he has sat on the prow of Adrian's barge,
 looking into the green, turbid Nile.  He has leaned over the still pool
 of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water's silent silver the
 wonder of his own beauty.  But he is much more to me than that.  I
 won't tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or
 that his beauty is such that art cannot express it.  There is nothing
 that art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done since I
 met Dorian Gray is good work, is the best work of my life.  But in some
 curious way--I wonder will you understand me?--his personality has
 suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of
 style.  I see things differently, I think of them differently.  I can
 now re-create life in a way that was hidden from me before.  'A dream
 of form in days of thought,'--who is it who says that?  I forget; but
 it is what Dorian Gray has been to me.  The merely visible presence of
 this lad,--for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is
 really over twenty,--his merely visible presence,--ah!  I wonder can
 you realize all that that means?  Unconsciously he defines for me the
 lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in itself all the
 passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that
 is Greek. The harmony of soul and body,--how much that is!  We in our
 madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is
 bestial, an ideality that is void.  Harry!  Harry! if you only knew
 what Dorian Gray is to me!  You remember that landscape of mine, for
 which Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part
 with? It is one of the best things I have ever done.  And why is it so?
 Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me."

 "Basil, this is quite wonderful!  I must see Dorian Gray."  Hallward
 got up from the seat, and walked up and down the [10] garden.  After
 some time he came back.  "You don't understand, Harry," he said.
 "Dorian Gray is merely to me a motive in art.  He is never more present
 in my work than when no image of him is there.  He is simply a
 suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner.  I see him in the curves
 of certain lines, in the loveliness and the subtleties of certain
 colors.  That is all."

 "Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?"

 "Because I have put into it all the extraordinary romance of which, of
 course, I have never dared to speak to him.  He knows nothing about it.
 He will never know anything about it.  But the world might guess it;
 and I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart
 shall never be put under their microscope.  There is too much of myself
 in the thing, Harry,--too much of myself!"

 "Poets are not so scrupulous as you are.  They know how useful passion
 is for publication.  Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

 "I hate them for it.  An artist should create beautiful things, but
 should put nothing of his own life into them.  We live in an age when
 men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.  We
 have lost the abstract sense of beauty.  If I live, I will show the
 world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my
 portrait of Dorian Gray."

 "I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you.  It is only
 the intellectually lost who ever argue.  Tell me, is Dorian Gray very
 fond of you?"

 Hallward considered for a few moments.  "He likes me," he answered,
 after a pause; "I know he likes me.  Of course I flatter him
 dreadfully.  I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I
 know I shall be sorry for having said.  I give myself away.  As a rule,
 he is charming to me, and we walk home together from the club arm in
 arm, or sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things.  Now and then,
 however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight
 in giving me pain.  Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole
 soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his
 coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a
 summer's day."

 "Days in summer, Basil, are apt to linger.  Perhaps you will tire
 sooner than he will.  It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no
 doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty.  That accounts for the fact
 that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.  In the wild
 struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so
 we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping
 our place.  The thoroughly well informed man,--that is the modern
 ideal.  And the mind of the thoroughly well informed man is a dreadful
 thing.  It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, and
 everything priced above its proper value.  I think you will tire first,
 all the same.  Some day you will look at Gray, and he will seem to you
 to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of color, or
 something.  You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and
 seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he
 calls, you will be [11] perfectly cold and indifferent.  It will be a
 great pity, for it will alter you.  The worst of having a romance is
 that it leaves one so unromantic."

 "Harry, don't talk like that.  As long as I live, the personality of
 Dorian Gray will dominate me.  You can't feel what I feel.  You change
 too often."

 "Ah, my dear Basil, that is exactly why I can feel it.  Those who are
 faithful know only the pleasures of love: it is the faithless who know
 love's tragedies."  And Lord Henry struck a light on a dainty silver
 case, and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and
 self-satisfied air, as if he had summed up life in a phrase.  There was
 a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows
 chased themselves across the grass like swallows.  How pleasant it was
 in the garden!  And how delightful other people's emotions were!--much
 more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him.  One's own soul,
 and the passions of one's friends,--those were the fascinating things
 in life.  He thought with pleasure of the tedious luncheon that he had
 missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward.  Had he gone to his
 aunt's, he would have been sure to meet Lord Goodbody there, and the
 whole conversation would have been about the housing of the poor, and
 the necessity for model lodging-houses. It was charming to have escaped
 all that!  As he thought of his aunt, an idea seemed to strike him.  He
 turned to Hallward, and said, "My dear fellow, I have just remembered."

 "Remembered what, Harry?"

 "Where I heard the name of Dorian Gray."

 "Where was it?" asked Hallward, with a slight frown.

 "Don't look so angry, Basil.  It was at my aunt's, Lady Agatha's. She
 told me she had discovered a wonderful young man, who was going to help
 her in the East End, and that his name was Dorian Gray.  I am bound to
 state that she never told me he was good-looking.  Women have no
 appreciation of good looks.  At least, good women have not. She said
 that he was very earnest, and had a beautiful nature.  I at once
 pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair, horridly
 freckled, and tramping about on huge feet.  I wish I had known it was
 your friend."

 "I am very glad you didn't, Harry."

 "Why?"

 "I don't want you to meet him."

 "Mr. Dorian Gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, coming into
 the garden.

 "You must introduce me now," cried Lord Henry, laughing.

 Basil Hallward turned to the servant, who stood blinking in the
 sunlight.  "Ask Mr. Gray to wait, Parker: I will be in in a few
 moments."  The man bowed, and went up the walk.

 Then he looked at Lord Henry.  "Dorian Gray is my dearest friend," he
 said.  "He has a simple and a beautiful nature.  Your aunt was quite
 right in what she said of him.  Don't spoil him for me.  Don't try to
 influence him.  Your influence would be bad.  The world is wide, and
 has many marvellous people in it.  Don't take [12] away from me the one
 person that makes life absolutely lovely to me, and that gives to my
 art whatever wonder or charm it possesses.  Mind, Harry, I trust you."
 He spoke very slowly, and the words seemed wrung out of him almost
 against his will.

 "What nonsense you talk!" said Lord Henry, smiling, and, taking
 Hallward by the arm, he almost led him into the house.



 CHAPTER II

 [...12] As they entered they saw Dorian Gray.  He was seated at the
 piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of
 Schumann's "Forest Scenes."  "You must lend me these, Basil," he cried.
 "I want to learn them.  They are perfectly charming."

 "That entirely depends on how you sit to-day, Dorian."

 "Oh, I am tired of sitting, and I don't want a life-sized portrait of
 myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the music-stool, in a
 wilful, petulant manner.  When he caught sight of Lord Henry, a faint
 blush colored his cheeks for a moment, and he started up.  "I beg your
 pardon, Basil, but I didn't know you had any one with you."

 "This is Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian, an old Oxford friend of mine.  I
 have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were, and now you
 have spoiled everything."

 "You have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Gray," said Lord
 Henry, stepping forward and shaking him by the hand.  "My aunt has
 often spoken to me about you.  You are one of her favorites, and, I am
 afraid, one of her victims also."

 "I am in Lady Agatha's black books at present," answered Dorian, with a
 funny look of penitence.  "I promised to go to her club in Whitechapel
 with her last Tuesday, and I really forgot all about it. We were to
 have played a duet together,--three duets, I believe.  I don't know
 what she will say to me.  I am far too frightened to call."

 "Oh, I will make your peace with my aunt.  She is quite devoted to you.
 And I don't think it really matters about your not being there. The
 audience probably thought it was a duet.  When Aunt Agatha sits down to
 the piano she makes quite enough noise for two people."

 "That is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me," answered Dorian,
 laughing.

 Lord Henry looked at him.  Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome,
 with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp
 gold hair.  There was something in his face that made one trust him at
 once.  All the candor of youth was there, as well as all youth's
 passionate purity.  One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from
 the world.  No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him. He was made to be
 worshipped.

 "You are too charming to go in for philanthropy, Mr. Gray,--far too
 charming."  And Lord Henry flung himself down on the divan, and opened
 his cigarette-case.

 Hallward had been busy mixing his colors and getting his brushes ready.
 He was looking worried, and when he heard Lord Henry's last [13] remark
 he glanced at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said, "Harry, I
 want to finish this picture to-day.  Would you think it awfully rude of
 me if I asked you to go away?"

 Lord Henry smiled, and looked at Dorian Gray.  "Am I to go, Mr. Gray?"
 he asked.

 "Oh, please don't, Lord Henry.  I see that Basil is in one of his sulky
 moods; and I can't bear him when he sulks.  Besides, I want you to tell
 me why I should not go in for philanthropy."

 "I don't know that I shall tell you that, Mr. Gray.  But I certainly
 will not run away, now that you have asked me to stop.  You don't
 really mind, Basil, do you?  You have often told me that you liked your
 sitters to have some one to chat to."

 Hallward bit his lip.  "If Dorian wishes it, of course you must stay.
 Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself."

 Lord Henry took up his hat and gloves.  "You are very pressing, Basil,
 but I am afraid I must go.  I have promised to meet a man at the
 Orleans.--Good-by, Mr. Gray.  Come and see me some afternoon in Curzon
 Street.  I am nearly always at home at five o'clock.  Write to me when
 you are coming.  I should be sorry to miss you."

 "Basil," cried Dorian Gray, "if Lord Henry goes I shall go too.  You
 never open your lips while you are painting, and it is horribly dull
 standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant.  Ask him to stay. I
 insist upon it."

 "Stay, Harry, to oblige Dorian, and to oblige me," said Hallward,
 gazing intently at his picture.  "It is quite true, I never talk when I
 am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious
 for my unfortunate sitters.  I beg you to stay."

 "But what about my man at the Orleans?"

 Hallward laughed.  "I don't think there will be any difficulty about
 that.  Sit down again, Harry.--And now, Dorian, get up on the platform,
 and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to what Lord Henry
 says.  He has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the
 exception of myself."

 Dorian stepped up on the dais, with the air of a young Greek martyr,
 and made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he had
 rather taken a fancy.  He was so unlike Hallward.  They made a
 delightful contrast.  And he had such a beautiful voice.  After a few
 moments he said to him, "Have you really a very bad influence, Lord
 Henry?  As bad as Basil says?"

 "There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray.  All influence
 is immoral,--immoral from the scientific point of view."

 "Why?"

 "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul.  He does
 not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions.  His
 virtues are not real to him.  His sins, if there are such things as
 sins, are borrowed.  He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an
 actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is
 self-development.  To realize one's nature perfectly,--that is what
 each of us is here for.  People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.
 They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes
 to one's [14] self.  Of course they are charitable.  They feed the
 hungry, and clothe the beggar.  But their own souls starve, and are
 naked.  Courage has gone out of our race.  Perhaps we never really had
 it.  The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of
 God, which is the secret of religion,--these are the two things that
 govern us.  And yet--"

 "Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good
 boy," said Hallward, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look
 had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.

 "And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with
 that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of
 him, and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one man
 were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to
 every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,--I
 believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we
 would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the
 Hellenic ideal,--to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal,
 it may be.  But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself.  The
 mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial
 that mars our lives.  We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse
 that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.  The
 body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of
 purification.  Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure,
 or the luxury of a regret.  The only way to get rid of a temptation is
 to yield to it.  Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for
 the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its
 monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.  It has been said that
 the great events of the world take place in the brain.  It is in the
 brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place
 also.  You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your
 rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid,
 thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping
 dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame--"

 "Stop!" murmured Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me.  I don't know
 what to say.  There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don't
 speak.  Let me think, or, rather, let me try not to think."

 For nearly ten minutes he stood there motionless, with parted lips, and
 eyes strangely bright.  He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh
 impulses were at work within him, and they seemed to him to have come
 really from himself.  The few words that Basil's friend had said to
 him--words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in
 them--had yet touched some secret chord, that had never been touched
 before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious
 pulses.

 Music had stirred him like that.  Music had troubled him many times.
 But music was not articulate.  It was not a new world, but rather a new
 chaos, that it created in us.  Words!  Mere words!  How terrible they
 were!  How clear, and vivid, and cruel!  One could not escape from
 them.  And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! [15] They seemed
 to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a
 music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute.  Mere words!
 Was there anything so real as words?

 Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood.
 He understood them now.  Life suddenly became fiery-colored to him. It
 seemed to him that he had been walking in fire.  Why had he not known
 it?

 Lord Henry watched him, with his sad smile.  He knew the precise
 psychological moment when to say nothing.  He felt intensely
 interested.  He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had
 produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen,
 which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he
 wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through the same experience.
 He had merely shot an arrow into the air.  Had it hit the mark?  How
 fascinating the lad was!

 Hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his, that had
 the true refinement and perfect delicacy that come only from strength.
 He was unconscious of the silence.

 "Basil, I am tired of standing," cried Dorian Gray, suddenly.  "I must
 go out and sit in the garden.  The air is stifling here."

 "My dear fellow, I am so sorry.  When I am painting, I can't think of
 anything else.  But you never sat better.  You were perfectly still.
 And I have caught the effect I wanted,--the half-parted lips, and the
 bright look in the eyes.  I don't know what Harry has been saying to
 you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression.
 I suppose he has been paying you compliments.  You mustn't believe a
 word that he says."

 "He has certainly not been paying me compliments.  Perhaps that is the
 reason I don't think I believe anything he has told me."

 "You know you believe it all," said Lord Henry, looking at him with his
 dreamy, heavy-lidded eyes.  "I will go out to the garden with you.  It
 is horridly hot in the studio.--Basil, let us have something iced to
 drink, something with strawberries in it."

 "Certainly, Harry.  Just touch the bell, and when Parker comes I will
 tell him what you want.  I have got to work up this background, so I
 will join you later on.  Don't keep Dorian too long.  I have never been
 in better form for painting than I am to-day.  This is going to be my
 masterpiece.  It is my masterpiece as it stands."

 Lord Henry went out to the garden, and found Dorian Gray burying his
 face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their
 perfume as if it had been wine.  He came close to him, and put his hand
 upon his shoulder.  "You are quite right to do that," he murmured.
 "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
 senses but the soul."

 The lad started and drew back.  He was bareheaded, and the leaves had
 tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads. There
 was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are
 suddenly awakened.  His finely-chiselled nostrils quivered, and some
 hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling.

 [16] "Yes," continued Lord Henry, "that is one of the great secrets of
 life,--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means
 of the soul.  You are a wonderful creature.  You know more than you
 think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

 Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away.  He could not help liking
 the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him.  His romantic
 olive-colored face and worn expression interested him. There was
 something in his low, languid voice that was absolutely fascinating.
 His cool, white, flower-like hands, even, had a curious charm.  They
 moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their
 own.  But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid.  Why had
 it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?  He had known
 Basil Hallward for months, but the friendship between then had never
 altered him.  Suddenly there had come some one across his life who
 seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery. And, yet, what was
 there to be afraid of?  He was not a school-boy, or a girl.  It was
 absurd to be frightened.

 "Let us go and sit in the shade," said Lord Henry.  "Parker has brought
 out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare you will be
 quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again.  You really must
 not let yourself become sunburnt.  It would be very unbecoming to you."

 "What does it matter?" cried Dorian, laughing, as he sat down on the
 seat at the end of the garden.

 "It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray."

 "Why?"

 "Because you have now the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one
 thing worth having."

 "I don't feel that, Lord Henry."

 "No, you don't feel it now.  Some day, when you are old and wrinkled
 and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and
 passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you
 will feel it terribly.  Now, wherever you go, you charm the world.
 Will it always be so?

 "You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray.  Don't frown.  You
 have.  And Beauty is a form of Genius,--is higher, indeed, than Genius,
 as it needs no explanation.  It is one of the great facts of the world,
 like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that
 silver shell we call the moon.  It cannot be questioned.  It has its
 divine right of sovereignty.  It makes princes of those who have it.
 You smile?  Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile.

 "People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial.  That may be so.
 But at least it is not so superficial as Thought.  To me, Beauty is the
 wonder of wonders.  It is only shallow people who do not judge by
 appearances.  The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the
 invisible.

 "Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.  But what the gods give
 they quickly take away.  You have only a few years in which really to
 live.  When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you
 will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left [17] for you, or
 have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of
 your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes
 brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and
 wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and
 hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed.  You will suffer horribly.

 "Realize your youth while you have it.  Don't squander the gold of your
 days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,
 or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar,
 which are the aims, the false ideals, of our age.  Live! Live the
 wonderful life that is in you!  Let nothing be lost upon you.  Be
 always searching for new sensations.  Be afraid of nothing.

 "A new hedonism,--that is what our century wants.  You might be its
 visible symbol.  With your personality there is nothing you could not
 do.  The world belongs to you for a season.

 "The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you
 really are, what you really might be.  There was so much about you that
 charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.  I
 thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.  For there is such a
 little time that your youth will last,--such a little time.

 "The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again.  The laburnum
 will be as golden next June as it is now.  In a month there will be
 purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of
 its leaves will have its purple stars.  But we never get back our
 youth.  The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish.
 Our limbs fail, our senses rot.  We degenerate into hideous puppets,
 haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid,
 and the exquisite temptations that we did not dare to yield to.  Youth!
 Youth!  There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!"

 Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering.  The spray of lilac fell
 from his hand upon the gravel.  A furry bee came and buzzed round it
 for a moment.  Then it began to scramble all over the fretted purple of
 the tiny blossoms.  He watched it with that strange interest in trivial
 things that we try to develop when things of high import make us
 afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion, for which we cannot
 find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden
 siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. After a time it flew away.
 He saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus.
 The flower seemed to quiver, and then swayed gently to and fro.

 Suddenly Hallward appeared at the door of the studio, and made frantic
 signs for them to come in.  They turned to each other, and smiled.

 "I am waiting," cried Hallward.  "Do come in.  The light is quite
 perfect, and you can bring your drinks."

 They rose up, and sauntered down the walk together.  Two
 green-and-white butterflies fluttered past them, and in the pear-tree
 at the end of the garden a thrush began to sing.

 "You are glad you have met me, Mr. Gray," said Lord Henry, looking at
 him.

 "Yes, I am glad now.  I wonder shall I always be glad?"

 [18] "Always!  That is a dreadful word.  It makes me shudder when I
 hear it.  Women are so fond of using it.  They spoil every romance by
 trying to make it last forever.  It is a meaningless word, too.  The
 only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the
 caprice lasts a little longer."

 As they entered the studio, Dorian Gray put his hand upon Lord Henry's
 arm.  "In that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he murmured,
 flushing at his own boldness, then stepped upon the platform and
 resumed his pose.

 Lord Henry flung himself into a large wicker arm-chair, and watched
 him.  The sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound
 that broke the stillness, except when Hallward stepped back now and
 then to look at his work from a distance.  In the slanting beams that
 streamed through the open door-way the dust danced and was golden.  The
 heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything.

 After about a quarter of an hour, Hallward stopped painting, looked for
 a long time at Dorian Gray, and then for a long time at the picture,
 biting the end of one of his huge brushes, and smiling.  "It is quite
 finished," he cried, at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in
 thin vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the canvas.

 Lord Henry came over and examined the picture.  It was certainly a
 wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well.

 "My dear fellow, I congratulate you most warmly," he said.--"Mr. Gray,
 come and look at yourself."

 The lad started, as if awakened from some dream.  "Is it really
 finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform.

 "Quite finished," said Hallward.  "And you have sat splendidly to-day.
 I am awfully obliged to you."

 "That is entirely due to me," broke in Lord Henry.  "Isn't it, Mr.
 Gray?"

 Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture
 and turned towards it.  When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks
 flushed for a moment with pleasure.  A look of joy came into his eyes,
 as if he had recognized himself for the first time.  He stood there
 motionless, and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking
 to him, but not catching the meaning of his words.  The sense of his
 own beauty came on him like a revelation.  He had never felt it before.
 Basil Hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the
 charming exaggerations of friendship.  He had listened to them, laughed
 at them, forgotten them.  They had not influenced his nature.  Then had
 come Lord Henry, with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible
 warning of its brevity.  That had stirred him at the time, and now, as
 he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality
 of the description flashed across him. Yes, there would be a day when
 his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colorless, the
 grace of his figure broken and deformed.  The scarlet would pass away
 from his lips, and the gold steal from his hair.  The life that was to
 make his soul would mar his body.  He would become ignoble, hideous,
 and uncouth.

 [19] As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck like a knife
 across him, and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver.  His
 eyes deepened into amethyst, and a mist of tears came across them. He
 felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart.

 "Don't you like it?" cried Hallward at last, stung a little by the
 lad's silence, and not understanding what it meant.

 "Of course he likes it," said Lord Henry.  "Who wouldn't like it?  It
 is one of the greatest things in modern art.  I will give you anything
 you like to ask for it.  I must have it."

 "It is not my property, Harry."

 "Whose property is it?"

 "Dorian's, of course."

 "He is a very lucky fellow."

 "How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed upon
 his own portrait.  "How sad it is!  I shall grow old, and horrid, and
 dreadful.  But this picture will remain always young.  It will never be
 older than this particular day of June. . . . If it was only the other
 way!  If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that
 were to grow old!  For this--for this--I would give everything! Yes,
 there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!"

 "You would hardly care for that arrangement, Basil," cried Lord Henry,
 laughing.  "It would be rather hard lines on you."

 "I should object very strongly, Harry."

 Dorian Gray turned and looked at him.  "I believe you would, Basil. You
 like your art better than your friends.  I am no more to you than a
 green bronze figure.  Hardly as much, I dare say."

 Hallward stared in amazement.  It was so unlike Dorian to speak like
 that.  What had happened?  He seemed almost angry.  His face was
 flushed and his cheeks burning.

 "Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your
 silver Faun.  You will like them always.  How long will you like me?
 Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose.  I know, now, that when one
 loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.
 Your picture has taught me that.  Lord Henry is perfectly right. Youth
 is the only thing worth having.  When I find that I am growing old, I
 will kill myself."

 Hallward turned pale, and caught his hand.  "Dorian!  Dorian!" he
 cried, "don't talk like that.  I have never had such a friend as you,
 and I shall never have such another.  You are not jealous of material
 things, are you?"

 "I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.  I am jealous of
 the portrait you have painted of me.  Why should it keep what I must
 lose?  Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives
 something to it.  Oh, if it was only the other way!  If the picture
 could change, and I could be always what I am now!  Why did you paint
 it?  It will mock me some day,--mock me horribly!"  The hot tears
 welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on
 the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as if he was praying.

 "This is your doing, Harry," said Hallward, bitterly.

 [20] "My doing?"

 "Yes, yours, and you know it."

 Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "It is the real Dorian Gray,--that
 is all," he answered.

 "It is not."

 "If it is not, what have I to do with it?"

 "You should have gone away when I asked you."

 "I stayed when you asked me."

 "Harry, I can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between
 you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work I have ever
 done, and I will destroy it.  What is it but canvas and color?  I will
 not let it come across our three lives and mar them."

 Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and looked at him
 with pallid face and tear-stained eyes, as he walked over to the deal
 painting-table that was set beneath the large curtained window.  What
 was he doing there?  His fingers were straying about among the litter
 of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something.  Yes, it was the
 long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel.  He had found
 it at last.  He was going to rip up the canvas.

 With a stifled sob he leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to
 Hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of
 the studio.  "Don't, Basil, don't!" he cried.  "It would be murder!"

 "I am glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian," said Hallward,
 coldly, when he had recovered from his surprise.  "I never thought you
 would."

 "Appreciate it?  I am in love with it, Basil.  It is part of myself, I
 feel that."

 "Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and
 sent home.  Then you can do what you like with yourself."  And he
 walked across the room and rang the bell for tea.  "You will have tea,
 of course, Dorian?  And so will you, Harry?  Tea is the only simple
 pleasure left to us."

 "I don't like simple pleasures," said Lord Henry.  "And I don't like
 scenes, except on the stage.  What absurd fellows you are, both of you!
 I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal.  It was the most
 premature definition ever given.  Man is many things, but he is not
 rational.  I am glad he is not, after all: though I wish you chaps
 would not squabble over the picture.  You had much better let me have
 it, Basil.  This silly boy doesn't really want it, and I do."

 "If you let any one have it but me, Basil, I will never forgive you!"
 cried Dorian Gray.  "And I don't allow people to call me a silly boy."

 "You know the picture is yours, Dorian.  I gave it to you before it
 existed."

 "And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray, and that you
 don't really mind being called a boy."

 "I should have minded very much this morning, Lord Henry."

 "Ah! this morning!  You have lived since then."

 There came a knock to the door, and the butler entered with the
 tea-tray and set it down upon a small Japanese table.  There was a [21]
 rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted Georgian urn.
 Two globe-shaped china dishes were brought in by a page.  Dorian Gray
 went over and poured the tea out.  The two men sauntered languidly to
 the table, and examined what was under the covers.

 "Let us go to the theatre to-night," said Lord Henry.  "There is sure
 to be something on, somewhere.  I have promised to dine at White's, but
 it is only with an old friend, so I can send him a wire and say that I
 am ill, or that I am prevented from coming in consequence of a
 subsequent engagement.  I think that would be a rather nice excuse: it
 would have the surprise of candor."

 "It is such a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered Hallward.
 "And, when one has them on, they are so horrid."

 "Yes," answered Lord Henry, dreamily, "the costume of our day is
 detestable.  It is so sombre, so depressing.  Sin is the only
 color-element left in modern life."

 "You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry."

 "Before which Dorian?  The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the
 one in the picture?"

 "Before either."

 "I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry," said the
 lad.

 "Then you shall come; and you will come too, Basil, won't you?"

 "I can't, really.  I would sooner not.  I have a lot of work to do."

 "Well, then, you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray."

 "I should like that awfully."

 Basil Hallward bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the
 picture.  "I will stay with the real Dorian," he said, sadly.

 "Is it the real Dorian?" cried the original of the portrait, running
 across to him.  "Am I really like that?"

 "Yes; you are just like that."

 "How wonderful, Basil!"

 "At least you are like it in appearance.  But it will never alter,"
 said Hallward.  "That is something."

 "What a fuss people make about fidelity!" murmured Lord Henry.

 "And, after all, it is purely a question for physiology.  It has
 nothing to do with our own will.  It is either an unfortunate accident,
 or an unpleasant result of temperament.  Young men want to be faithful,
 and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one
 can say."

 "Don't go to the theatre to-night, Dorian," said Hallward.  "Stop and
 dine with me."

 "I can't, really."

 "Why?"

 "Because I have promised Lord Henry to go with him."

 "He won't like you better for keeping your promises.  He always breaks
 his own.  I beg you not to go."

 Dorian Gray laughed and shook his head.

 "I entreat you."

 The lad hesitated, and looked over at Lord Henry, who was watching them
 from the tea-table with an amused smile.

 [22] "I must go, Basil," he answered.

 "Very well," said Hallward; and he walked over and laid his cup down on
 the tray.  "It is rather late, and, as you have to dress, you had
 better lose no time.  Good-by, Harry; good-by, Dorian.  Come and see me
 soon.  Come to-morrow."

 "Certainly."

 "You won't forget?"

 "No, of course not."

 "And . . . Harry!"

 "Yes, Basil?"

 "Remember what I asked you, when in the garden this morning."

 "I have forgotten it."

 "I trust you."

 "I wish I could trust myself," said Lord Henry, laughing.--"Come, Mr.
 Gray, my hansom is outside, and I can drop you at your own
 place.--Good-by, Basil.  It has been a most interesting afternoon."

 As the door closed behind them, Hallward flung himself down on a sofa,
 and a look of pain came into his face.



 CHAPTER III

 [...22] One afternoon, a month later, Dorian Gray was reclining in a
 luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of Lord Henry's house in
 Curzon Street.  It was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high
 panelled wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-colored frieze and
 ceiling of raised plaster-work, and its brick-dust felt carpet strewn
 with long-fringed silk Persian rugs.  On a tiny satinwood table stood a
 statuette by Clodion, and beside it lay a copy of "Les Cent Nouvelles,"
 bound for Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve, and powdered with the gilt
 daisies that the queen had selected for her device.  Some large blue
 china jars, filled with parrot-tulips, were ranged on the mantel-shelf,
 and through the small leaded panes of the window streamed the
 apricot-colored light of a summer's day in London.

 Lord Henry had not come in yet.  He was always late on principle, his
 principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.  So the lad was
 looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages
 of an elaborately-illustrated edition of "Manon Lescaut" that he had
 found in one of the bookcases.  The formal monotonous ticking of the
 Louis Quatorze clock annoyed him.  Once or twice he thought of going
 away.

 At last he heard a light step outside, and the door opened.  "How late
 you are, Harry!" he murmured.

 "I am afraid it is not Harry, Mr. Gray," said a woman's voice.

 He glanced quickly round, and rose to his feet.  "I beg your pardon. I
 thought--"

 "You thought it was my husband.  It is only his wife.  You must let me
 introduce myself.  I know you quite well by your photographs.  I think
 my husband has got twenty-seven of them."

 [23] "Not twenty-seven, Lady Henry?"

 "Well, twenty-six, then.  And I saw you with him the other night at the
 Opera."  She laughed nervously, as she spoke, and watched him with her
 vague forget-me-not eyes.  She was a curious woman, whose dresses
 always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a
 tempest.  She was always in love with somebody, and, as her passion was
 never returned, she had kept all her illusions.  She tried to look
 picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.  Her name was
 Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.

 "That was at 'Lohengrin,' Lady Henry, I think?"

 "Yes; it was at dear 'Lohengrin.'  I like Wagner's music better than
 any other music.  It is so loud that one can talk the whole time,
 without people hearing what one says.  That is a great advantage: don't
 you think so, Mr. Gray?"

 The same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her
 fingers began to play with a long paper-knife.

 Dorian smiled, and shook his head: "I am afraid I don't think so, Lady
 Henry.  I never talk during music,--at least during good music. If one
 hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by conversation."

 "Ah! that is one of Harry's views, isn't it, Mr. Gray?  But you must
 not think I don't like good music.  I adore it, but I am afraid of it.
 It makes me too romantic.  I have simply worshipped pianists,--two at a
 time, sometimes.  I don't know what it is about them. Perhaps it is
 that they are foreigners.  They all are, aren't they? Even those that
 are born in England become foreigners after a time, don't they?  It is
 so clever of them, and such a compliment to art. Makes it quite
 cosmopolitan, doesn't it?  You have never been to any of my parties,
 have you, Mr. Gray?  You must come.  I can't afford orchids, but I
 spare no expense in foreigners.  They make one's rooms look so
 picturesque.  But here is Harry!--Harry, I came in to look for you, to
 ask you something,--I forget what it was,--and I found Mr. Gray here.
 We have had such a pleasant chat about music.  We have quite the same
 views.  No; I think our views are quite different.  But he has been
 most pleasant.  I am so glad I've seen him."

 "I am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said Lord Henry, elevating his
 dark crescent-shaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an amused
 smile.--"So sorry I am late, Dorian.  I went to look after a piece of
 old brocade in Wardour Street, and had to bargain for hours for it.
 Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."

 "I am afraid I must be going," exclaimed Lady Henry, after an awkward
 silence, with her silly sudden laugh.  "I have promised to drive with
 the duchess.--Good-by, Mr. Gray.--Good-by, Harry.  You are dining out,
 I suppose?  So am I.  Perhaps I shall see you at Lady Thornbury's."

 "I dare say, my dear," said Lord Henry, shutting the door behind her,
 as she flitted out of the room, looking like a bird-of-paradise that
 had been out in the rain, and leaving a faint odor of patchouli behind
 her.  Then he shook hands with Dorian Gray, lit a cigarette, and flung
 himself down on the sofa.

 [24] "Never marry a woman with straw-colored hair, Dorian," he said,
 after a few puffs.

 "Why, Harry?"

 "Because they are so sentimental."

 "But I like sentimental people."

 "Never marry at all, Dorian.  Men marry because they are tired; women,
 because they are curious: both are disappointed."

 "I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry.  I am too much in love.
 That is one of your aphorisms.  I am putting it into practice, as I do
 everything you say."

 "Whom are you in love with?" said Lord Henry, looking at him with a
 curious smile.

 "With an actress," said Dorian Gray, blushing.

 Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "That is a rather common-place
 début," he murmured.

 "You would not say so if you saw her, Harry."

 "Who is she?"

 "Her name is Sibyl Vane."

 "Never heard of her."

 "No one has.  People will some day, however.  She is a genius."

 "My dear boy, no woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex.  They
 never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.  They represent
 the triumph of matter over mind, just as we men represent the triumph
 of mind over morals.  There are only two kinds of women, the plain and
 the colored.  The plain women are very useful.  If you want to gain a
 reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to
 supper.  The other women are very charming.  They commit one mistake,
 however.  They paint in order to try to look young.  Our grandmothers
 painted in order to try to talk brilliantly.  Rouge and esprit used to
 go together.  That has all gone out now.  As long as a woman can look
 ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
 As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking
 to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent society.  However,
 tell me about your genius.  How long have you known her?"

 "About three weeks.  Not so much.  About two weeks and two days."

 "How did you come across her?"

 "I will tell you, Harry; but you mustn't be unsympathetic about it.
 After all, it never would have happened if I had not met you.  You
 filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life.  For days
 after I met you, something seemed to throb in my veins.  As I lounged
 in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at every one
 who passed me, and wonder with a mad curiosity what sort of lives they
 led.  Some of them fascinated me.  Others filled me with terror. There
 was an exquisite poison in the air.  I had a passion for sensations.

 "One evening about seven o'clock I determined to go out in search of
 some adventure.  I felt that this gray, monstrous London of ours, with
 its myriads of people, its splendid sinners, and its sordid sins, as
 [25] you once said, must have something in store for me.  I fancied a
 thousand things.

 "The mere danger gave me a sense of delight.  I remembered what you had
 said to me on that wonderful night when we first dined together, about
 the search for beauty being the poisonous secret of life.  I don't know
 what I expected, but I went out, and wandered eastward, soon losing my
 way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares.
 About half-past eight I passed by a little third-rate theatre, with
 great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills.  A hideous Jew, in the
 most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the
 entrance, smoking a vile cigar.  He had greasy ringlets, and an
 enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt.  ''Ave a box,
 my lord?' he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an act
 of gorgeous servility.  There was something about him, Harry, that
 amused me.  He was such a monster.  You will laugh at me, I know, but I
 really went in and paid a whole guinea for the stage-box.  To the
 present day I can't make out why I did so; and yet if I hadn't!--my
 dear Harry, if I hadn't, I would have missed the greatest romance of my
 life.  I see you are laughing.  It is horrid of you!"

 "I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you.  But you
 should not say the greatest romance of your life.  You should say the
 first romance of your life.  You will always be loved, and you will
 always be in love with love.  There are exquisite things in store for
 you.  This is merely the beginning."

 "Do you think my nature so shallow?" cried Dorian Gray, angrily.

 "No; I think your nature so deep."

 "How do you mean?"

 "My dear boy, people who only love once in their lives are really
 shallow people.  What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I
 call either the lethargy of custom or the lack of imagination.
 Faithlessness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the
 intellectual life,--simply a confession of failure.  But I don't want
 to interrupt you.  Go on with your story."

 "Well, I found myself seated in a horrid little private box, with a
 vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face.  I looked out behind the
 curtain, and surveyed the house.  It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids
 and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding-cake.  The gallery and pit
 were fairly full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty,
 and there was hardly a person in what I suppose they called the
 dress-circle.  Women went about with oranges and ginger-beer, and there
 was a terrible consumption of nuts going on."

 "It must have been just like the palmy days of the British Drama."

 "Just like, I should fancy, and very horrid.  I began to wonder what on
 earth I should do, when I caught sight of the play-bill.  What do you
 think the play was, Harry?"

 "I should think 'The Idiot Boy, or Dumb but Innocent.'  Our fathers
 used to like that sort of piece, I believe.  The longer I live, Dorian,
 the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is
 not good enough for us.  In art, as in politics, les grand pères ont
 toujours tort."

 [26] "This play was good enough for us, Harry.  It was 'Romeo and
 Juliet.'  I must admit I was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing
 Shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place.  Still, I felt
 interested, in a sort of way.  At any rate, I determined to wait for
 the first act.  There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a
 young Jew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at
 last the drop-scene was drawn up, and the play began.  Romeo was a
 stout elderly gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice,
 and a figure like a beer-barrel.  Mercutio was almost as bad.  He was
 played by the low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was
 on most familiar terms with the pit.  They were as grotesque as the
 scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a pantomime of fifty
 years ago.  But Juliet!  Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years
 of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited
 coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips
 that were like the petals of a rose.  She was the loveliest thing I had
 ever seen in my life.  You said to me once that pathos left you
 unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.
 I tell you, Harry, I could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears
 that came across me.  And her voice,--I never heard such a voice.  It
 was very low at first, with deep mellow notes, that seemed to fall
 singly upon one's ear.  Then it became a little louder, and sounded
 like a flute or a distant hautbois.  In the garden-scene it had all the
 tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are
 singing.  There were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of
 violins.  You know how a voice can stir one.  Your voice and the voice
 of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget.  When I close
 my eyes, I hear them, and each of them says something different.  I
 don't know which to follow.  Why should I not love her?  Harry, I do
 love her.  She is everything to me in life.  Night after night I go to
 see her play. One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is
 Imogen.  I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking
 the poison from her lover's lips.  I have watched her wandering through
 the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and
 dainty cap.  She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a
 guilty king, and given him rue to wear, and bitter herbs to taste of.
 She has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her
 reed-like throat.  I have seen her in every age and in every costume.
 Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.  They are limited to
 their century.  No glamour ever transfigures them.  One knows their
 minds as easily as one knows their bonnets.  One can always find them.
 There is no mystery in one of them.  They ride in the Park in the
 morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their
 stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. They are quite
 obvious.  But an actress!  How different an actress is!  Why didn't you
 tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?"

 "Because I have loved so many of them, Dorian."

 "Oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces."

 "Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces.  There is an extraordinary
 charm in them, sometimes."

 [27] "I wish now I had not told you about Sibyl Vane."

 "You could not have helped telling me, Dorian.  All through your life
 you will tell me everything you do."

 "Yes, Harry, I believe that is true.  I cannot help telling you things.
 You have a curious influence over me.  If I ever did a crime, I would
 come and confide it to you.  You would understand me."

 "People like you--the wilful sunbeams of life--don't commit crimes,
 Dorian.  But I am much obliged for the compliment, all the same.  And
 now tell me,--reach me the matches, like a good boy: thanks,--tell me,
 what are your relations with Sibyl Vane?"

 Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes.
 "Harry, Sibyl Vane is sacred!"

 "It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian," said
 Lord Henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice.  "But why
 should you be annoyed?  I suppose she will be yours some day.  When one
 is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always
 ends by deceiving others.  That is what the world calls romance.  You
 know her, at any rate, I suppose?"

 "Of course I know her.  On the first night I was at the theatre, the
 horrid old Jew came round to the box after the performance was over,
 and offered to bring me behind the scenes and introduce me to her.  I
 was furious with him, and told him that Juliet had been dead for
 hundreds of years, and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in
 Verona.  I think, from his blank look of amazement, that he thought I
 had taken too much champagne, or something."

 "I am not surprised."

 "I was not surprised either.  Then he asked me if I wrote for any of
 the newspapers.  I told him I never even read them.  He seemed terribly
 disappointed at that, and confided to me that all the dramatic critics
 were in a conspiracy against him, and that they were all to be bought."

 "I believe he was quite right there.  But, on the other hand, most of
 them are not at all expensive."

 "Well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means.  By this time the
 lights were being put out in the theatre, and I had to go.  He wanted
 me to try some cigars which he strongly recommended.  I declined.  The
 next night, of course, I arrived at the theatre again. When he saw me
 he made me a low bow, and assured me that I was a patron of art.  He
 was a most offensive brute, though he had an extraordinary passion for
 Shakespeare.  He told me once, with an air of pride, that his three
 bankruptcies were entirely due to the poet, whom he insisted on calling
 'The Bard.'  He seemed to think it a distinction."

 "It was a distinction, my dear Dorian,--a great distinction.  But when
 did you first speak to Miss Sibyl Vane?"

 "The third night.  She had been playing Rosalind.  I could not help
 going round.  I had thrown her some flowers, and she had looked at me;
 at least I fancied that she had.  The old Jew was persistent.  He
 seemed determined to bring me behind, so I consented.  It was curious
 my not wanting to know her, wasn't it?"

 [28] "No; I don't think so."

 "My dear Harry, why?"

 "I will tell you some other time.  Now I want to know about the girl."

 "Sibyl?  Oh, she was so shy, and so gentle.  There is something of a
 child about her.  Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I told
 her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious
 of her power.  I think we were both rather nervous.  The old Jew stood
 grinning at the door-way of the dusty greenroom, making elaborate
 speeches about us both, while we stood looking at each other like
 children.  He would insist on calling me 'My Lord,' so I had to assure
 Sibyl that I was not anything of the kind.  She said quite simply to
 me, 'You look more like a prince.'"

 "Upon my word, Dorian, Miss Sibyl knows how to pay compliments."

 "You don't understand her, Harry.  She regarded me merely as a person
 in a play.  She knows nothing of life.  She lives with her mother, a
 faded tired woman who played Lady Capulet in a sort of magenta
 dressing-wrapper on the first night, and who looks as if she had seen
 better days."

 "I know that look.  It always depresses me."

 "The Jew wanted to tell me her history, but I said it did not interest
 me."

 "You were quite right.  There is always something infinitely mean about
 other people's tragedies."

 "Sibyl is the only thing I care about.  What is it to me where she came
 from?  From her little head to her little feet, she is absolutely and
 entirely divine.  I go to see her act every night of my life, and every
 night she is more marvellous."

 "That is the reason, I suppose, that you will never dine with me now. I
 thought you must have some curious romance on hand.  You have; but it
 is not quite what I expected."

 "My dear Harry, we either lunch or sup together every day, and I have
 been to the Opera with you several times."

 "You always come dreadfully late."

 "Well, I can't help going to see Sibyl play, even if it is only for an
 act.  I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful
 soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with
 awe."

 "You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can't you?"

 He shook his head.  "To-night she is Imogen," he answered, "and
 tomorrow night she will be Juliet."

 "When is she Sibyl Vane?"

 "Never."

 "I congratulate you."

 "How horrid you are!  She is all the great heroines of the world in
 one.  She is more than an individual.  You laugh, but I tell you she
 has genius.  I love her, and I must make her love me.  You, who know
 all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I
 want to make Romeo jealous.  I want the dead lovers of the [29] world
 to hear our laughter, and grow sad.  I want a breath of our passion to
 stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.  My
 God, Harry, how I worship her!"  He was walking up and down the room as
 he spoke.  Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. He was terribly
 excited.

 Lord Henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure.  How different
 he was now from the shy, frightened boy he had met in Basil Hallward's
 studio!  His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of
 scarlet flame.  Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul, and
 Desire had come to meet it on the way.

 "And what do you propose to do?" said Lord Henry, at last.

 "I want you and Basil to come with me some night and see her act.  I
 have not the slightest fear of the result.  You won't be able to refuse
 to recognize her genius.  Then we must get her out of the Jew's hands.
 She is bound to him for three years--at least for two years and eight
 months--from the present time.  I will have to pay him something, of
 course.  When all that is settled, I will take a West-End theatre and
 bring her out properly.  She will make the world as mad as she has made
 me."

 "Impossible, my dear boy!"

 "Yes, she will.  She has not merely art, consummate art-instinct, in
 her, but she has personality also; and you have often told me that it
 is personalities, not principles, that move the age."

 "Well, what night shall we go?"

 "Let me see.  To-day is Tuesday.  Let us fix to-morrow.  She plays
 Juliet to-morrow."

 "All right.  The Bristol at eight o'clock; and I will get Basil."

 "Not eight, Harry, please.  Half-past six.  We must be there before the
 curtain rises.  You must see her in the first act, where she meets
 Romeo."

 "Half-past six!  What an hour!  It will be like having a meat-tea.
 However, just as you wish.  Shall you see Basil between this and then?
 Or shall I write to him?"

 "Dear Basil!  I have not laid eyes on him for a week.  It is rather
 horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in the most wonderful
 frame, designed by himself, and, though I am a little jealous of it for
 being a whole month younger than I am, I must admit that I delight in
 it.  Perhaps you had better write to him.  I don't want to see him
 alone.  He says things that annoy me."

 Lord Henry smiled.  "He gives you good advice, I suppose.  People are
 very fond of giving away what they need most themselves."

 "You don't mean to say that Basil has got any passion or any romance in
 him?"

 "I don't know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has
 romance," said Lord Henry, with an amused look in his eyes.  "Has he
 never let you know that?"

 "Never.  I must ask him about it.  I am rather surprised to hear it. He
 is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit of a
 Philistine.  Since I have known you, Harry, I have discovered that."

 "Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into [30]
 his work.  The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his
 prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.  The only artists I
 have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists.  Good
 artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly
 uninteresting in themselves.  A great poet, a really great poet, is the
 most unpoetical of all creatures.  But inferior poets are absolutely
 fascinating.  The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they
 look.  The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets
 makes a man quite irresistible.  He lives the poetry that he cannot
 write.  The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."

 "I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray, putting some
 perfume on his handkerchief out of a large gold-topped bottle that
 stood on the table.  "It must be, if you say so.  And now I must be
 off.  Imogen is waiting for me.  Don't forget about to-morrow.
 Good-by."

 As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began
 to think.  Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as
 Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused
 him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy.  He was pleased by
 it.  It made him a more interesting study.  He had been always
 enthralled by the methods of science, but the ordinary subject-matter
 of science had seemed to him trivial and of no import.  And so he had
 begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others.
 Human life,--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating.
 There was nothing else of any value, compared to it.  It was true that
 as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one
 could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, or keep the sulphurous
 fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with
 monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle
 that to know their properties one had to sicken of them.  There were
 maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to
 understand their nature.  And, yet, what a great reward one received!
 How wonderful the whole world became to one!  To note the curious hard
 logic of passion, and the emotional colored life of the intellect,--to
 observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they
 became one, and at what point they were at discord,--there was a
 delight in that!  What matter what the cost was?  One could never pay
 too high a price for any sensation.

 He was conscious--and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his
 brown agate eyes--that it was through certain words of his, musical
 words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had turned
 to this white girl and bowed in worship before her.  To a large extent,
 the lad was his own creation.  He had made him premature.  That was
 something.  Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its
 secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were
 revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect
 of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately
 with the passions and the intellect.  But now and then a complex
 personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed,
 in its [31] way, a real work of art, Life having its elaborate
 masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.

 Yes, the lad was premature.  He was gathering his harvest while it was
 yet spring.  The pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was
 becoming self-conscious.  It was delightful to watch him.  With his
 beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at.
 It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end.  He was like
 one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem
 to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty,
 and whose wounds are like red roses.

 Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were!  There was
 animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.
 The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade.  Who could
 say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?
 How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists!
 And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various
 schools!  Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin?  Or was the
 body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought?  The separation of
 spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter
 was a mystery also.

 He began to wonder whether we should ever make psychology so absolute a
 science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it
 was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others.
 Experience was of no ethical value.  It was merely the name we gave to
 our mistakes.  Men had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning,
 had claimed for it a certain moral efficacy in the formation of
 character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow
 and showed us what to avoid.  But there was no motive power in
 experience.  It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself.
 All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same
 as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we
 would do many times, and with joy.

 It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by
 which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and
 certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to
 promise rich and fruitful results.  His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane
 was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest.  There was no
 doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire
 for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex
 passion.  What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of
 boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination,
 changed into something that seemed to the boy himself to be remote from
 sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous.  It was the
 passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most
 strongly over us.  Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we
 were conscious.  It often happened that when we thought we were
 experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

 While Lord Henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the
 door, and his valet entered, and reminded him it was time to dress [32]
 for dinner.  He got up and looked out into the street.  The sunset had
 smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite.
 The panes glowed like plates of heated metal.  The sky above was like a
 faded rose.  He thought of Dorian Gray's young fiery-colored life, and
 wondered how it was all going to end.

 When he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram
 lying on the hall-table.  He opened it and found it was from Dorian.
 It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to Sibyl Vane.



 CHAPTER IV

 [...32] "I suppose you have heard the news, Basil?" said Lord Henry on
 the following evening, as Hallward was shown into a little private room
 at the Bristol where dinner had been laid for three.

 "No, Harry," answered Hallward, giving his hat and coat to the bowing
 waiter.  "What is it?  Nothing about politics, I hope?  They don't
 interest me.  There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons
 worth painting; though many of them would be the better for a little
 whitewashing."

 "Dorian Gray is engaged to be married," said Lord Henry, watching him
 as he spoke.

 Hallward turned perfectly pale, and a curious look flashed for a moment
 into his eyes, and then passed away, leaving them dull. "Dorian engaged
 to be married!" he cried.  "Impossible!"

 "It is perfectly true."

 "To whom?"

 "To some little actress or other."

 "I can't believe it.  Dorian is far too sensible."

 "Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear
 Basil."

 "Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry," said
 Hallward, smiling.

 "Except in America.  But I didn't say he was married.  I said he was
 engaged to be married.  There is a great difference.  I have a distinct
 remembrance of being married, but I have no recollection at all of
 being engaged.  I am inclined to think that I never was engaged."

 "But think of Dorian's birth, and position, and wealth.  It would be
 absurd for him to marry so much beneath him."

 "If you want him to marry this girl, tell him that, Basil.  He is sure
 to do it then.  Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is
 always from the noblest motives."

 "I hope the girl is good, Harry.  I don't want to see Dorian tied to
 some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his
 intellect."

 "Oh, she is more than good--she is beautiful," murmured Lord Henry,
 sipping a glass of vermouth and orange-bitters.  "Dorian says she is
 beautiful; and he is not often wrong about things of that kind.  [33]
 Your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal
 appearance of other people.  It has had that excellent effect, among
 others.  We are to see her to-night, if that boy doesn't forget his
 appointment."

 "But do you approve of it, Harry?" asked Hallward, walking up and down
 the room, and biting his lip.  "You can't approve of it, really. It is
 some silly infatuation."

 "I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now.  It is an absurd
 attitude to take towards life.  We are not sent into the world to air
 our moral prejudices.  I never take any notice of what common people
 say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.  If a
 personality fascinates me, whatever the personality chooses to do is
 absolutely delightful to me.  Dorian Gray falls in love with a
 beautiful girl who acts Shakespeare, and proposes to marry her.  Why
 not?  If he wedded Messalina he would be none the less interesting. You
 know I am not a champion of marriage.  The real drawback to marriage is
 that it makes one unselfish.  And unselfish people are colorless.  They
 lack individuality.  Still, there are certain temperaments that
 marriage makes more complex.  They retain their egotism, and add to it
 many other egos.  They are forced to have more than one life.  They
 become more highly organized.  Besides, every experience is of value,
 and, whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an
 experience.  I hope that Dorian Gray will make this girl his wife,
 passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become
 fascinated by some one else.  He would be a wonderful study."

 "You don't mean all that, Harry; you know you don't.  If Dorian Gray's
 life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than yourself.  You are much
 better than you pretend to be."

 Lord Henry laughed.  "The reason we all like to think so well of others
 is that we are all afraid for ourselves.  The basis of optimism is
 sheer terror.  We think that we are generous because we credit our
 neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves.  We
 praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good
 qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
 I mean everything that I have said.  I have the greatest contempt for
 optimism.  And as for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose
 growth is arrested.  If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to
 reform it.  But here is Dorian himself. He will tell you more than I
 can."

 "My dear Harry, my dear Basil, you must both congratulate me!" said the
 boy, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined wings, and
 shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn.  "I have never been so
 happy.  Of course it is sudden: all really delightful things are.  And
 yet it seems to me to be the one thing I have been looking for all my
 life."  He was flushed with excitement and pleasure, and looked
 extraordinarily handsome.

 "I hope you will always be very happy, Dorian," said Hallward, "but I
 don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your engagement.
 You let Harry know."

 "And I don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in Lord [34]
 Henry, putting his hand on the lad's shoulder, and smiling as he spoke.
 "Come, let us sit down and try what the new chef here is like, and then
 you will tell us how it all came about."

 "There is really not much to tell," cried Dorian, as they took their
 seats at the small round table.  "What happened was simply this. After
 I left you yesterday evening, Harry, I had some dinner at that curious
 little Italian restaurant in Rupert Street, you introduced me to, and
 went down afterwards to the theatre.  Sibyl was playing Rosalind.  Of
 course the scenery was dreadful, and the Orlando absurd.  But Sibyl!
 You should have seen her!  When she came on in her boy's dress she was
 perfectly wonderful.  She wore a moss-colored velvet jerkin with
 cinnamon sleeves, slim brown cross-gartered hose, a dainty little green
 cap with a hawk's feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined
 with dull red.  She had never seemed to me more exquisite.  She had all
 the delicate grace of that Tanagra figurine that you have in your
 studio, Basil.  Her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves
 round a pale rose.  As for her acting--well, you will see her to-night.
 She is simply a born artist.  I sat in the dingy box absolutely
 enthralled.  I forgot that I was in London and in the nineteenth
 century.  I was away with my love in a forest that no man had ever
 seen.  After the performance was over I went behind, and spoke to her.
 As we were sitting together, suddenly there came a look into her eyes
 that I had never seen there before.  My lips moved towards hers.  We
 kissed each other.  I can't describe to you what I felt at that moment.
 It seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect point
 of rose-colored joy.  She trembled all over, and shook like a white
 narcissus.  Then she flung herself on her knees and kissed my hands. I
 feel that I should not tell you all this, but I can't help it.  Of
 course our engagement is a dead secret.  She has not even told her own
 mother.  I don't know what my guardians will say.  Lord Radley is sure
 to be furious.  I don't care.  I shall be of age in less than a year,
 and then I can do what I like.  I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to
 take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays?
 Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my
 ear.  I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on
 the mouth."

 "Yes, Dorian, I suppose you were right," said Hallward, slowly.

 "Have you seen her to-day?" asked Lord Henry.

 Dorian Gray shook his head.  "I left her in the forest of Arden, I
 shall find her in an orchard in Verona."

 Lord Henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner.  "At what
 particular point did you mention the word marriage, Dorian? and what
 did she say in answer?  Perhaps you forgot all about it."

 "My dear Harry, I did not treat it as a business transaction, and I did
 not make any formal proposal.  I told her that I loved her, and she
 said she was not worthy to be my wife.  Not worthy!  Why, the whole
 world is nothing to me compared to her."

 "Women are wonderfully practical," murmured Lord Henry,--"much more
 practical than we are.  In situations of that kind we often forget to
 say anything about marriage, and they always remind us."

 [35] Hallward laid his hand upon his arm.  "Don't, Harry.  You have
 annoyed Dorian.  He is not like other men.  He would never bring misery
 upon any one.  His nature is too fine for that."

 Lord Henry looked across the table.  "Dorian is never annoyed with me,"
 he answered.  "I asked the question for the best reason possible, for
 the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any
 question,--simple curiosity.  I have a theory that it is always the
 women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women, except,
 of course, in middle-class life.  But then the middle classes are not
 modern."

 Dorian Gray laughed, and tossed his head.  "You are quite incorrigible,
 Harry; but I don't mind.  It is impossible to be angry with you.  When
 you see Sibyl Vane you will feel that the man who could wrong her would
 be a beast without a heart.  I cannot understand how any one can wish
 to shame what he loves.  I love Sibyl Vane.  I wish to place her on a
 pedestal of gold, and to see the world worship the woman who is mine.
 What is marriage?  An irrevocable vow.  And it is an irrevocable vow
 that I want to take. Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me
 good.  When I am with her, I regret all that you have taught me.  I
 become different from what you have known me to be.  I am changed, and
 the mere touch of Sibyl Vane's hand makes me forget you and all your
 wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories."

 "You will always like me, Dorian," said Lord Henry.  "Will you have
 some coffee, you fellows?--Waiter, bring coffee, and fine-champagne,
 and some cigarettes.  No: don't mind the cigarettes; I have
 some.--Basil, I can't allow you to smoke cigars.  You must have a
 cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure.  It
 is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.  What more can you
 want?--Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me.  I represent to you
 all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

 "What nonsense you talk, Harry!" cried Dorian Gray, lighting his
 cigarette from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had
 placed on the table.  "Let us go down to the theatre.  When you see
 Sibyl you will have a new ideal of life.  She will represent something
 to you that you have never known."

 "I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a sad look in his
 eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion.  I am afraid that there
 is no such thing, for me at any rate.  Still, your wonderful girl may
 thrill me.  I love acting.  It is so much more real than life.  Let us
 go.  Dorian, you will come with me.--I am so sorry, Basil, but there is
 only room for two in the brougham.  You must follow us in a hansom."

 They got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing.
 Hallward was silent and preoccupied.  There was a gloom over him.  He
 could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him to be better
 than many other things that might have happened.  After a few moments,
 they all passed down-stairs.  He drove off by himself, as had been
 arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in
 front of him.  A strange sense of loss came over him. [36] He felt that
 Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the
 past.  His eyes darkened, and the crowded flaring streets became
 blurred to him.  When the cab drew up at the doors of the theatre, it
 seemed to him that he had grown years older.



 CHAPTER V

 [...36] For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and
 the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to
 ear with an oily, tremulous smile.  He escorted them to their box with
 a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands, and talking
 at the top of his voice.  Dorian Gray loathed him more than ever.  He
 felt as if he had come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban.
 Lord Henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him.  At least he
 declared he did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand, and assured
 him that he was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real genius
 and gone bankrupt over Shakespeare.  Hallward amused himself with
 watching the faces in the pit.  The heat was terribly oppressive, and
 the huge sunlight flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of fire.
 The youths in the gallery had taken off their coats and waistcoats and
 hung them over the side.  They talked to each other across the theatre,
 and shared their oranges with the tawdry painted girls who sat by them.
 Some women were laughing in the pit; their voices were horribly shrill
 and discordant.  The sound of the popping of corks came from the bar.

 "What a place to find one's divinity in!" said Lord Henry.

 "Yes!" answered Dorian Gray.  "It was here I found her, and she is
 divine beyond all living things.  When she acts you will forget
 everything.  These common people here, with their coarse faces and
 brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage. They
 sit silently and watch her.  They weep and laugh as she wills them to
 do.  She makes them as responsive as a violin.  She spiritualizes them,
 and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self."

 "Oh, I hope not!" murmured Lord Henry, who was scanning the occupants
 of the gallery through his opera-glass.

 "Don't pay any attention to him, Dorian," said Hallward.  "I understand
 what you mean, and I believe in this girl.  Any one you love must be
 marvellous, and any girl that has the effect you describe must be fine
 and noble.  To spiritualize one's age,--that is something worth doing.
 If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if
 she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been
 sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend
 them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all
 your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.  This marriage is
 quite right.  I did not think so at first, but I admit it now.  God
 made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you would have been incomplete."

 "Thanks, Basil," answered Dorian Gray, pressing his hand.  "I [37] knew
 that you would understand me.  Harry is so cynical, he terrifies me.
 But here is the orchestra.  It is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for
 about five minutes.  Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl
 to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything
 that is good in me."

 A quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of
 applause, Sibyl Vane stepped on to the stage.  Yes, she was certainly
 lovely to look at,--one of the loveliest creatures, Lord Henry thought,
 that he had ever seen.  There was something of the fawn in her shy
 grace and startled eyes.  A faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a
 mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she glanced at the crowded,
 enthusiastic house.  She stepped back a few paces, and her lips seemed
 to tremble.  Basil Hallward leaped to his feet and began to applaud.
 Dorian Gray sat motionless, gazing on her, like a man in a dream.  Lord
 Henry peered through his opera-glass, murmuring, "Charming! charming!"

 The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's
 dress had entered with Mercutio and his friends.  The band, such as it
 was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began.  Through the
 crowd of ungainly, shabbily-dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a
 creature from a finer world.  Her body swayed, as she danced, as a
 plant sways in the water.  The curves of her throat were like the
 curves of a white lily.  Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.

 Yet she was curiously listless.  She showed no sign of joy when her
 eyes rested on Romeo.  The few lines she had to speak,--

     Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
        Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
     For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
        And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss,--

 with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly
 artificial manner.  The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view
 of tone it was absolutely false.  It was wrong in color.  It took away
 all the life from the verse.  It made the passion unreal.

 Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her.  Neither of his friends dared
 to say anything to him.  She seemed to them to be absolutely
 incompetent.  They were horribly disappointed.

 Yet they felt that the true test of any Juliet is the balcony scene of
 the second act.  They waited for that.  If she failed there, there was
 nothing in her.

 She looked charming as she came out in the moonlight.  That could not
 be denied.  But the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew
 worse as she went on.  Her gestures became absurdly artificial.  She
 over-emphasized everything that she had to say.  The beautiful
 passage,--

     Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
     Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
     For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night,--

 [38] was declaimed with the painful precision of a school-girl who has
 been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. When
 she leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines,--

                                Although I joy in thee,
     I have no joy of this contract to-night:
     It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
     Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
     Ere one can say, "It lightens."  Sweet, good-night!
     This bud of love by summer's ripening breath
     May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet,--

 she spoke the words as if they conveyed no meaning to her.  It was not
 nervousness.  Indeed, so far from being nervous, she seemed absolutely
 self-contained.  It was simply bad art.  She was a complete failure.

 Even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their
 interest in the play.  They got restless, and began to talk loudly and
 to whistle.  The Jew manager, who was standing at the back of the
 dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage.  The only person unmoved was
 the girl herself.

 When the second act was over there came a storm of hisses, and Lord
 Henry got up from his chair and put on his coat.  "She is quite
 beautiful, Dorian," he said, "but she can't act.  Let us go."

 "I am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard,
 bitter voice.  "I am awfully sorry that I have made you waste an
 evening, Harry.  I apologize to both of you."

 "My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill," interrupted
 Hallward.  "We will come some other night."

 "I wish she was ill," he rejoined.  "But she seems to me to be simply
 callous and cold.  She has entirely altered.  Last night she was a
 great artist.  To-night she is merely a commonplace, mediocre actress."

 "Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian.  Love is a more
 wonderful thing than art."

 "They are both simply forms of imitation," murmured Lord Henry.  "But
 do let us go.  Dorian, you must not stay here any longer.  It is not
 good for one's morals to see bad acting.  Besides, I don't suppose you
 will want your wife to act.  So what does it matter if she plays Juliet
 like a wooden doll?  She is very lovely, and if she knows as little
 about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful
 experience.  There are only two kinds of people who are really
 fascinating,--people who know absolutely everything, and people who
 know absolutely nothing.  Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so
 tragic!  The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that
 is unbecoming.  Come to the club with Basil and myself.  We will smoke
 cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane.  She is beautiful.
 What more can you want?"

 "Please go away, Harry," cried the lad.  "I really want to be
 alone.--Basil, you don't mind my asking you to go?  Ah! can't you see
 that my heart is breaking?"  The hot tears came to his eyes.  His [39]
 lips trembled, and, rushing to the back of the box, he leaned up
 against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.

 "Let us go, Basil," said Lord Henry, with a strange tenderness in his
 voice; and the two young men passed out together.

 A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up, and the curtain rose
 on the third act.  Dorian Gray went back to his seat.  He looked pale,
 and proud, and indifferent.  The play dragged on, and seemed
 interminable.  Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots,
 and laughing.  The whole thing was a fiasco.  The last act was played
 to almost empty benches.

 As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into the
 greenroom.  The girl was standing alone there, with a look of triumph
 on her face.  Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire.  There was a
 radiance about her.  Her parted lips were smiling over some secret of
 their own.

 When he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy
 came over her.  "How badly I acted to-night, Dorian!" she cried.

 "Horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement,--"horribly!  It
 was dreadful.  Are you ill?  You have no idea what it was.  You have no
 idea what I suffered."

 The girl smiled.  "Dorian," she answered, lingering over his name with
 long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to
 the red petals of her lips,--"Dorian, you should have understood.  But
 you understand now, don't you?"

 "Understand what?" he asked, angrily.

 "Why I was so bad to-night.  Why I shall always be bad.  Why I shall
 never act well again."

 He shrugged his shoulders.  "You are ill, I suppose.  When you are ill
 you shouldn't act.  You make yourself ridiculous.  My friends were
 bored.  I was bored."

 She seemed not to listen to him.  She was transfigured with joy.  An
 ecstasy of happiness dominated her.

 "Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one
 reality of my life.  It was only in the theatre that I lived.  I
 thought that it was all true.  I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the
 other.  The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia
 were mine also.  I believed in everything.  The common people who acted
 with me seemed to me to be godlike.  The painted scenes were my world.
 I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real.  You came,--oh, my
 beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison.  You taught me what
 reality really is.  To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw
 through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness, of the empty pageant
 in which I had always played.  To-night, for the first time, I became
 conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the
 moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and
 that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, not what
 I wanted to say.  You had brought me something higher, something of
 which all art is but a reflection.  You have made me understand what
 love really is.  My love! my love!  I am sick [40] of shadows.  You are
 more to me than all art can ever be.  What have I to do with the
 puppets of a play? When I came on to-night, I could not understand how
 it was that everything had gone from me.  Suddenly it dawned on my soul
 what it all meant.  The knowledge was exquisite to me.  I heard them
 hissing, and I smiled.  What should they know of love?  Take me away,
 Dorian--take me away with you, where we can be quite alone.  I hate the
 stage.  I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic
 one that burns me like fire.  Oh, Dorian, Dorian, you understand now
 what it all means?  Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for
 me to play at being in love.  You have made me see that."

 He flung himself down on the sofa, and turned away his face.  "You have
 killed my love," he muttered.

 She looked at him in wonder, and laughed.  He made no answer.  She came
 across to him, and stroked his hair with her little fingers. She knelt
 down and pressed his hands to her lips.  He drew them away, and a
 shudder ran through him.

 Then he leaped up, and went to the door.  "Yes," he cried, "you have
 killed my love.  You used to stir my imagination.  Now you don't even
 stir my curiosity.  You simply produce no effect.  I loved you because
 you were wonderful, because you had genius and intellect, because you
 realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the
 shadows of art.  You have thrown it all away.  You are shallow and
 stupid.  My God! how mad I was to love you!  What a fool I have been!
 You are nothing to me now.  I will never see you again.  I will never
 think of you.  I will never mention your name. You don't know what you
 were to me, once.  Why, once . . . . Oh, I can't bear to think of it!
 I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of
 my life.  How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art!
 What are you without your art? Nothing.  I would have made you famous,
 splendid, magnificent.  The world would have worshipped you, and you
 would have belonged to me. What are you now?  A third-rate actress with
 a pretty face."

 The girl grew white, and trembled.  She clinched her hands together,
 and her voice seemed to catch in her throat.  "You are not serious,
 Dorian?" she murmured.  "You are acting."

 "Acting!  I leave that to you.  You do it so well," he answered,
 bitterly.

 She rose from her knees, and, with a piteous expression of pain in her
 face, came across the room to him.  She put her hand upon his arm, and
 looked into his eyes.  He thrust her back.  "Don't touch me!" he cried.

 A low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet, and lay
 there like a trampled flower.  "Dorian, Dorian, don't leave me!" she
 whispered.  "I am so sorry I didn't act well.  I was thinking of you
 all the time.  But I will try,--indeed, I will try.  It came so
 suddenly across me, my love for you.  I think I should never have known
 it if you had not kissed me,--if we had not kissed each other. Kiss me
 again, my love.  Don't go away from me.  I couldn't bear it. Can't you
 forgive me for to-night?  I will work so hard, and try to [41] improve.
 Don't be cruel to me because I love you better than anything in the
 world.  After all, it is only once that I have not pleased you.  But
 you are quite right, Dorian.  I should have shown myself more of an
 artist.  It was foolish of me; and yet I couldn't help it.  Oh, don't
 leave me, don't leave me."  A fit of passionate sobbing choked her.
 She crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with
 his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled
 in exquisite disdain.  There is always something ridiculous about the
 passions of people whom one has ceased to love.  Sibyl Vane seemed to
 him to be absurdly melodramatic.  Her tears and sobs annoyed him.

 "I am going," he said at last, in his calm, clear voice.  "I don't wish
 to be unkind, but I can't see you again.  You have disappointed me."

 She wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer to him.  Her
 little hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him.
 He turned on his heel, and left the room.  In a few moments he was out
 of the theatre.

 Where he went to, he hardly knew.  He remembered wandering through
 dimly-lit streets with gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking
 houses.  Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after
 him.  Drunkards had reeled by cursing, and chattering to themselves
 like monstrous apes.  He had seen grotesque children huddled upon
 door-steps, and had heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.

 When the dawn was just breaking he found himself at Covent Garden. Huge
 carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty
 street.  The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their
 beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.  He followed into
 the market, and watched the men unloading their wagons.  A
 white-smocked carter offered him some cherries.  He thanked him,
 wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat
 them listlessly.  They had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness
 of the moon had entered into them.  A long line of boys carrying crates
 of striped tulips, and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of
 him, threading their way through the huge jade-green piles of
 vegetables.  Under the portico, with its gray sun-bleached pillars,
 loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction
 to be over.  After some time he hailed a hansom and drove home.  The
 sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like
 silver against it.  As he was passing through the library towards the
 door of his bedroom, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had
 painted of him.  He started back in surprise, and then went over to it
 and examined it.  In the dim arrested light that struggled through the
 cream-colored silk blinds, the face seemed to him to be a little
 changed.  The expression looked different.  One would have said that
 there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth.  It was certainly curious.

 He turned round, and, walking to the window, drew the blinds up.  The
 bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows [42] into
 dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.  But the strange expression
 that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there,
 to be more intensified even.  The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him
 the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been
 looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

 He winced, and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory
 Cupids, that Lord Henry had given him, he glanced hurriedly into it.
 No line like that warped his red lips.  What did it mean?

 He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it
 again.  There were no signs of any change when he looked into the
 actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression
 had altered.  It was not a mere fancy of his own.  The thing was
 horribly apparent.

 He threw himself into a chair, and began to think.  Suddenly there
 flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward's studio the
 day the picture had been finished.  Yes, he remembered it perfectly.
 He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the
 portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the
 face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that
 the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and
 thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness
 of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his prayer had not been
 answered?  Such things were impossible.  It seemed monstrous even to
 think of them.  And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the
 touch of cruelty in the mouth.

 Cruelty!  Had he been cruel?  It was the girl's fault, not his.  He had
 dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he
 had thought her great.  Then she had disappointed him. She had been
 shallow and unworthy.  And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over
 him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little
 child.  He remembered with what callousness he had watched her.  Why
 had he been made like that?  Why had such a soul been given to him?
 But he had suffered also.  During the three terrible hours that the
 play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of
 torture.  His life was well worth hers.  She had marred him for a
 moment, if he had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better
 suited to bear sorrow than men.  They lived on their emotions.  They
 only thought of their emotions.  When they took lovers, it was merely
 to have some one with whom they could have scenes.  Lord Henry had told
 him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were.  Why should he trouble
 about Sibyl Vane?  She was nothing to him now.

 But the picture?  What was he to say of that?  It held the secret of
 his life, and told his story.  It had taught him to love his own
 beauty.  Would it teach him to loathe his own soul?  Would he ever look
 at it again?

 No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses.  The
 horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. Suddenly
 there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that [43] makes
 men mad.  The picture had not changed.  It was folly to think so.

 Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel
 smile.  Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight.  Its blue eyes
 met his own.  A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the
 painted image of himself, came over him.  It had altered already, and
 would alter more.  Its gold would wither into gray.  Its red and white
 roses would die.  For every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck
 and wreck its fairness.  But he would not sin.  The picture, changed or
 unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience.  He would
 resist temptation.  He would not see Lord Henry any more,--would not,
 at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil
 Hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for
 impossible things.  He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends,
 marry her, try to love her again.  Yes, it was his duty to do so.  She
 must have suffered more than he had.  Poor child! He had been selfish
 and cruel to her.  The fascination that she had exercised over him
 would return.  They would be happy together.  His life with her would
 be beautiful and pure.

 He got up from his chair, and drew a large screen right in front of the
 portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it.  "How horrible!" he murmured
 to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it.  When he
 stepped out on the grass, he drew a deep breath.  The fresh morning air
 seemed to drive away all his sombre passions.  He thought only of Sibyl
 Vane.  A faint echo of his love came back to him.  He repeated her name
 over and over again.  The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched
 garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.



 CHAPTER VI

 [...43] It was long past noon when he awoke.  His valet had crept
 several times into the room on tiptoe to see if he was stirring, and
 had wondered what made his young master sleep so late.  Finally his
 bell sounded, and Victor came in softly with a cup of tea, and a pile
 of letters, on a small tray of old Sèvres china, and drew back the
 olive-satin curtains, with their shimmering blue lining, that hung in
 front of the three tall windows.

 "Monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling.

 "What o'clock is it, Victor?" asked Dorian Gray, sleepily.

 "One hour and a quarter, monsieur."

 How late it was!  He sat up, and, having sipped some tea, turned over
 his letters.  One of them was from Lord Henry, and had been brought by
 hand that morning.  He hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside.
 The others he opened listlessly.  They contained the usual collection
 of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes
 of charity concerts, and the like, that are showered on fashionable
 young men every morning during the season. There was a [44] rather
 heavy bill, for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set, that he had
 not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely
 old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when
 only unnecessary things are absolutely necessary to us; and there were
 several very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street
 money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice
 and at the most reasonable rates of interest.

 After about ten minutes he got up, and, throwing on an elaborate
 dressing-gown, passed into the onyx-paved bath-room.  The cool water
 refreshed him after his long sleep.  He seemed to have forgotten all
 that he had gone through.  A dim sense of having taken part in some
 strange tragedy came to him once or twice, but there was the unreality
 of a dream about it.

 As soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down to a
 light French breakfast, that had been laid out for him on a small round
 table close to an open window.  It was an exquisite day.  The warm air
 seemed laden with spices.  A bee flew in, and buzzed round the
 blue-dragon bowl, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, that stood in front
 of him.  He felt perfectly happy.

 Suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the
 portrait, and he started.

 "Too cold for Monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the
 table.  "I shut the window?"

 Dorian shook his head.  "I am not cold," he murmured.

 Was it all true?  Had the portrait really changed?  Or had it been
 simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where
 there had been a look of joy?  Surely a painted canvas could not alter?
 The thing was absurd.  It would serve as a tale to tell Basil some day.
 It would make him smile.

 And, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing!  First in
 the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the touch of
 cruelty in the warped lips.  He almost dreaded his valet leaving the
 room.  He knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the
 portrait.  He was afraid of certainty.  When the coffee and cigarettes
 had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a mad desire to tell
 him to remain.  As the door closed behind him he called him back.  The
 man stood waiting for his orders.  Dorian looked at him for a moment.
 "I am not at home to any one, Victor," he said, with a sigh.  The man
 bowed and retired.

 He rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on a
 luxuriously-cushioned couch that stood facing the screen.  The screen
 was an old one of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a
 rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern.  He scanned it curiously,
 wondering if it had ever before concealed the secret of a man's life.

 Should he move it aside, after all?  Why not let it stay there?  What
 was the use of knowing?  If the thing was true, it was terrible.  If it
 was not true, why trouble about it?  But what if, by some fate or
 deadlier chance, other eyes than his spied behind, and saw the horrible
 change?  What should he do if Basil Hallward came and asked to look at
 his own picture?  He would be sure to do that.  No; the [45] thing had
 to be examined, and at once.  Anything would be better than this
 dreadful state of doubt.

 He got up, and locked both doors.  At least he would be alone when he
 looked upon the mask of his shame.  Then he drew the screen aside, and
 saw himself face to face.  It was perfectly true.  The portrait had
 altered.

 As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he
 found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost
 scientific interest.  That such a change should have taken place was
 incredible to him.  And yet it was a fact.  Was there some subtle
 affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form
 and color on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? Could it be
 that what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they
 made true?  Or was there some other, more terrible reason?  He
 shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there,
 gazing at the picture in sickened horror.

 One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him.  It had made him
 conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane.  It was not
 too late to make reparation for that.  She could still be his wife.
 His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would
 be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil
 Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would
 be to him what holiness was to some, and conscience to others, and the
 fear of God to us all.  There were opiates for remorse, drugs that
 could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of
 the degradation of sin.  Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men
 brought upon their souls.

 Three o'clock struck, and four, and half-past four, but he did not
 stir.  He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to
 weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine
 labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.  He did not know
 what to do, or what to think.  Finally, he went over to the table and
 wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved, imploring her
 forgiveness, and accusing himself of madness.  He covered page after
 page with wild words of sorrow, and wilder words of pain.  There is a
 luxury in self-reproach.  When we blame ourselves we feel that no one
 else has a right to blame us.  It is the confession, not the priest,
 that gives us absolution.  When Dorian Gray had finished the letter, he
 felt that he had been forgiven.

 Suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard Lord Henry's
 voice outside.  "My dear Dorian, I must see you.  Let me in at once. I
 can't bear your shutting yourself up like this."

 He made no answer at first, but remained quite still.  The knocking
 still continued, and grew louder.  Yes, it was better to let Lord Henry
 in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to quarrel
 with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was
 inevitable.  He jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture,
 and unlocked the door.

 "I am so sorry for it all, my dear boy," said Lord Henry, coming in.
 "But you must not think about it too much."

 [46] "Do you mean about Sibyl Vane?" asked Dorian.

 "Yes, of course," answered Lord Henry, sinking into a chair, and slowly
 pulling his gloves off.  "It is dreadful, from one point of view, but
 it was not your fault.  Tell me, did you go behind and see her after
 the play was over?"

 "Yes."

 "I felt sure you had.  Did you make a scene with her?"

 "I was brutal, Harry,--perfectly brutal.  But it is all right now.  I
 am not sorry for anything that has happened.  It has taught me to know
 myself better."

 "Ah, Dorian, I am so glad you take it in that way!  I was afraid I
 would find you plunged in remorse, and tearing your nice hair."

 "I have got through all that," said Dorian, shaking his head, and
 smiling.  "I am perfectly happy now.  I know what conscience is, to
 begin with.  It is not what you told me it was.  It is the divinest
 thing in us.  Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more,--at least not before
 me.  I want to be good.  I can't bear the idea of my soul being
 hideous."

 "A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian!  I congratulate you
 on it.  But how are you going to begin?"

 "By marrying Sibyl Vane."

 "Marrying Sibyl Vane!" cried Lord Henry, standing up, and looking at
 him in perplexed amazement.  "But, my dear Dorian--"

 "Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say.  Something dreadful
 about marriage.  Don't say it.  Don't ever say things of that kind to
 me again.  Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me.  I am not going to
 break my word to her.  She is to be my wife."

 "Your wife!  Dorian! . . . Didn't you get my letter?  I wrote to you
 this morning, and sent the note down, by my own man."

 "Your letter?  Oh, yes, I remember.  I have not read it yet, Harry. I
 was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like."

 Lord Henry walked across the room, and, sitting down by Dorian Gray,
 took both his hands in his, and held them tightly.  "Dorian," he said,
 "my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that Sibyl Vane is
 dead."

 A cry of pain rose from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet,
 tearing his hands away from Lord Henry's grasp.  "Dead!  Sibyl dead! It
 is not true!  It is a horrible lie!"

 "It is quite true, Dorian," said Lord Henry, gravely.  "It is in all
 the morning papers.  I wrote down to you to ask you not to see any one
 till I came.  There will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must
 not be mixed up in it.  Things like that make a man fashionable in
 Paris.  But in London people are so prejudiced.  Here, one should never
 make one's début with a scandal.  One should reserve that to give an
 interest to one's old age.  I don't suppose they know your name at the
 theatre.  If they don't, it is all right.  Did any one see you going
 round to her room?  That is an important point."

 Dorian did not answer for a few moments.  He was dazed with horror.
 Finally he murmured, in a stifled voice, "Harry, did you say an
 inquest?  What did you mean by that?  Did Sibyl--?  Oh, [47] Harry, I
 can't bear it!  But be quick.  Tell me everything at once."

 "I have no doubt it was not an accident, Dorian, though it must be put
 in that way to the public.  As she was leaving the theatre with her
 mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she had forgotten
 something up-stairs.  They waited some time for her, but she did not
 come down again.  They ultimately found her lying dead on the floor of
 her dressing-room.  She had swallowed something by mistake, some
 dreadful thing they use at theatres.  I don't know what it was, but it
 had either prussic acid or white lead in it.  I should fancy it was
 prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously.  It is very
 tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself mixed up in it. I see
 by the Standard that she was seventeen.  I should have thought she was
 almost younger than that.  She looked such a child, and seemed to know
 so little about acting.  Dorian, you mustn't let this thing get on your
 nerves.  You must come and dine with me, and afterwards we will look in
 at the Opera.  It is a Patti night, and everybody will be there.  You
 can come to my sister's box.  She has got some smart women with her."

 "So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to
 himself,--"murdered her as certainly as if I had cut her little throat
 with a knife.  And the roses are not less lovely for all that.  The
 birds sing just as happily in my garden.  And to-night I am to dine
 with you, and then go on to the Opera, and sup somewhere, I suppose,
 afterwards.  How extraordinarily dramatic life is!  If I had read all
 this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it.  Somehow, now
 that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful
 for tears.  Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever
 written in my life.  Strange, that my first passionate love-letter
 should have been addressed to a dead girl.  Can they feel, I wonder,
 those white silent people we call the dead?  Sibyl!  Can she feel, or
 know, or listen?  Oh, Harry, how I loved her once!  It seems years ago
 to me now.  She was everything to me.  Then came that dreadful
 night--was it really only last night?--when she played so badly, and my
 heart almost broke.  She explained it all to me.  It was terribly
 pathetic.  But I was not moved a bit.  I thought her shallow.  Then
 something happened that made me afraid.  I can't tell you what it was,
 but it was awful.  I said I would go back to her.  I felt I had done
 wrong.  And now she is dead.  My God! my God!  Harry, what shall I do?
 You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me
 straight.  She would have done that for me.  She had no right to kill
 herself.  It was selfish of her."

 "My dear Dorian, the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by
 boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
 If you had married this girl you would have been wretched.  Of course
 you would have treated her kindly.  One can always be kind to people
 about whom one cares nothing.  But she would have soon found out that
 you were absolutely indifferent to her.  And when a woman finds that
 out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears
 very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to [48] pay for.
 I say nothing about the social mistake, but I assure you that in any
 case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure."

 "I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room,
 and looking horribly pale.  "But I thought it was my duty.  It is not
 my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was
 right.  I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good
 resolutions,--that they are always made too late.  Mine certainly were."

 "Good resolutions are simply a useless attempt to interfere with
 scientific laws.  Their origin is pure vanity.  Their result is
 absolutely nil.  They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious
 sterile emotions that have a certain charm for us.  That is all that
 can be said for them."

 "Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
 "why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?  I
 don't think I am heartless.  Do you?"

 "You have done too many foolish things in your life to be entitled to
 give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord Henry, with his sweet,
 melancholy smile.

 The lad frowned.  "I don't like that explanation, Harry," he rejoined,
 "but I am glad you don't think I am heartless.  I am nothing of the
 kind.  I know I am not.  And yet I must admit that this thing that has
 happened does not affect me as it should.  It seems to me to be simply
 like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible
 beauty of a great tragedy, a tragedy in which I took part, but by which
 I have not been wounded."

 "It is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found an
 exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism,--"an
 extremely interesting question.  I fancy that the explanation is this.
 It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an
 inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
 absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
 of style.  They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.  They give us
 an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
 Sometimes, however, a tragedy that has artistic elements of beauty
 crosses our lives.  If these elements of beauty are real, the whole
 thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.  Suddenly we find
 that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play.  Or
 rather we are both.  We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the
 spectacle enthralls us.  In the present case, what is it that has
 really happened?  Some one has killed herself for love of you.  I wish
 I had ever had such an experience.  It would have made me in love with
 love for the rest of my life.  The people who have adored me--there
 have not been very many, but there have been some--have always insisted
 on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care
 for me.  They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them they
 go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of woman!  What a
 fearful thing it is!  And what an utter intellectual stagnation it
 reveals!  One should absorb the color of life, but one should never
 remember its details.  Details are always vulgar.

 [49] "Of course, now and then things linger.  I once wore nothing but
 violets all through one season, as mourning for a romance that would
 not die.  Ultimately, however, it did die.  I forget what killed it. I
 think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is
 always a dreadful moment.  It fills one with the terror of eternity.
 Well,--would you believe it?--a week ago, at Lady Hampshire's, I found
 myself seated at dinner next the lady in question, and she insisted on
 going over the whole thing again, and digging up the past, and raking
 up the future.  I had buried my romance in a bed of poppies.  She
 dragged it out again, and assured me that I had spoiled her life.  I am
 bound to state that she ate an enormous dinner, so I did not feel any
 anxiety.  But what a lack of taste she showed!  The one charm of the
 past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has
 fallen.  They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of
 the play is entirely over they propose to continue it.  If they were
 allowed to have their way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and
 every tragedy would culminate in a farce.  They are charmingly
 artificial, but they have no sense of art.  You are more fortunate than
 I am.  I assure you, Dorian, that not one of the women I have known
 would have done for me what Sibyl Vane did for you.  Ordinary women
 always console themselves.  Some of them do it by going in for
 sentimental colors. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her
 age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons.
 It always means that they have a history.  Others find a great
 consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their
 husbands.  They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it
 was the most fascinating of sins.  Religion consoles some.  Its
 mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me; and
 I can quite understand it.  Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being
 told that one is a sinner.  There is really no end to the consolations
 that women find in modern life.  Indeed, I have not mentioned the most
 important one of all."

 "What is that, Harry?" said Dorian Gray, listlessly.

 "Oh, the obvious one.  Taking some one else's admirer when one loses
 one's own.  In good society that always whitewashes a woman.  But
 really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the
 women one meets!  There is something to me quite beautiful about her
 death.  I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.
 They make one believe in the reality of the things that shallow,
 fashionable people play with, such as romance, passion, and love."

 "I was terribly cruel to her.  You forget that."

 "I believe that women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. They
 have wonderfully primitive instincts.  We have emancipated them, but
 they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same.  They love
 being dominated.  I am sure you were splendid.  I have never seen you
 angry, but I can fancy how delightful you looked.  And, after all, you
 said something to me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the
 time to be merely fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and
 it explains everything."

 [50] "What was that, Harry?"

 "You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of
 romance--that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that
 if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."

 "She will never come to life again now," murmured the lad, burying his
 face in his hands.

 "No, she will never come to life.  She has played her last part.  But
 you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply
 as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful
 scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.  The girl never really
 lived, and so she has never really died.  To you at least she was
 always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and
 left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's
 music sounded richer and more full of joy.  The moment she touched
 actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.
 Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia
 was strangled.  Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of
 Brabantio died.  But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane.  She was
 less real than they are."

 There was a silence.  The evening darkened in the room.  Noiselessly,
 and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden.  The colors
 faded wearily out of things.

 After some time Dorian Gray looked up.  "You have explained me to
 myself, Harry," he murmured, with something of a sigh of relief.  "I
 felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it, and I
 could not express it to myself.  How well you know me!  But we will not
 talk again of what has happened.  It has been a marvellous experience.
 That is all.  I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as
 marvellous."

 "Life has everything in store for you, Dorian.  There is nothing that
 you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do."

 "But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and gray, and wrinkled?  What
 then?"

 "Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go,--"then, my dear Dorian, you
 would have to fight for your victories.  As it is, they are brought to
 you.  No, you must keep your good looks.  We live in an age that reads
 too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.  We
 cannot spare you.  And now you had better dress, and drive down to the
 club.  We are rather late, as it is."

 "I think I shall join you at the Opera, Harry.  I feel too tired to eat
 anything.  What is the number of your sister's box?"

 "Twenty-seven, I believe.  It is on the grand tier.  You will see her
 name on the door.  But I am sorry you won't come and dine."

 "I don't feel up to it," said Dorian, wearily.  "But I am awfully
 obliged to you for all that you have said to me.  You are certainly my
 best friend.  No one has ever understood me as you have."

 "We are only at the beginning of our friendship, Dorian," answered Lord
 Henry, shaking him by the hand.  "Good-by.  I shall see you before
 nine-thirty, I hope.  Remember, Patti is singing."

 As he closed the door behind him, Dorian Gray touched the bell, [51]
 and in a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds
 down.  He waited impatiently for him to go.  The man seemed to take an
 interminable time about everything.

 As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen, and drew it back. No;
 there was no further change in the picture.  It had received the news
 of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself.  It was
 conscious of the events of life as they occurred.  The vicious cruelty
 that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the
 very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was.  Or
 was it indifferent to results?  Did it merely take cognizance of what
 passed within the soul? he wondered, and hoped that some day he would
 see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he
 hoped it.

 Poor Sibyl! what a romance it had all been!  She had often mimicked
 death on the stage, and at last Death himself had touched her, and
 brought her with him.  How had she played that dreadful scene?  Had she
 cursed him, as she died?  No; she had died for love of him, and love
 would always be a sacrament to him now.  She had atoned for everything,
 by the sacrifice she had made of her life.  He would not think any more
 of what she had made him go through, that horrible night at the
 theatre.  When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic
 figure to show Love had been a great reality.  A wonderful tragic
 figure?  Tears came to his eyes as he remembered her child-like look
 and winsome fanciful ways and shy tremulous grace. He wiped them away
 hastily, and looked again at the picture.

 He felt that the time had really come for making his choice.  Or had
 his choice already been made?  Yes, life had decided that for
 him,--life, and his own infinite curiosity about life.  Eternal youth,
 infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder
 sins,--he was to have all these things.  The portrait was to bear the
 burden of his shame: that was all.

 A feeling of pain came over him as he thought of the desecration that
 was in store for the fair face on the canvas.  Once, in boyish mockery
 of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips
 that now smiled so cruelly at him.  Morning after morning he had sat
 before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as
 it seemed to him at times.  Was it to alter now with every mood to
 which he yielded?  Was it to become a hideous and loathsome thing, to
 be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that
 had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of the hair?
 The pity of it! the pity of it!

 For a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that
 existed between him and the picture might cease.  It had changed in
 answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain
 unchanged.  And, yet, who, that knew anything about Life, would
 surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that
 chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?
 Besides, was it really under his control?  Had it indeed been prayer
 that had produced the substitution?  Might there not be some curious
 scientific reason for it all?  If thought could exercise its [52]
 influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an
 influence upon dead and inorganic things?  Nay, without thought or
 conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in
 unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom, in secret
 love or strange affinity?  But the reason was of no importance.  He
 would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power.  If the picture
 was to alter, it was to alter.  That was all.  Why inquire too closely
 into it?

 For there would be a real pleasure in watching it.  He would be able to
 follow his mind into its secret places.  This portrait would be to him
 the most magical of mirrors.  As it had revealed to him his own body,
 so it would reveal to him his own soul.  And when winter came upon it,
 he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of
 summer.  When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid
 mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood.
 Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade.  Not one pulse of
 his life would ever weaken.  Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be
 strong, and fleet, and joyous.  What did it matter what happened to the
 colored image on the canvas?  He would be safe.  That was everything.

 He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture,
 smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was
 already waiting for him.  An hour later he was at the Opera, and Lord
 Henry was leaning over his chair.



 CHAPTER VII

 [...52] As he was sitting at breakfast next morning, Basil Hallward was
 shown into the room.

 "I am so glad I have found you, Dorian," he said, gravely.  "I called
 last night, and they told me you were at the Opera.  Of course I knew
 that was impossible.  But I wish you had left word where you had really
 gone to.  I passed a dreadful evening, half afraid that one tragedy
 might be followed by another.  I think you might have telegraphed for
 me when you heard of it first.  I read of it quite by chance in a late
 edition of the Globe, that I picked up at the club. I came here at
 once, and was miserable at not finding you.  I can't tell you how
 heart-broken I am about the whole thing.  I know what you must suffer.
 But where were you?  Did you go down and see the girl's mother?  For a
 moment I thought of following you there.  They gave the address in the
 paper.  Somewhere in the Euston Road, isn't it?  But I was afraid of
 intruding upon a sorrow that I could not lighten.  Poor woman!  What a
 state she must be in!  And her only child, too!  What did she say about
 it all?"

 "My dear Basil, how do I know?" murmured Dorian, sipping some
 pale-yellow wine from a delicate gold-beaded bubble of Venetian glass,
 and looking dreadfully bored.  "I was at the Opera.  You should have
 come on there.  I met Lady Gwendolen, Harry's sister, for the first
 time. We were in her box.  She is perfectly charming; and Patti sang
 divinely.  Don't talk about horrid subjects.  If one doesn't [53] talk
 about a thing, it has never happened.  It is simply expression, as
 Harry says, that gives reality to things.  Tell me about yourself and
 what you are painting."

 "You went to the Opera?" said Hallward, speaking very slowly, and with
 a strained touch of pain in his voice.  "You went to the Opera while
 Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging?  You can talk to me
 of other women being charming, and of Patti singing divinely, before
 the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in? Why, man,
 there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!"

 "Stop, Basil!  I won't hear it!" cried Dorian, leaping to his feet.
 "You must not tell me about things.  What is done is done.  What is
 past is past."

 "You call yesterday the past?"

 "What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it?  It is only
 shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.  A man who
 is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a
 pleasure.  I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions.  I want to
 use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."

 "Dorian, this is horrible!  Something has changed you completely. You
 look exactly the same wonderful boy who used to come down to my studio,
 day after day, to sit for his picture.  But you were simple, natural,
 and affectionate then.  You were the most unspoiled creature in the
 whole world.  Now, I don't know what has come over you.  You talk as if
 you had no heart, no pity in you.  It is all Harry's influence.  I see
 that."

 The lad flushed up, and, going to the window, looked out on the green,
 flickering garden for a few moments.  "I owe a great deal to Harry,
 Basil," he said, at last,--"more than I owe to you.  You only taught me
 to be vain."

 "Well, I am punished for that, Dorian,--or shall be some day."

 "I don't know what you mean, Basil," he exclaimed, turning round.  "I
 don't know what you want.  What do you want?"

 "I want the Dorian Gray I used to know."

 "Basil," said the lad, going over to him, and putting his hand on his
 shoulder, "you have come too late.  Yesterday when I heard that Sibyl
 Vane had killed herself--"

 "Killed herself!  Good heavens! is there no doubt about that?" cried
 Hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror.

 "My dear Basil!  Surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident?  Of
 course she killed herself  It is one of the great romantic tragedies of
 the age.  As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives.
 They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious.  You
 know what I mean,--middle-class virtue, and all that kind of thing.
 How different Sibyl was!  She lived her finest tragedy.  She was always
 a heroine.  The last night she played--the night you saw her--she acted
 badly because she had known the reality of love.  When she knew its
 unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died.  She passed again into
 the sphere of art.  There is something of the martyr about her.  Her
 death has all the pathetic uselessness of [54] martyrdom, all its
 wasted beauty.  But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not
 suffered.  If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment,--about
 half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six,--you would have found me
 in tears.  Even Harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact,
 had no idea what I was going through.  I suffered immensely, then it
 passed away.  I cannot repeat an emotion.  No one can, except
 sentimentalists.  And you are awfully unjust, Basil.  You come down
 here to console me.  That is charming of you.  You find me consoled,
 and you are furious.  How like a sympathetic person!  You remind me of
 a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty
 years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some
 unjust law altered,--I forget exactly what it was.  Finally he
 succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment.  He had
 absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed
 misanthrope.  And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really want to
 console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it
 from a proper artistic point of view.  Was it not Gautier who used to
 write about la consolation des arts?  I remember picking up a little
 vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that
 delightful phrase.  Well, I am not like that young man you told me of
 when we were down at Marlowe together, the young man who used to say
 that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life.  I
 love beautiful things that one can touch and handle.  Old brocades,
 green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings,
 luxury, pomp,--there is much to be got from all these.  But the
 artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still
 more to me.  To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says,
 is to escape the suffering of life.  I know you are surprised at my
 talking to you like this.  You have not realized how I have developed.
 I was a school-boy when you knew me.  I am a man now.  I have new
 passions, new thoughts, new ideas.  I am different, but you must not
 like me less.  I am changed, but you must always be my friend.  Of
 course I am very fond of Harry.  But I know that you are better than he
 is. You are not stronger,--you are too much afraid of life,--but you
 are better.  And how happy we used to be together!  Don't leave me,
 Basil, and don't quarrel with me.  I am what I am.  There is nothing
 more to be said."

 Hallward felt strangely moved.  Rugged and straightforward as he was,
 there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its
 tenderness.  The lad was infinitely dear to him, and his personality
 had been the great turning-point in his art.  He could not bear the
 idea of reproaching him any more.  After all, his indifference was
 probably merely a mood that would pass away.  There was so much in him
 that was good, so much in him that was noble.

 "Well, Dorian," he said, at length, with a sad smile, "I won't speak to
 you again about this horrible thing, after to-day.  I only trust your
 name won't be mentioned in connection with it.  The inquest is to take
 place this afternoon.  Have they summoned you?"

 Dorian shook his head, and a look of annoyance passed over his face at
 the mention of the word "inquest."  There was something so [55] crude
 and vulgar about everything of the kind.  "They don't know my name," he
 answered.

 "But surely she did?"

 "Only my Christian name, and that I am quite sure she never mentioned
 to any one.  She told me once that they were all rather curious to
 learn who I was, and that she invariably told them my name was Prince
 Charming.  It was pretty of her.  You must do me a drawing of her,
 Basil.  I should like to have something more of her than the memory of
 a few kisses and some broken pathetic words."

 "I will try and do something, Dorian, if it would please you.  But you
 must come and sit to me yourself again.  I can't get on without you."

 "I will never sit to you again, Basil.  It is impossible!" he
 exclaimed, starting back.

 Hallward stared at him, "My dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried.  "Do
 you mean to say you don't like what I did of you?  Where is it?  Why
 have you pulled the screen in front of it?  Let me look at it.  It is
 the best thing I have ever painted.  Do take that screen away, Dorian.
 It is simply horrid of your servant hiding my work like that.  I felt
 the room looked different as I came in."

 "My servant has nothing to do with it, Basil.  You don't imagine I let
 him arrange my room for me?  He settles my flowers for me
 sometimes,--that is all.  No; I did it myself.  The light was too
 strong on the portrait."

 "Too strong!  Impossible, my dear fellow!  It is an admirable place for
 it.  Let me see it."  And Hallward walked towards the corner of the
 room.

 A cry of terror broke from Dorian Gray's lips, and he rushed between
 Hallward and the screen.  "Basil," he said, looking very pale, "you
 must not look at it.  I don't wish you to."

 "Not look at my own work! you are not serious.  Why shouldn't I look at
 it?" exclaimed Hallward, laughing.

 "If you try to look at it, Basil, on my word of honor I will never
 speak to you again as long as I live.  I am quite serious.  I don't
 offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any.  But, remember,
 if you touch this screen, everything is over between us."

 Hallward was thunderstruck.  He looked at Dorian Gray in absolute
 amazement.  He had never seen him like this before.  The lad was
 absolutely pallid with rage.  His hands were clinched, and the pupils
 of his eyes were like disks of blue fire.  He was trembling all over.

 "Dorian!"

 "Don't speak!"

 "But what is the matter?  Of course I won't look at it if you don't
 want me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel, and going
 over towards the window.  "But, really, it seems rather absurd that I
 shouldn't see my own work, especially as I am going to exhibit it in
 Paris in the autumn.  I shall probably have to give it another coat of
 varnish before that, so I must see it some day, and why not to-day?"

 "To exhibit it!  You want to exhibit it?" exclaimed Dorian Gray, a
 strange sense of terror creeping over him.  Was the world going [56] to
 be shown his secret?  Were people to gape at the mystery of his life?
 That was impossible.  Something--he did not know what--had to be done
 at once.

 "Yes: I don't suppose you will object to that.  Georges Petit is going
 to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the Rue de
 Sèze, which will open the first week in October.  The portrait will
 only be away a month.  I should think you could easily spare it for
 that time.  In fact, you are sure to be out of town.  And if you hide
 it always behind a screen, you can't care much about it."

 Dorian Gray passed his hand over his forehead.  There were beads of
 perspiration there.  He felt that he was on the brink of a horrible
 danger.  "You told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it," he
 said.  "Why have you changed your mind?  You people who go in for being
 consistent have just as many moods as others.  The only difference is
 that your moods are rather meaningless.  You can't have forgotten that
 you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world would induce you
 to send it to any exhibition.  You told Harry exactly the same thing."
 He stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light came into his eyes.  He
 remembered that Lord Henry had said to him once, half seriously and
 half in jest, "If you want to have an interesting quarter of an hour,
 get Basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your picture.  He told me
 why he wouldn't, and it was a revelation to me."  Yes, perhaps Basil,
 too, had his secret.  He would ask him and try.

 "Basil," he said, coming over quite close, and looking him straight in
 the face, "we have each of us a secret.  Let me know yours, and I will
 tell you mine.  What was your reason for refusing to exhibit my
 picture?"

 Hallward shuddered in spite of himself.  "Dorian, if I told you, you
 might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me. I
 could not bear your doing either of those two things.  If you wish me
 never to look at your picture again, I am content.  I have always you
 to look at.  If you wish the best work I have ever done to be hidden
 from the world, I am satisfied.  Your friendship is dearer to me than
 any fame or reputation."

 "No, Basil, you must tell me," murmured Dorian Gray.  "I think I have a
 right to know."  His feeling of terror had passed away, and curiosity
 had taken its place.  He was determined to find out Basil Hallward's
 mystery.

 "Let us sit down, Dorian," said Hallward, looking pale and pained. "Let
 us sit down.  I will sit in the shadow, and you shall sit in the
 sunlight.  Our lives are like that.  Just answer me one question. Have
 you noticed in the picture something that you did not like?--something
 that probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself to
 you suddenly?"

 "Basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling
 hands, and gazing at him with wild, startled eyes.

 "I see you did.  Don't speak.  Wait till you hear what I have to say.
 It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of
 feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.  Somehow, I had never
 loved a woman.  I suppose I never had time.  Perhaps, as [57] Harry
 says, a really 'grande passion' is the privilege of those who have
 nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country.
 Well, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most
 extraordinary influence over me.  I quite admit that I adored you
 madly, extravagantly, absurdly.  I was jealous of every one to whom you
 spoke.  I wanted to have you all to myself.  I was only happy when I
 was with you.  When I was away from you, you were still present in my
 art.  It was all wrong and foolish.  It is all wrong and foolish still.
 Of course I never let you know anything about this.  It would have been
 impossible.  You would not have understood it; I did not understand it
 myself.  One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you.  It
 was to have been my masterpiece.  It is my masterpiece.  But, as I
 worked at it, every flake and film of color seemed to me to reveal my
 secret.  I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry.  I
 felt, Dorian, that I had told too much. Then it was that I resolved
 never to allow the picture to be exhibited.  You were a little annoyed;
 but then you did not realize all that it meant to me.  Harry, to whom I
 talked about it, laughed at me.  But I did not mind that.  When the
 picture was finished, and I sat alone with it, I felt that I was right.
 Well, after a few days the portrait left my studio, and as soon as I
 had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence it seemed to
 me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had said anything in it,
 more than that you were extremely good-looking and that I could paint.
 Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the
 passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one
 creates.  Art is more abstract than we fancy.  Form and color tell us
 of form and color,--that is all.  It often seems to me that art
 conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. And
 so when I got this offer from Paris I determined to make your portrait
 the principal thing in my exhibition.  It never occurred to me that you
 would refuse.  I see now that you were right.  The picture must not be
 shown.  You must not be angry with me, Dorian, for what I have told
 you.  As I said to Harry, once, you are made to be worshipped."

 Dorian Gray drew a long breath.  The color came back to his cheeks, and
 a smile played about his lips.  The peril was over.  He was safe for
 the time.  Yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the young
 man who had just made this strange confession to him.  He wondered if
 he would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend.  Lord
 Harry had the charm of being very dangerous.  But that was all.  He was
 too clever and too cynical to be really fond of. Would there ever be
 some one who would fill him with a strange idolatry?  Was that one of
 the things that life had in store?

 "It is extraordinary to me, Dorian," said Hallward, "that you should
 have seen this in the picture.  Did you really see it?"

 "Of course I did."

 "Well, you don't mind my looking at it now?"

 Dorian shook his head.  "You must not ask me that, Basil.  I could not
 possibly let you stand in front of that picture."

 "You will some day, surely?"

 [58] "Never."

 "Well, perhaps you are right.  And now good-by, Dorian.  You have been
 the one person in my life of whom I have been really fond.  I don't
 suppose I shall often see you again.  You don't know what it cost me to
 tell you all that I have told you."

 "My dear Basil," cried Dorian, "what have you told me?  Simply that you
 felt that you liked me too much.  That is not even a compliment."

 "It was not intended as a compliment.  It was a confession."

 "A very disappointing one."

 "Why, what did you expect, Dorian?  You didn't see anything else in the
 picture, did you?  There was nothing else to see?"

 "No: there was nothing else to see.  Why do you ask?  But you mustn't
 talk about not meeting me again, or anything of that kind.  You and I
 are friends, Basil, and we must always remain so."

 "You have got Harry," said Hallward, sadly.

 "Oh, Harry!" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter.  "Harry spends
 his days in saying what is incredible, and his evenings in doing what
 is improbable.  Just the sort of life I would like to lead.  But still
 I don't think I would go to Harry if I was in trouble.  I would sooner
 go to you, Basil."

 "But you won't sit to me again?"

 "Impossible!"

 "You spoil my life as an artist by refusing, Dorian.  No man comes
 across two ideal things.  Few come across one."

 "I can't explain it to you, Basil, but I must never sit to you again. I
 will come and have tea with you.  That will be just as pleasant."

 "Pleasanter for you, I am afraid," murmured Hallward, regretfully. "And
 now good-by.  I am sorry you won't let me look at the picture once
 again.  But that can't be helped.  I quite understand what you feel
 about it."

 As he left the room, Dorian Gray smiled to himself.  Poor Basil! how
 little he knew of the true reason!  And how strange it was that,
 instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had
 succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend! How
 much that strange confession explained to him!  Basil's absurd fits of
 jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his curious
 reticences,--he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. There was
 something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.

 He sighed, and touched the bell.  The portrait must be hidden away at
 all costs.  He could not run such a risk of discovery again.  It had
 been mad of him to have the thing remain, even for an hour, in a room
 to which any of his friends had access.



 CHAPTER VIII

 [...58] When his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly, and
 wondered if he had thought of peering behind the screen.  The man was
 quite impassive, and waited for his orders.  Dorian lit a cigarette,
 [59] and walked over to the glass and glanced into it.  He could see
 the reflection of Victor's face perfectly.  It was like a placid mask
 of servility.  There was nothing to be afraid of, there.  Yet he
 thought it best to be on his guard.

 Speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the housekeeper that he
 wanted to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker's and ask him to
 send two of his men round at once.  It seemed to him that as the man
 left the room he peered in the direction of the screen.  Or was that
 only his fancy?

 After a few moments, Mrs. Leaf, a dear old lady in a black silk dress,
 with a photograph of the late Mr. Leaf framed in a large gold brooch at
 her neck, and old-fashioned thread mittens on her wrinkled hands,
 bustled into the room.

 "Well, Master Dorian," she said, "what can I do for you?  I beg your
 pardon, sir,"--here came a courtesy,--"I shouldn't call you Master
 Dorian any more.  But, Lord bless you, sir, I have known you since you
 were a baby, and many's the trick you've played on poor old Leaf. Not
 that you were not always a good boy, sir; but boys will be boys, Master
 Dorian, and jam is a temptation to the young, isn't it, sir?"

 He laughed.  "You must always call me Master Dorian, Leaf.  I will be
 very angry with you if you don't.  And I assure you I am quite as fond
 of jam now as I used to be.  Only when I am asked out to tea I am never
 offered any.  I want you to give me the key of the room at the top of
 the house."

 "The old school-room, Master Dorian?  Why, it's full of dust.  I must
 get it arranged and put straight before you go into it.  It's not fit
 for you to see, Master Dorian.  It is not, indeed."

 "I don't want it put straight, Leaf.  I only want the key."

 "Well, Master Dorian, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you goes into
 it.  Why, it hasn't been opened for nearly five years,--not since his
 lordship died."

 He winced at the mention of his dead uncle's name.  He had hateful
 memories of him.  "That does not matter, Leaf," he replied.  "All I
 want is the key."

 "And here is the key, Master Dorian," said the old lady, after going
 over the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. "Here
 is the key.  I'll have it off the ring in a moment.  But you don't
 think of living up there, Master Dorian, and you so comfortable here?"

 "No, Leaf, I don't.  I merely want to see the place, and perhaps store
 something in it,--that is all.  Thank you, Leaf.  I hope your
 rheumatism is better; and mind you send me up jam for breakfast."

 Mrs. Leaf shook her head.  "Them foreigners doesn't understand jam,
 Master Dorian.  They calls it 'compot.'  But I'll bring it to you
 myself some morning, if you lets me."

 "That will be very kind of you, Leaf," he answered, looking at the key;
 and, having made him an elaborate courtesy, the old lady left the room,
 her face wreathed in smiles.  She had a strong objection to the French
 valet.  It was a poor thing, she felt, for any one to be born a
 foreigner.

 [60] As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket, and looked
 round the room.  His eye fell on a large purple satin coverlet heavily
 embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century
 Venetian work that his uncle had found in a convent near Bologna.  Yes,
 that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in.  It had perhaps served
 often as a pall for the dead.  Now it was to hide something that had a
 corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death
 itself,--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.
 What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image
 on the canvas.  They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace.
 They would defile it, and make it shameful.  And yet the thing would
 still live on.  It would be always alive.

 He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told Basil
 the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. Basil would
 have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence, and the still more
 poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. The love that
 he bore him--for it was really love--had something noble and
 intellectual in it.  It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty
 that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire.  It was
 such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann,
 and Shakespeare himself.  Yes, Basil could have saved him.  But it was
 too late now.  The past could always be annihilated.  Regret, denial,
 or forgetfulness could do that.  But the future was inevitable.  There
 were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that
 would make the shadow of their evil real.

 He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that
 covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen. Was
 the face on the canvas viler than before?  It seemed to him that it was
 unchanged; and yet his loathing of it was intensified.  Gold hair, blue
 eyes, and rose-red lips,--they all were there.  It was simply the
 expression that had altered.  That was horrible in its cruelty.
 Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow Basil's
 reproaches about Sibyl Vane had been!--how shallow, and of what little
 account!  His own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and
 calling him to judgment.  A look of pain came across him, and he flung
 the rich pall over the picture.  As he did so, a knock came to the
 door.  He passed out as his servant entered.

 "The persons are here, monsieur."

 He felt that the man must be got rid of at once.  He must not be
 allowed to know where the picture was being taken to.  There was
 something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes.
 Sitting down at the writing-table, he scribbled a note to Lord Henry,
 asking him to send him round something to read, and reminding him that
 they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening.

 "Wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the men in
 here."

 In two or three minutes there was another knock, and Mr. Ashton
 himself, the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street, came in
 with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant.  Mr. Ashton was a
 florid, red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was
 considerably [61] tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of
 the artists who dealt with him.  As a rule, he never left his shop. He
 waited for people to come to him.  But he always made an exception in
 favor of Dorian Gray.  There was something about Dorian that charmed
 everybody.  It was a pleasure even to see him.

 "What can I do for you, Mr. Gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled
 hands.  "I thought I would do myself the honor of coming round in
 person.  I have just got a beauty of a frame, sir.  Picked it up at a
 sale.  Old Florentine.  Came from Fonthill, I believe.  Admirably
 suited for a religious picture, Mr. Gray."

 "I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round, Mr.
 Ashton.  I will certainly drop in and look at the frame,--though I
 don't go in much for religious art,--but to-day I only want a picture
 carried to the top of the house for me.  It is rather heavy, so I
 thought I would ask you to lend me a couple of your men."

 "No trouble at all, Mr. Gray.  I am delighted to be of any service to
 you.  Which is the work of art, sir?"

 "This," replied Dorian, moving the screen back.  "Can you move it,
 covering and all, just as it is?  I don't want it to get scratched
 going up-stairs."

 "There will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial frame-maker,
 beginning, with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from
 the long brass chains by which it was suspended.  "And, now, where
 shall we carry it to, Mr. Gray?"

 "I will show you the way, Mr. Ashton, if you will kindly follow me. Or
 perhaps you had better go in front.  I am afraid it is right at the top
 of the house.  We will go up by the front staircase, as it is wider."

 He held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall and
 began the ascent.  The elaborate character of the frame had made the
 picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious
 protests of Mr. Ashton, who had a true tradesman's dislike of seeing a
 gentleman doing anything useful, Dorian put his hand to it so as to
 help them.

 "Something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man, when they
 reached the top landing.  And he wiped his shiny forehead.

 "A terrible load to carry," murmured Dorian, as he unlocked the door
 that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious secret
 of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men.

 He had not entered the place for more than four years,--not, indeed,
 since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child and then
 as a study when he grew somewhat older.  It was a large,
 well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last Lord
 Sherard for the use of the little nephew whom, being himself childless,
 and perhaps for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep
 at a distance.  It did not appear to Dorian to have much changed.
 There was the huge Italian cassone, with its fantastically-painted
 panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which he had so often
 hidden himself as a boy.  There was the satinwood bookcase filled with
 his dog-eared school-books.  On the wall behind it was hanging the same
 [62] ragged Flemish tapestry where a faded king and queen were playing
 chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded
 birds on their gauntleted wrists.  How well he recalled it all!  Every
 moment of his lonely childhood came back to him, as he looked round.
 He remembered the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed
 horrible to him that it was here that the fatal portrait was to be
 hidden away.  How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all
 that was in store for him!

 But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as
 this.  He had the key, and no one else could enter it.  Beneath its
 purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden,
 and unclean.  What did it matter?  No one could see it.  He himself
 would not see it.  Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his
 soul?  He kept his youth,--that was enough.  And, besides, might not
 his nature grow finer, after all?  There was no reason that the future
 should be so full of shame.  Some love might come across his life, and
 purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already
 stirring in spirit and in flesh,--those curious unpictured sins whose
 very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm.  Perhaps, some
 day, the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive
 mouth, and he might show to the world Basil Hallward's masterpiece.

 No; that was impossible.  The thing upon the canvas was growing old,
 hour by hour, and week by week.  Even if it escaped the hideousness of
 sin, the hideousness of age was in store for it.  The cheeks would
 become hollow or flaccid.  Yellow crow's-feet would creep round the
 fading eyes and make them horrible.  The hair would lose its
 brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross,
 as the mouths of old men are.  There would be the wrinkled throat, the
 cold blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the
 uncle who had been so stern to him in his boyhood.  The picture had to
 be concealed.  There was no help for it.

 "Bring it in, Mr. Ashton, please," he said, wearily, turning round. "I
 am sorry I kept you so long.  I was thinking of something else."

 "Always glad to have a rest, Mr. Gray," answered the frame-maker, who
 was still gasping for breath.  "Where shall we put it, sir?"

 "Oh, anywhere, Here, this will do.  I don't want to have it hung up.
 Just lean it against the wall.  Thanks."

 "Might one look at the work of art, sir?"

 Dorian started.  "It would not interest you, Mr. Ashton," he said,
 keeping his eye on the man.  He felt ready to leap upon him and fling
 him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that
 concealed the secret of his life.  "I won't trouble you any more now. I
 am much obliged for your kindness in coming round."

 "Not at all, not at all, Mr. Gray.  Ever ready to do anything for you,
 sir."  And Mr. Ashton tramped down-stairs, followed by the assistant,
 who glanced back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough,
 uncomely face.  He had never seen any one so marvellous.

 When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Dorian locked [63] the
 door, and put the key in his pocket.  He felt safe now.  No one would
 ever look on the horrible thing.  No eye but his would ever see his
 shame.

 On reaching the library he found that it was just after five o'clock,
 and that the tea had been already brought up.  On a little table of
 dark perfumed wood thickly incrusted with nacre, a present from his
 guardian's wife, Lady Radley, who had spent the preceding winter in
 Cairo, was lying a note from Lord Henry, and beside it was a book bound
 in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled. A copy
 of the third edition of the St. James's Gazette had been placed on the
 tea-tray.  It was evident that Victor had returned.  He wondered if he
 had met the men in the hall as they were leaving the house and had
 wormed out of them what they had been doing.  He would be sure to miss
 the picture,--had no doubt missed it already, while he had been laying
 the tea-things.  The screen had not been replaced, and the blank space
 on the wall was visible.  Perhaps some night he might find him creeping
 up-stairs and trying to force the door of the room.  It was a horrible
 thing to have a spy in one's house.  He had heard of rich men who had
 been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter,
 or overheard a conversation, or picked up a card with an address, or
 found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a bit of crumpled lace.

 He sighed, and, having poured himself out some tea, opened Lord Henry's
 note.  It was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper,
 and a book that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at
 eight-fifteen.  He opened the St. James's languidly, and looked through
 it.  A red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye.  He read the
 following paragraph:

 "INQUEST ON AN ACTRESS.--An inquest was held this morning at the Bell
 Tavern, Hoxton Road, by Mr. Danby, the District Coroner, on the body of
 Sibyl Vane, a young actress recently engaged at the Royal Theatre,
 Holborn.  A verdict of death by misadventure was returned. Considerable
 sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly
 affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of Dr.
 Birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased."

 He frowned slightly, and, tearing the paper in two, went across the
 room and flung the pieces into a gilt basket.  How ugly it all was! And
 how horribly real ugliness made things!  He felt a little annoyed with
 Lord Henry for having sent him the account.  And it was certainly
 stupid of him to have marked it with red pencil.  Victor might have
 read it.  The man knew more than enough English for that.

 Perhaps he had read it, and had begun to suspect something.  And, yet,
 what did it matter?  What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's
 death?  There was nothing to fear.  Dorian Gray had not killed her.

 His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.  What was
 it, he wondered.  He went towards the little pearl-colored octagonal
 stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some [64] strange
 Egyptian bees who wrought in silver, and took the volume up.  He flung
 himself into an arm-chair, and began to turn over the leaves.  After a
 few minutes, he became absorbed.  It was the strangest book he had ever
 read.  It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate
 sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before
 him.  Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to
 him.  Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

 It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being,
 indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who
 spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
 passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his
 own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through
 which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere
 artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue,
 as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.  The
 style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid
 and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical
 expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work
 of some of the finest artists of the French school of Décadents.  There
 were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as evil in color.
 The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical
 philosophy.  One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the
 spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions
 of a modern sinner.  It was a poisonous book.  The heavy odor of
 incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.  The
 mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so
 full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated,
 produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter,
 a form of revery, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of
 the falling day and the creeping shadows.

 Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed
 through the windows.  He read on by its wan light till he could read no
 more.  Then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the
 lateness of the hour, he got up, and, going into the next room, placed
 the book on the little Florentine table that always stood at his
 bedside, and began to dress for dinner.

 It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found
 Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very bored.

 "I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your
 fault.  That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot what the
 time was."

 "I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his chair.

 "I didn't say I liked it, Harry.  I said it fascinated me.  There is a
 great difference."

 "Ah, if you have discovered that, you have discovered a great deal,"
 murmured Lord Henry, with his curious smile.  "Come, let us go in to
 dinner.  It is dreadfully late, and I am afraid the champagne will be
 too much iced."



 CHAPTER IX

 [65] For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of
 this book.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never
 sought to free himself from it.  He procured from Paris no less than
 five large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
 different colors, so that they might suit his various moods and the
 changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have
 almost entirely lost control.  The hero, the wonderful young Parisian,
 in whom the romantic temperament and the scientific temperament were so
 strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself.
 And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his
 own life, written before he had lived it.

 In one point he was more fortunate than the book's fantastic hero. He
 never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat
 grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still
 water, which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was
 occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once, apparently,
 been so remarkable.  It was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in
 nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its
 place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its
 really tragic, if somewhat over-emphasized, account of the sorrow and
 despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and in the world,
 he had most valued.

 He, at any rate, had no cause to fear that.  The boyish beauty that had
 so fascinated Basil Hallward, and many others besides him, seemed never
 to leave him.  Even those who had heard the most evil things against
 him (and from time to time strange rumors about his mode of life crept
 through London and became the chatter of the clubs) could not believe
 anything to his dishonor when they saw him.  He had always the look of
 one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. Men who talked
 grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room.  There was
 something in the purity of his face that rebuked them.  His mere
 presence seemed to recall to them the innocence that they had
 tarnished.  They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was
 could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and
 sensuous.

 He himself, on returning home from one of those mysterious and
 prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among
 those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, would creep
 up-stairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never
 left him, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil
 Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on
 the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him
 from the polished glass.  The very sharpness of the contrast used to
 quicken his sense of pleasure.  He grew more and more enamoured of his
 own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.
 He would examine with minute care, and often with a monstrous and
 terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead
 or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, [66] wondering sometimes
 which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.  He
 would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the
 picture, and smile.  He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.

 There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own
 delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little
 ill-famed tavern near the Docks, which, under an assumed name, and in
 disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he
 had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignant
 because it was purely selfish.  But moments such as these were rare.
 That curiosity about life that, many years before, Lord Henry had first
 stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend,
 seemed to increase with gratification.  The more he knew, the more he
 desired to know.  He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed
 them.

 Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to
 society.  Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each
 Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the
 world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the
 day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art.  His little
 dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were
 noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited,
 as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with
 its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered
 cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. Indeed, there were many,
 especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw,
 in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often
 dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of
 the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and
 perfect manner of a citizen of the world.  To them he seemed to belong
 to those whom Dante describes as having sought to "make themselves
 perfect by the worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one for whom
 "the visible world existed."

 And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the
 arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
 Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment
 universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert
 the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for
 him.  His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that he affected
 from time to time, had their marked influence on the young exquisites
 of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in
 everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of
 his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.

 For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost
 immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a
 subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the
 London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the
 "Satyricon" had once been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be
 something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on the
 wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or [67] the conduct
 of a cane.  He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would
 have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles and find in the
 spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.

 The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
 decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
 sensations that seem stronger than ourselves, and that we are conscious
 of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.  But it
 appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never
 been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely
 because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill
 them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new
 spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the
 dominant characteristic.  As he looked back upon man moving through
 History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss.  So much had been
 surrendered! and to such little purpose!  There had been mad wilful
 rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose
 origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more
 terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance,
 they had sought to escape, Nature in her wonderful irony driving the
 anchorite out to herd with the wild animals of the desert and giving to
 the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.

 Yes, there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new hedonism that
 was to re-create life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely
 puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.  It was
 to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to
 accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any
 mode of passionate experience.  Its aim, indeed, was to be experience
 itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might
 be.  Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar
 profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing.  But it was to
 teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is
 itself but a moment.

 There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either
 after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of
 death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through
 the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality
 itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,
 and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one
 might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled
 with the malady of revery. Gradually white fingers creep through the
 curtains, and they appear to tremble.  Black fantastic shadows crawl
 into the corners of the room, and crouch there.  Outside, there is the
 stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to
 their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills,
 and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the
 sleepers.  Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by
 degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we
 watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.  The wan
 mirrors get back their mimic life.  The flameless tapers stand where we
 have left them, and beside them [68] lies the half-read book that we
 had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or
 the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too
 often.  Nothing seems to us changed.  Out of the unreal shadows of the
 night comes back the real life that we had known.  We have to resume it
 where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the
 necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of
 stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids
 might open some morning upon a world that had been re-fashioned anew
 for our pleasure in the darkness, a world in which things would have
 fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world
 in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any
 rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance
 even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their
 pain.

 It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray
 to be the true object, or among the true objects, of life; and in his
 search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and
 possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he
 would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
 alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and
 then, having, as it were, caught their color and satisfied his
 intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that
 is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament, and that indeed,
 according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.

 It was rumored of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic
 communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction
 for him.  The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the
 sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb
 rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity
 of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it
 sought to symbolize.  He loved to kneel down on the cold marble
 pavement, and with the priest, in his stiff flowered cope, slowly and
 with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, and raising
 aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer
 that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "panis caelestis,"
 the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of
 Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice, and smiting his breast for
 his sins.  The fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and
 scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle
 fascination for him.  As he passed out, he used to look with wonder at
 the black confessionals, and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of
 them and listen to men and women whispering through the tarnished
 grating the true story of their lives.

 But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
 development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
 mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable
 for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which
 there are no stars and the moon is in travail.  Mysticism, with its
 marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
 antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a
 season; and for a [69] season he inclined to the materialistic
 doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious
 pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly
 cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the
 conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical
 conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased.  Yet, as has been
 said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any
 importance compared with life itself.  He felt keenly conscious of how
 barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and
 experiment.  He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their
 mysteries to reveal.

 And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their
 manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums
 from the East.  He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not
 its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their
 true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one
 mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets
 that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the
 brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often
 to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several
 influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers,
 of aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that
 sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to
 be able to expel melancholy from the soul.

 At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long
 latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of
 olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad
 gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled
 Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while
 grinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, or turbaned
 Indians, crouching upon scarlet mats, blew through long pipes of reed
 or brass, and charmed, or feigned to charm, great hooded snakes and
 horrible horned adders.  The harsh intervals and shrill discords of
 barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's
 beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell
 unheeded on his ear.  He collected together from all parts of the world
 the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of
 dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact
 with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them.  He had
 the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not
 allowed to look at, and that even youths may not see till they have
 been subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the
 Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human
 bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chili, and the sonorous green
 stones that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular
 sweetness.  He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when
 they were shaken; the long clarin of the Mexicans, into which the
 performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the
 harsh turé of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who
 sit all day long in trees, and that can be heard, it is said, at a
 distance of three leagues; the teponaztli, that [70] has two vibrating
 tongues of wood, and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an
 elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of
 the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge
 cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the
 one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican
 temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a
 description.  The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated
 him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that Art, like
 Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous
 voices.  Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his
 box at the Opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt
 pleasure to "Tannhäuser," and seeing in that great work of art a
 presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.

 On another occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a
 costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered
 with five hundred and sixty pearls.  He would often spend a whole day
 settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had
 collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by
 lamplight, the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the
 pistachio-colored peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes,
 carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red
 cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their
 alternate layers of ruby and sapphire.  He loved the red gold of the
 sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow
 of the milky opal.  He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of
 extraordinary size and richness of color, and had a turquoise de la
 vieille roche that was the envy of all the connoisseurs.

 He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels.  In Alphonso's
 "Clericalis Disciplina" a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real
 jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander he was said to have
 found snakes in the vale of Jordan "with collars of real emeralds
 growing on their backs."  There was a gem in the brain of the dragon,
 Philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition of golden letters and a
 scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep, and
 slain.  According to the great alchemist Pierre de Boniface, the
 diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him
 eloquent.  The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked
 sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine.  The garnet cast
 out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color. The
 selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that
 discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids.
 Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a
 newly-killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison.  The
 bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm
 that could cure the plague.  In the nests of Arabian birds was the
 aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any
 danger by fire.

 The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand,
 as the ceremony of his coronation.  The gates of the palace of John the
 Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned [71] snake
 inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." Over the gable
 were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the
 gold might shine by day, and the carbuncles by night.  In Lodge's
 strange romance "A Margarite of America" it was stated that in the
 chamber of Margarite were seen "all the chaste ladies of the world,
 inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of chrysolites,
 carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults."  Marco Polo had watched
 the inhabitants of Zipangu place a rose-colored pearl in the mouth of
 the dead.  A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver
 brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven
 moons over his loss. When the Huns lured the king into the great pit,
 he flung it away,--Procopius tells the story,--nor was it ever found
 again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred-weight of
 gold pieces for it. The King of Malabar had shown a Venetian a rosary
 of one hundred and four pearls, one for every god that he worshipped.

 When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI., visited Louis XII.
 of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to
 Brantôme, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great
 light.  Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with three
 hundred and twenty-one diamonds.  Richard II. had a coat, valued at
 thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies. Hall
 described Henry VIII., on his way to the Tower previous to his
 coronation, as wearing "a jacket of raised gold, the placard
 embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike
 about his neck of large balasses."  The favorites of James I. wore
 ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane.  Edward II. gave to Piers
 Gaveston a suit of red-gold armor studded with jacinths, and a collar
 of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parsemé with
 pearls.  Henry II. wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had
 a hawk-glove set with twelve rubies and fifty-two great pearls.  The
 ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race,
 was studded with sapphires and hung with pear-shaped pearls.

 How exquisite life had once been!  How gorgeous in its pomp and
 decoration!  Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.

 Then he turned his attention to embroideries, and to the tapestries
 that performed the office of frescos in the chill rooms of the Northern
 nations of Europe.  As he investigated the subject,--and he always had
 an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment
 in whatever he took up,--he was almost saddened by the reflection of
 the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things.  He, at
 any rate, had escaped that.  Summer followed summer, and the yellow
 jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the
 story of their shame, but he was unchanged.  No winter marred his face
 or stained his flower-like bloom.  How different it was with material
 things!  Where had they gone to? Where was the great crocus-colored
 robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
 for Athena?  Where the huge velarium that Nero had stretched across the
 Colosseum at Rome, on which were represented the starry sky, and Apollo
 driving a chariot drawn by [72] white gilt-reined steeds?  He longed to
 see the curious table-napkins wrought for Elagabalus, on which were
 displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
 the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
 bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of
 Pontus, and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests,
 rocks, hunters,--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature;"
 and the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which
 were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "Madame, je suis tout
 joyeux," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold
 thread, and each note, a square shape in those days, formed with four
 pearls.  He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims
 for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy, and was decorated with "thirteen
 hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the
 king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings
 were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked
 in gold."  Catherine de Médicis had a mourning-bed made for her of
 black velvet powdered with crescents and suns.  Its curtains were of
 damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver
 ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it
 stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black
 velvet upon cloth of silver.  Louis XIV. had gold-embroidered
 caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment.  The state bed of
 Sobieski, King of Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered
 in turquoises with verses from the Koran.  Its supports were of silver
 gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled
 medallions.  It had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and
 the standard of Mohammed had stood under it.

 And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite
 specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting
 the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought, with gold-threat palmates,
 and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes,
 that from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air," and
 "running water," and "evening dew;" strange figured cloths from Java;
 elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair
 blue silks and wrought with fleurs de lys, birds, and images; veils of
 lacis worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades, and stiff Spanish
 velvets; Georgian work with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas with
 their green-toned golds and their marvellously-plumaged birds.

 He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed
 he had for everything connected with the service of the Church.  In the
 long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had
 stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the
 raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and
 fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by
 the suffering that she seeks for, and wounded by self-inflicted pain.
 He had a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask, figured
 with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in six-petalled
 formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the pine- [73] apple
 device wrought in seed-pearls. The orphreys were divided into panels
 representing scenes from the life of the Virgin, and the coronation of
 the Virgin was figured in colored silks upon the hood.  This was
 Italian work of the fifteenth century.  Another cope was of green
 velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves, from
 which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which were
 picked out with silver thread and colored crystals.  The morse bore a
 seraph's head in gold-thread raised work.  The orphreys were woven in a
 diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with medallions of many
 saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian.  He had chasubles,
 also, of amber-colored silk, and blue silk and gold brocade, and yellow
 silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with representations of the
 Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, and embroidered with lions and
 peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and pink silk
 damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and fleurs de lys; altar
 frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals,
 chalice-veils, and sudaria.  In the mystic offices to which these
 things were put there was something that quickened his imagination.

 For these things, and everything that he collected in his lovely house,
 were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could
 escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be
 almost too great to be borne.  Upon the walls of the lonely locked room
 where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own
 hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real
 degradation of his life, and had draped the purple-and-gold pall in
 front of it as a curtain.  For weeks he would not go there, would
 forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart, his
 wonderful joyousness, his passionate pleasure in mere existence.  Then,
 suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to
 dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day,
 until he was driven away.  On his return he would sit in front of the
 picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times,
 with that pride of rebellion that is half the fascination of sin, and
 smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear
 the burden that should have been his own.

 After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England, and
 gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry, as
 well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where he had more
 than once spent his winter.  He hated to be separated from the picture
 that was such a part of his life, and he was also afraid that during
 his absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of the
 elaborate bolts and bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.

 He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing.  It was true
 that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and ugliness
 of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn
 from that?  He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him.  He had
 not painted it.  What was it to him how vile and full of shame it
 looked?  Even if he told them, would they believe it?

 Yet he was afraid.  Sometimes when he was down at his great [74] house
 in Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own
 rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the
 wanton luxury and gorgeous splendor of his mode of life, he would
 suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door
 had not been tampered with and that the picture was still there. What
 if it should be stolen?  The mere thought made him cold with horror.
 Surely the world would know his secret then.  Perhaps the world already
 suspected it.

 For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him.
 He was blackballed at a West End club of which his birth and social
 position fully entitled him to become a member, and on one occasion,
 when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the Carlton,
 the Duke of Berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and
 went out.  Curious stories became current about him after he had passed
 his twenty-fifth year.  It was said that he had been seen brawling with
 foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and
 that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of
 their trade.  His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he
 used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in
 corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching
 eyes, as if they were determined to discover his secret.

 Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice,
 and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his
 charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth
 that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer
 to the calumnies (for so they called them) that were circulated about
 him.  It was remarked, however, that those who had been most intimate
 with him appeared, after a time, to shun him.  Of all his friends, or
 so-called friends, Lord Henry Wotton was the only one who remained
 loyal to him.  Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had
 braved all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen to
 grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered the room.

 Yet these whispered scandals only lent him, in the eyes of many, his
 strange and dangerous charm.  His great wealth was a certain element of
 security.  Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to
 believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and
 charming.  It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance
 than morals, and the highest respectability is of less value in its
 opinion than the possession of a good chef.  And, after all, it is a
 very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad
 dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life.  Even the
 cardinal virtues cannot atone for cold entrées, as Lord Henry remarked
 once, in a discussion on the subject; and there is possibly a good deal
 to be said for his view.  For the canons of good society are, or should
 be, the same as the canons of art.  Form is absolutely essential to it.
 It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and
 should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit
 and beauty that make such plays charming.  Is insincerity such a [75]
 terrible thing? I think not.  It is merely a method by which we can
 multiply our personalities.

 Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion.  He used to wonder at the
 shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing
 simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence.  To him, man was a
 being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform
 creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and
 passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies
 of the dead.  He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery
 of his country-house and look at the various portraits of those whose
 blood flowed in his veins.  Here was Philip Herbert, described by
 Francis Osborne, in his "Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and
 King James," as one who was "caressed by the court for his handsome
 face, which kept him not long company."  Was it young Herbert's life
 that he sometimes led?  Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body
 to body till it had reached his own? Was it some dim sense of that
 ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause,
 give utterance, in Basil Hallward's studio, to that mad prayer that had
 so changed his life? Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled
 surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wrist-bands, stood Sir Anthony
 Sherard, with his silver-and-black armor piled at his feet.  What had
 this man's legacy been?  Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples bequeathed
 him some inheritance of sin and shame?  Were his own actions merely the
 dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize?  Here, from the
 fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl
 stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves.  A flower was in her right hand,
 and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses. On
 a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple.  There were large
 green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes.  He knew her life, and
 the strange stories that were told about her lovers.  Had he something
 of her temperament in him?  Those oval heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look
 curiously at him.  What of George Willoughby, with his powdered hair
 and fantastic patches?  How evil he looked!  The face was saturnine and
 swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain.
 Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were so
 overladen with rings.  He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
 century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars. What of the
 second Lord Sherard, the companion of the Prince Regent in his wildest
 days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs.
 Fitzherbert?  How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls
 and insolent pose!  What passions had he bequeathed? The world had
 looked upon him as infamous.  He had led the orgies at Carlton House.
 The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung the
 portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black.  Her blood,
 also, stirred within him.  How curious it all seemed!

 Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race,
 nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly
 with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.  There
 [76] were times when it seemed to Dorian Gray that the whole of history
 was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act
 and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it
 had been in his brain and in his passions.  He felt that he had known
 them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the
 stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of
 wonder.  It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had
 been his own.

 The hero of the dangerous novel that had so influenced his life had
 himself had this curious fancy.  In a chapter of the book he tells how,
 crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as
 Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of
 Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the
 flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had
 caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables, and supped in
 an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had
 wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round
 with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his
 days, and sick with that ennui, that taedium vitae, that comes on those
 to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at
 the red shambles of the Circus, and then, in a litter of pearl and
 purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of
 Pomegranates to a House of Gold, and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he
 passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colors, and
 plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage,
 and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.

 Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the
 chapter immediately following, in which the hero describes the curious
 tapestries that he had had woven for him from Gustave Moreau's designs,
 and on which were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom
 Vice and Blood and Weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke
 of Milan, who slew his wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet
 poison; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the Second, who
 sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus, and whose tiara,
 valued at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of a
 terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to chase living men,
 and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had
 loved him; the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside
 him, and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto; Pietro Riario,
 the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sixtus
 IV., whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received
 Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with
 nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve her at the
 feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured
 only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as
 other men have for red wine,--the son of the Fiend, as was reported,
 and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for
 his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of
 Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was
 infused by a [77] Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of
 Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the
 enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave
 poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honor of a
 shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles
 VI., who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had
 warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who could only
 be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images of Love and Death
 and Madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and
 acanthus-like curls, Grifonetto Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his
 bride, and Simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that,
 as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated
 him could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him,
 blessed him.

 There was a horrible fascination in them all.  He saw them at night,
 and they troubled his imagination in the day.  The Renaissance knew of
 strange manners of poisoning,--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted
 torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander
 and by an amber chain.  Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.  There
 were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he
 could realize his conception of the beautiful.



 CHAPTER X

 [...77] It was on the 7th of November, the eve of his own thirty-second
 birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.

 He was walking home about eleven o'clock from Lord Henry's, where he
 had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold
 and foggy.  At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street a
 man passed him in the mist, walking very fast, and with the collar of
 his gray ulster turned up.  He had a bag in his hand.  He recognized
 him.  It was Basil Hallward.  A strange sense of fear, for which he
 could not account, came over him.  He made no sign of recognition, and
 went on slowly, in the direction of his own house.

 But Hallward had seen him.  Dorian heard him first stopping, and then
 hurrying after him.  In a few moments his hand was on his arm.

 "Dorian!  What an extraordinary piece of luck!  I have been waiting for
 you ever since nine o'clock in your library.  Finally I took pity on
 your tired servant, and told him to go to bed, as he let me out. I am
 off to Paris by the midnight train, and I wanted particularly to see
 you before I left.  I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as
 you passed me.  But I wasn't quite sure.  Didn't you recognize me?"

 "In this fog, my dear Basil?  Why, I can't even recognize Grosvenor
 Square.  I believe my house is somewhere about here, but I don't feel
 at all certain about it.  I am sorry you are going away, as I have not
 seen you for ages.  But I suppose you will be back soon?"

 "No: I am going to be out of England for six months.  I intend [78] to
 take a studio in Paris, and shut myself up till I have finished a great
 picture I have in my head.  However, it wasn't about myself I wanted to
 talk.  Here we are at your door.  Let me come in for a moment.  I have
 something to say to you."

 "I shall be charmed.  But won't you miss your train?" said Dorian Gray,
 languidly, as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his
 latch-key.

 The lamp-light struggled out through the fog, and Hallward looked at
 his watch.  "I have heaps of time," he answered.  "The train doesn't go
 till twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven.  In fact, I was on my
 way to the club to look for you, when I met you.  You see, I shan't
 have any delay about luggage, as I have sent on my heavy things.  All I
 have with me is in this bag, and I can easily get to Victoria in twenty
 minutes."

 Dorian looked at him and smiled.  "What a way for a fashionable painter
 to travel!  A Gladstone bag, and an ulster!  Come in, or the fog will
 get into the house.  And mind you don't talk about anything serious.
 Nothing is serious nowadays.  At least nothing should be."

 Hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed Dorian into the
 library.  There was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open
 hearth.  The lamps were lit, and an open Dutch silver spirit-case
 stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers, on
 a little table.

 "You see your servant made me quite at home, Dorian.  He gave me
 everything I wanted, including your best cigarettes.  He is a most
 hospitable creature.  I like him much better than the Frenchman you
 used to have.  What has become of the Frenchman, by the bye?"

 Dorian shrugged his shoulders.  "I believe he married Lady Ashton's
 maid, and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker.
 Anglomanie is very fashionable over there now, I hear.  It seems silly
 of the French, doesn't it?  But--do you know?--he was not at all a bad
 servant.  I never liked him, but I had nothing to complain about.  One
 often imagines things that are quite absurd.  He was really very
 devoted to me, and seemed quite sorry when he went away. Have another
 brandy-and-soda?  Or would you like hock-and-seltzer?  I always take
 hock-and-seltzer myself.  There is sure to be some in the next room."

 "Thanks, I won't have anything more," said Hallward, taking his cap and
 coat off, and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the
 corner.  "And now, my dear fellow, I want to speak to you seriously.
 Don't frown like that.  You make it so much more difficult for me."

 "What is it all about?" cried Dorian, in his petulant way, flinging
 himself down on the sofa.  "I hope it is not about myself.  I am tired
 of myself to-night.  I should like to be somebody else."

 "It is about yourself," answered Hallward, in his grave, deep voice,
 "and I must say it to you.  I shall only keep you half an hour."

 Dorian sighed, and lit a cigarette.  "Half an hour!" he murmured.

 [79] "It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is entirely for your
 own sake that I am speaking.  I think it right that you should know
 that the most dreadful things are being said about you in
 London,--things that I could hardly repeat to you."

 "I don't wish to know anything about them.  I love scandals about other
 people, but scandals about myself don't interest me.  They have not got
 the charm of novelty."

 "They must interest you, Dorian.  Every gentleman is interested in his
 good name.  You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and
 degraded.  Of course you have your position, and your wealth, and all
 that kind of thing.  But position and wealth are not everything.  Mind
 you, I don't believe these rumors at all.  At least, I can't believe
 them when I see you.  Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's
 face.  It cannot be concealed.  People talk of secret vices.  There are
 no such things as secret vices.  If a wretched man has a vice, it shows
 itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the
 moulding of his hands even.  Somebody--I won't mention his name, but
 you know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done.  I had
 never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the
 time, though I have heard a good deal since.  He offered an extravagant
 price.  I refused him.  There was something in the shape of his fingers
 that I hated.  I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied
 about him.  His life is dreadful. But you, Dorian, with your pure,
 bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth,--I can't
 believe anything against you. And yet I see you very seldom, and you
 never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I
 hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I
 don't know what to say.  Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of
 Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it?  Why is it that so
 many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house nor invite you
 to theirs?  You used to be a friend of Lord Cawdor.  I met him at
 dinner last week.  Your name happened to come up in conversation, in
 connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the
 Dudley.  Cawdor curled his lip, and said that you might have the most
 artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl
 should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the
 same room with.  I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked
 him what he meant.  He told me.  He told me right out before everybody.
 It was horrible!  Why is your friendship so fateful to young men? There
 was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.  You were
 his great friend.  There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave
 England, with a tarnished name.  You and he were inseparable.  What
 about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end?  What about Lord Kent's
 only son, and his career?  I met his father yesterday in St. James
 Street.  He seemed broken with shame and sorrow.  What about the young
 Duke of Perth?  What sort of life has he got now?  What gentleman would
 associate with him?  Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous.  I
 know you and Harry are great friends.  I say nothing about that now,
 but [80] surely you need not have made his sister's name a by-word.
 When you met Lady Gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched
 her.  Is there a single decent woman in London now who would drive with
 her in the Park?  Why, even her children are not allowed to live with
 her.  Then there are other stories,--stories that you have been seen
 creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into
 the foulest dens in London.  Are they true? Can they be true?  When I
 first heard them, I laughed.  I hear them now, and they make me
 shudder.  What about your country-house, and the life that is led
 there?  Dorian, you don't know what is said about you.  I won't tell
 you that I don't want to preach to you.  I remember Harry saying once
 that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment
 always said that, and then broke his word.  I do want to preach to you.
 I want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect you.  I
 want you to have a clean name and a fair record.  I want you to get rid
 of the dreadful people you associate with.  Don't shrug your shoulders
 like that.  Don't be so indifferent.  You have a wonderful influence.
 Let it be for good, not for evil.  They say that you corrupt every one
 whom you become intimate with, and that it is quite sufficient for you
 to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow after you.  I don't
 know whether it is so or not.  How should I know?  But it is said of
 you. I am told things that it seems impossible to doubt.  Lord
 Gloucester was one of my greatest friends at Oxford.  He showed me a
 letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in her
 villa at Mentone.  Your name was implicated in the most terrible
 confession I ever read.  I told him that it was absurd,--that I knew
 you thoroughly, and that you were incapable of anything of the kind.
 Know you?  I wonder do I know you?  Before I could answer that, I
 should have to see your soul."

 "To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa and
 turning almost white from fear.

 "Yes," answered Hallward, gravely, and with infinite sorrow in his
 voice,--"to see your soul.  But only God can do that."

 A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man. "You
 shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the
 table.  "Come: it is your own handiwork.  Why shouldn't you look at it?
 You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose.  Nobody
 would believe you.  If they did believe you, they'd like me all the
 better for it.  I know the age better than you do, though you will
 prate about it so tediously.  Come, I tell you.  You have chattered
 enough about corruption.  Now you shall look on it face to face."

 There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered.  He stamped
 his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner.  He felt a
 terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret,
 and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of
 all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the
 hideous memory of what he had done.

 "Yes," he continued, coming closer to him, and looking steadfastly into
 his stern eyes, "I will show you my soul.  You shall see the thing that
 you fancy only God can see."

 [81] Hallward started back.  "This is blasphemy, Dorian!" he cried.
 "You must not say things like that.  They are horrible, and they don't
 mean anything."

 "You think so?" He laughed again.

 "I know so.  As for what I said to you to-night, I said it for your
 good.  You know I have been always devoted to you."

 "Don't touch me.  Finish what you have to say."

 A twisted flash of pain shot across Hallward's face.  He paused for a
 moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him.  After all, what
 right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray?  If he had done a
 tithe of what was rumored about him, how much he must have suffered!
 Then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fireplace, and
 stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frost-like ashes
 and their throbbing cores of flame.

 "I am waiting, Basil," said the young man, in a hard, clear voice.

 He turned round.  "What I have to say is this," he cried.  "You must
 give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against
 you.  If you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to
 end, I will believe you.  Deny them, Dorian, deny them!  Can't you see
 what I am going through?  My God! don't tell me that you are infamous!"

 Dorian Gray smiled.  There was a curl of contempt in his lips.  "Come
 up-stairs, Basil," he said, quietly.  "I keep a diary of my life from
 day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written.  I
 will show it to you if you come with me."

 "I will come with you, Dorian, if you wish it.  I see I have missed my
 train.  That makes no matter.  I can go to-morrow.  But don't ask me to
 read anything to-night.  All I want is a plain answer to my question."

 "That will be given to you up-stairs.  I could not give it here.  You
 won't have to read long.  Don't keep me waiting."



 CHAPTER XI

 [...81] He passed out of the room, and began the ascent, Basil Hallward
 following close behind.  They walked softly, as men instinctively do at
 night.  The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase.  A
 rising wind made some of the windows rattle.

 When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down on the
 floor, and taking out the key turned it in the lock.  "You insist on
 knowing, Basil?" he asked, in a low voice.

 "Yes."

 "I am delighted," he murmured, smiling.  Then he added, somewhat
 bitterly, "You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know
 everything about me.  You have had more to do with my life than you
 think."  And, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in.  A
 cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in
 a flame of murky orange.  He shuddered.  "Shut the door behind you," he
 said, as he placed the lamp on the table.

 [82] Hallward glanced round him, with a puzzled expression.  The room
 looked as if it had not been lived in for years.  A faded Flemish
 tapestry, a curtained picture, an old Italian cassone, and an almost
 empty bookcase,--that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a
 chair and a table.  As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle
 that was standing on the mantel-shelf, he saw that the whole place was
 covered with dust, and that the carpet was in holes.  A mouse ran
 scuffling behind the wainscoting.  There was a damp odor of mildew.

 "So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil?  Draw that
 curtain back, and you will see mine."

 The voice that spoke was cold and cruel.  "You are mad, Dorian, or
 playing a part," muttered Hallward, frowning.

 "You won't?  Then I must do it myself," said the young man; and he tore
 the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground.

 An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward's lips as he saw in the
 dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him.  There was
 something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing.
 Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at!
 The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely marred that
 marvellous beauty.  There was still some gold in the thinning hair and
 some scarlet on the sensual lips.  The sodden eyes had kept something
 of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet passed
 entirely away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat.  Yes, it
 was Dorian himself.  But who had done it?  He seemed to recognize his
 own brush-work, and the frame was his own design. The idea was
 monstrous, yet he felt afraid.  He seized the lighted candle, and held
 it to the picture.  In the left-hand corner was his own name, traced in
 long letters of bright vermilion.

 It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire.  He had never
 done that.  Still, it was his own picture.  He knew it, and he felt as
 if his blood had changed from fire to sluggish ice in a moment. His own
 picture!  What did it mean?  Why had it altered?  He turned, and looked
 at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man.  His mouth twitched, and
 his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate.  He passed his hand
 across his forehead.  It was dank with clammy sweat.

 The young man was leaning against the mantel-shelf, watching him with
 that strange expression that is on the faces of those who are absorbed
 in a play when a great artist is acting.  There was neither real sorrow
 in it nor real joy.  There was simply the passion of the spectator,
 with perhaps a flicker of triumph in the eyes.  He had taken the flower
 out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so.

 "What does this mean?" cried Hallward, at last.  His own voice sounded
 shrill and curious in his ears.

 "Years ago, when I was a boy," said Dorian Gray, "you met me, devoted
 yourself to me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good
 looks.  One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained
 to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that
 revealed to me the wonder of beauty.  In a mad moment, that [83] I
 don't know, even now, whether I regret or not, I made a wish. Perhaps
 you would call it a prayer . . . ."

 "I remember it!  Oh, how well I remember it!  No! the thing is
 impossible.  The room is damp.  The mildew has got into the canvas. The
 paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them.  I tell you the
 thing is impossible."

 "Ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the
 window, and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass.

 "You told me you had destroyed it."

 "I was wrong.  It has destroyed me."

 "I don't believe it is my picture."

 "Can't you see your romance in it?" said Dorian, bitterly.

 "My romance, as you call it . . ."

 "As you called it."

 "There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful.  This is the face of a
 satyr."

 "It is the face of my soul."

 "God! what a thing I must have worshipped!  This has the eyes of a
 devil."

 "Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian, with a
 wild gesture of despair.

 Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it.  "My God! if it
 is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life,
 why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you
 to be!"  He held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it.
 The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it.  It
 was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come.
 Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were
 slowly eating the thing away.  The rotting of a corpse in a watery
 grave was not so fearful.

 His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor, and
 lay there sputtering.  He placed his foot on it and put it out.  Then
 he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table
 and buried his face in his hands.

 "Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! what an awful lesson!"  There was no
 answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window.

 "Pray, Dorian, pray," he murmured.  "What is it that one was taught to
 say in one's boyhood?  'Lead us not into temptation.  Forgive us our
 sins.  Wash away our iniquities.'  Let us say that together.  The
 prayer of your pride has been answered.  The prayer of your repentance
 will be answered also.  I worshipped you too much.  I am punished for
 it.  You worshipped yourself too much.  We are both punished."

 Dorian Gray turned slowly around, and looked at him with tear-dimmed
 eyes.  "It is too late, Basil," he murmured.

 "It is never too late, Dorian.  Let us kneel down and try if we can
 remember a prayer.  Isn't there a verse somewhere, 'Though your sins be
 as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow'?"

 [84] "Those words mean nothing to me now."

 "Hush! don't say that.  You have done enough evil in your life.  My
 God! don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?"

 Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable
 feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him.  The mad passions
 of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was
 seated at the table, more than he had ever loathed anything in his
 whole life.  He glanced wildly around.  Something glimmered on the top
 of the painted chest that faced him.  His eye fell on it.  He knew what
 it was.  It was a knife that he had brought up, some days before, to
 cut a piece of cord, and had forgotten to take away with him.  He moved
 slowly towards it, passing Hallward as he did so.  As soon as he got
 behind him, he seized it, and turned round.  Hallward moved in his
 chair as if he was going to rise.  He rushed at him, and dug the knife
 into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man's head
 down on the table, and stabbing again and again.

 There was a stifled groan, and the horrible sound of some one choking
 with blood.  The outstretched arms shot up convulsively three times,
 waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air.  He stabbed him once
 more, but the man did not move.  Something began to trickle on the
 floor.  He waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. Then he
 threw the knife on the table, and listened.

 He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet. He
 opened the door, and went out on the landing.  The house was quite
 quiet.  No one was stirring.

 He took out the key, and returned to the room, locking himself in as he
 did so.

 The thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with
 bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms.  Had it not been
 for the red jagged tear in the neck, and the clotted black pool that
 slowly widened on the table, one would have said that the man was
 simply asleep.

 How quickly it had all been done!  He felt strangely calm, and, walking
 over to the window, opened it, and stepped out on the balcony.  The
 wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's
 tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes.  He looked down, and saw the
 policeman going his rounds and flashing a bull's-eye lantern on the
 doors of the silent houses.  The crimson spot of a prowling hansom
 gleamed at the corner, and then vanished. A woman in a ragged shawl was
 creeping round by the railings, staggering as she went.  Now and then
 she stopped, and peered back. Once, she began to sing in a hoarse
 voice.  The policeman strolled over and said something to her.  She
 stumbled away, laughing.  A bitter blast swept across the Square.  The
 gas-lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook
 their black iron branches as if in pain.  He shivered, and went back,
 closing the window behind him.

 He passed to the door, turned the key, and opened it.  He did not even
 glance at the murdered man.  He felt that the secret of the whole thing
 was not to realize the situation.  The friend who had painted [85] the
 fatal portrait, the portrait to which all his misery had been due, had
 gone out of his life.  That was enough.

 Then he remembered the lamp.  It was a rather curious one of Moorish
 workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished
 steel.  Perhaps it might be missed by his servant, and questions would
 be asked.  He turned back, and took it from the table.  How still the
 man was!  How horribly white the long hands looked!  He was like a
 dreadful wax image.

 He locked the door behind him, and crept quietly down-stairs.  The
 wood-work creaked, and seemed to cry out as if in pain.  He stopped
 several times, and waited.  No: everything was still.  It was merely
 the sound of his own footsteps.

 When he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner.
 They must be hidden away somewhere.  He unlocked a secret press that
 was in the wainscoting, and put them into it.  He could easily burn
 them afterwards.  Then he pulled out his watch.  It was twenty minutes
 to two.

 He sat down, and began to think.  Every year--every month, almost--men
 were strangled in England for what he had done.  There had been a
 madness of murder in the air.  Some red star had come too close to the
 earth.

 Evidence?  What evidence was there against him?  Basil Hallward had
 left the house at eleven.  No one had seen him come in again.  Most of
 the servants were at Selby Royal.  His valet had gone to bed.

 Paris!  Yes.  It was to Paris that Basil had gone, by the midnight
 train, as he had intended.  With his curious reserved habits, it would
 be months before any suspicions would be aroused.  Months? Everything
 could be destroyed long before then.

 A sudden thought struck him.  He put on his fur coat and hat, and went
 out into the hall.  There he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of
 the policeman outside on the pavement, and seeing the flash of the
 lantern reflected in the window.  He waited, holding his breath.

 After a few moments he opened the front door, and slipped out, shutting
 it very gently behind him.  Then he began ringing the bell. In about
 ten minutes his valet appeared, half dressed, and looking very drowsy.

 "I am sorry to have had to wake you up, Francis," he said, stepping in;
 "but I had forgotten my latch-key.  What time is it?"

 "Five minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock
 and yawning.

 "Five minutes past two?  How horribly late!  You must wake me at nine
 to-morrow.  I have some work to do."

 "All right, sir."

 "Did any one call this evening?"

 "Mr. Hallward, sir.  He stayed here till eleven, and then he went away
 to catch his train."

 "Oh!  I am sorry I didn't see him.  Did he leave any message?"

 "No, sir, except that he would write to you."

 [86] "That will do, Francis.  Don't forget to call me at nine tomorrow."

 "No, sir."

 The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.

 Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the yellow marble table, and
 passed into the library.  He walked up and down the room for a quarter
 of an hour, biting his lip, and thinking.  Then he took the Blue Book
 down from one of the shelves, and began to turn over the leaves.  "Alan
 Campbell, 152, Hertford Street, Mayfair."  Yes; that was the man he
 wanted.



 CHAPTER XII

 [...86] At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup
 of chocolate on a tray, and opened the shutters.  Dorian was sleeping
 quite peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his
 cheek.  He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.

 The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as
 he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he
 had been having some delightful dream.  Yet he had not dreamed at all.
 His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain.
 But youth smiles without any reason.  It is one of its chiefest charms.

 He turned round, and, leaning on his elbow, began to drink his
 chocolate.  The mellow November sun was streaming into the room.  The
 sky was bright blue, and there was a genial warmth in the air.  It was
 almost like a morning in May.

 Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent
 blood-stained feet into his brain, and reconstructed themselves there
 with terrible distinctness.  He winced at the memory of all that he had
 suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for
 Basil Hallward, that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair, came
 back to him, and he grew cold with passion.  The dead man was still
 sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now.  How horrible that was!
 Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.

 He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken
 or grow mad.  There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory
 than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride
 more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of
 joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the
 senses.  But this was not one of them.  It was a thing to be driven out
 of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might
 strangle one itself.

 He passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up hastily, and
 dressed himself with even more than his usual attention, giving a good
 deal of care to the selection of his necktie and scarf-pin, and
 changing his rings more than once.

 He spent a long time over breakfast, tasting the various dishes,
 talking to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of
 [87] getting made for the servants at Selby, and going through his
 correspondence.  Over some of the letters he smiled.  Three of them
 bored him.  One he read several times over, and then tore up with a
 slight look of annoyance in his face.  "That awful thing, a woman's
 memory!" as Lord Henry had once said.

 When he had drunk his coffee, he sat down at the table, and wrote two
 letters.  One he put in his pocket, the other he handed to the valet.

 "Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell
 is out of town, get his address."

 As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette, and began sketching upon a
 piece of paper, drawing flowers, and bits of architecture, first, and
 then faces.  Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed
 to have an extraordinary likeness to Basil Hallward.  He frowned, and,
 getting up, went over to the bookcase and took out a volume at hazard.
 He was determined that he would not think about what had happened, till
 it became absolutely necessary to do so.

 When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page
 of the book.  It was Gautier's "Emaux et Camées," Charpentier's
 Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching.  The binding was
 of citron-green leather with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted
 pomegranates.  It had been given to him by Adrian Singleton.  As he
 turned over the pages his eye fell on the poem about the hand of
 Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand "du supplice encore mal lavée," with
 its downy red hairs and its "doigts de faune."  He glanced at his own
 white taper fingers, and passed on, till he came to those lovely verses
 upon Venice:

     Sur une gamme chromatique,
        Le sein de perles ruisselant,
     La Vénus de l'Adriatique
        Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.

     Les dômes, sur l'azur des ondes
        Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
     S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
        Que soulève un soupir d'amour.

     L'esquif aborde et me dépose,
        Jetant son amarre au pilier,
     Devant une façade rose,
        Sur le marbre d'un escalier.

 How exquisite they were!  As one read them, one seemed to be floating
 down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, lying in a black
 gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains.  The mere lines looked
 to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as
 one pushes out to the Lido.  The sudden flashes of color reminded him
 of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the
 tall honey-combed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through
 the dim arcades.  Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept saying
 over and over to himself,--

     Devant une façade rose,
     Sur le marbre d'un escalier.

 [88] The whole of Venice was in those two lines.  He remembered the
 autumn that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred
 him to delightful fantastic follies.  There was romance in every place.
 But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and
 background was everything, or almost everything.  Basil had been with
 him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret. Poor Basil! what
 a horrible way for a man to die!

 He sighed, and took up the book again, and tried to forget.  He read of
 the swallows that fly in and out of the little café at Smyrna where the
 Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke
 their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; of the
 Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its
 lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered
 Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures
 with gilded claws, and crocodiles, with small beryl eyes, that crawl
 over the green steaming mud; and of that curious statue that Gautier
 compares to a contralto voice, the "monstre charmant" that couches in
 the porphyry-room of the Louvre. But after a time the book fell from
 his hand.  He grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came over him.
 What if Alan Campbell should be out of England?  Days would elapse
 before he could come back. Perhaps he might refuse to come.  What could
 he do then?  Every moment was of vital importance.

 They had been great friends once, five years before,--almost
 inseparable, indeed.  Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.
 When they met in society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled: Alan
 Campbell never did.

 He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real
 appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the
 beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian. His
 dominant intellectual passion was for science.  At Cambridge he had
 spent a great deal of his time working in the Laboratory, and had taken
 a good class in the Natural Science tripos of his year. Indeed, he was
 still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his
 own, in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the
 annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for
 Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up
 prescriptions.  He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and
 played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs.  In
 fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray
 together,--music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to
 be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed exercised often
 without being conscious of it. They had met at Lady Berkshire's the
 night that Rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always
 seen together at the Opera, and wherever good music was going on.  For
 eighteen months their intimacy lasted.  Campbell was always either at
 Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square.  To him, as to many others, Dorian
 Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in
 life. Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever
 knew.  But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when [89]
 they met, and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any
 party at which Dorian Gray was present.  He had changed, too,--was
 strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music
 of any passionate character, and would never himself play, giving as
 his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science
 that he had no time left in which to practise. And this was certainly
 true.  Every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and
 his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews, in
 connection with certain curious experiments.

 This was the man that Dorian Gray was waiting for, pacing up and down
 the room, glancing every moment at the clock, and becoming horribly
 agitated as the minutes went by.  At last the door opened, and his
 servant entered.

 "Mr. Alan Campbell, sir."

 A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the color came back
 to his cheeks.

 "Ask him to come in at once, Francis."

 The man bowed, and retired.  In a few moments Alan Campbell walked in,
 looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his
 coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.

 "Alan! this is kind of you.  I thank you for coming."

 "I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray.  But you said it
 was a matter of life and death."  His voice was hard and cold.  He
 spoke with slow deliberation.  There was a look of contempt in the
 steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian.  He kept his hands in
 the pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and appeared not to have noticed the
 gesture with which he had been greeted.

 "It is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one person.
 Sit down."

 Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him. The
 two men's eyes met.  In Dorian's there was infinite pity.  He knew that
 what he was going to do was dreadful.

 After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very
 quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of the man
 he had sent for, "Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a
 room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a
 table.  He has been dead ten hours now.  Don't stir, and don't look at
 me like that.  Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters
 that do not concern you.  What you have to do is this--"

 "Stop, Gray.  I don't want to know anything further.  Whether what you
 have told me is true or not true, doesn't concern me.  I entirely
 decline to be mixed up in your life.  Keep your horrible secrets to
 yourself.  They don't interest me any more."

 "Alan, they will have to interest you.  This one will have to interest
 you.  I am awfully sorry for you, Alan.  But I can't help myself.  You
 are the one man who is able to save me.  I am forced to bring you into
 the matter.  I have no option.  Alan, you are a scientist.  You know
 about chemistry, and things of that kind.  You have made experiments.
 What you have got to do is to destroy the [90] thing that is
 up-stairs,--to destroy it so that not a vestige will be left of it.
 Nobody saw this person come into the house. Indeed, at the present
 moment he is supposed to be in Paris.  He will not be missed for
 months.  When he is missed, there must be no trace of him found here.
 You, Alan, you must change him, and everything that belongs to him,
 into a handful of ashes that I may scatter in the air."

 "You are mad, Dorian."

 "Ah!  I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."

 "You are mad, I tell you,--mad to imagine that I would raise a finger
 to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession.  I will have
 nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is.  Do you think I am
 going to peril my reputation for you?  What is it to me what devil's
 work you are up to?"

 "It was a suicide, Alan."

 "I am glad of that.  But who drove him to it?  You, I should fancy."

 "Do you still refuse to do this, for me?"

 "Of course I refuse.  I will have absolutely nothing to do with it. I
 don't care what shame comes on you.  You deserve it all.  I should not
 be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced.  How dare you ask
 me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror?  I should
 have thought you knew more about people's characters.  Your friend Lord
 Henry Wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever else
 he has taught you.  Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you.
 You have come to the wrong man.  Go to some of your friends.  Don't
 come to me."

 "Alan, it was murder.  I killed him.  You don't know what he had made
 me suffer.  Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or
 the marring of it than poor Harry has had.  He may not have intended
 it, the result was the same."

 "Murder!  Good God, Dorian, is that what you have come to?  I shall not
 inform upon you.  It is not my business.  Besides, you are certain to
 be arrested, without my stirring in the matter.  Nobody ever commits a
 murder without doing something stupid.  But I will have nothing to do
 with it."

 "All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment.  You
 go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there
 don't affect you.  If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid
 laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters
 scooped out in it, you would simply look upon him as an admirable
 subject.  You would not turn a hair.  You would not believe that you
 were doing anything wrong.  On the contrary, you would probably feel
 that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of
 knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or
 something of that kind.  What I want you to do is simply what you have
 often done before.  Indeed, to destroy a body must be less horrible
 than what you are accustomed to work at.  And, remember, it is the only
 piece of evidence against me.  If it is discovered, I am lost; and it
 is sure to be discovered unless you help me."

 [91] "I have no desire to help you.  You forget that.  I am simply
 indifferent to the whole thing.  It has nothing to do with me."

 "Alan, I entreat you.  Think of the position I am in.  Just before you
 came I almost fainted with terror.  No! don't think of that. Look at
 the matter purely from the scientific point of view.  You don't inquire
 where the dead things on which you experiment come from.  Don't inquire
 now.  I have told you too much as it is.  But I beg of you to do this.
 We were friends once, Alan."

 "Don't speak about those days, Dorian: they are dead."

 "The dead linger sometimes.  The man up-stairs will not go away.  He is
 sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms.  Alan!
 Alan! if you don't come to my assistance I am ruined.  Why, they will
 hang me, Alan!  Don't you understand?  They will hang me for what I
 have done."

 "There is no good in prolonging this scene.  I refuse absolutely to do
 anything in the matter.  It is insane of you to ask me."

 "You refuse absolutely?"

 "Yes."

 The same look of pity came into Dorian's eyes, then he stretched out
 his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it.  He read it
 over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table. Having
 done this, he got up, and went over to the window.

 Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and
 opened it.  As he read it, his face became ghastly pale, and he fell
 back in his chair.  A horrible sense of sickness came over him.  He
 felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.

 After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round,
 and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.

 "I am so sorry, Alan," he murmured, "but you leave me no alternative. I
 have a letter written already.  Here it is.  You see the address. If
 you don't help me, I must send it.  You know what the result will be.
 But you are going to help me.  It is impossible for you to refuse now.
 I tried to spare you.  You will do me the justice to admit that.  You
 were stern, harsh, offensive.  You treated me as no man has ever dared
 to treat me,--no living man, at any rate.  I bore it all.  Now it is
 for me to dictate terms."

 Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him.

 "Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan.  You know what they are.
 The thing is quite simple.  Come, don't work yourself into this fever.
 The thing has to be done.  Face it, and do it."

 A groan broke from Campbell's lips, and he shivered all over.  The
 ticking of the clock on the mantel-piece seemed to him to be dividing
 time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be
 borne.  He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his
 forehead, and as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had
 already come upon him.  The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand
 of lead.  It was intolerable.  It seemed to crush him.

 "Come, Alan, you must decide at once."

 [92] He hesitated a moment.  "Is there a fire in the room up-stairs?"
 he murmured.

 "Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos."

 "I will have to go home and get some things from the laboratory."

 "No, Alan, you need not leave the house.  Write on a sheet of
 note-paper what you want, and my servant will take a cab and bring the
 things back to you."

 Campbell wrote a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope to
 his assistant.  Dorian took the note up and read it carefully. Then he
 rang the bell, and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as soon
 as possible, and to bring the things with him.

 When the hall door shut, Campbell started, and, having got up from the
 chair, went over to the chimney-piece.  He was shivering with a sort of
 ague.  For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. A fly
 buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was like
 the beat of a hammer.

 As the chime struck one, Campbell turned around, and, looking at Dorian
 Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears.  There was something in
 the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him.
 "You are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered.

 "Hush, Alan: you have saved my life," said Dorian.

 "Your life?  Good heavens! what a life that is!  You have gone from
 corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime.  In
 doing what I am going to do, what you force me to do, it is not of your
 life that I am thinking."

 "Ah, Alan," murmured Dorian, with a sigh, "I wish you had a thousandth
 part of the pity for me that I have for you."  He turned away, as he
 spoke, and stood looking out at the garden.  Campbell made no answer.

 After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant
 entered, carrying a mahogany chest of chemicals, with a small electric
 battery set on top of it.  He placed it on the table, and went out
 again, returning with a long coil of steel and platinum wire and two
 rather curiously-shaped iron clamps.

 "Shall I leave the things here, sir?" he asked Campbell.

 "Yes," said Dorian.  "And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another
 errand for you.  What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies
 Selby with orchids?"

 "Harden, sir."

 "Yes,--Harden.  You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden
 personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered,
 and to have as few white ones as possible.  In fact, I don't want any
 white ones.  It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty
 place, otherwise I wouldn't bother you about it."

 "No trouble, sir.  At what time shall I be back?"

 Dorian looked at Campbell.  "How long will your experiment take, Alan?"
 he said, in a calm, indifferent voice.  The presence of a third person
 in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.

 Campbell frowned, and bit his lip.  "It will take about five hours," he
 answered.

 [93] "It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven,
 Francis.  Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing.  You can have
 the evening to yourself.  I am not dining at home, so I shall not want
 you."

 "Thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room.

 "Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost.  How heavy this chest is!
 I'll take it for you.  You bring the other things."  He spoke rapidly,
 and in an authoritative manner.  Campbell felt dominated by him.  They
 left the room together.

 When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and turned
 it in the lock.  Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his
 eyes.  He shuddered.  "I don't think I can go in, Alan," he murmured.

 "It is nothing to me.  I don't require you," said Campbell, coldly.

 Dorian half opened the door.  As he did so, he saw the face of the
 portrait grinning in the sunlight.  On the floor in front of it the
 torn curtain was lying.  He remembered that the night before, for the
 first time in his life, he had forgotten to hide it, when he crept out
 of the room.

 But what was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening,
 on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood?  How
 horrible it was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than
 the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing
 whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that
 it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.

 He opened the door a little wider, and walked quickly in, with
 half-closed eyes and averted head, determined that he would not look
 even once upon the dead man.  Then, stooping down, and taking up the
 gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it over the picture.

 He stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves
 on the intricacies of the pattern before him.  He heard Campbell
 bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things that
 he had required for his dreadful work.  He began to wonder if he and
 Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of each
 other.

 "Leave me now," said Campbell.

 He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been
 thrust back into the chair and was sitting up in it, with Campbell
 gazing into the glistening yellow face.  As he was going downstairs he
 heard the key being turned in the lock.

 It was long after seven o'clock when Campbell came back into the
 library.  He was pale, but absolutely calm.  "I have done what you
 asked me to do," he muttered.  "And now, good-by.  Let us never see
 each other again."

 "You have saved me from ruin, Alan.  I cannot forget that," said
 Dorian, simply.

 As soon as Campbell had left, he went up-stairs.  There was a horrible
 smell of chemicals in the room.  But the thing that had been sitting at
 the table was gone.



 CHAPTER XIII

 [94] "There is no good telling me you are going to be good, Dorian,"
 cried Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl
 filled with rose-water.  "You are quite perfect.  Pray don't change."

 Dorian shook his head.  "No, Harry, I have done too many dreadful
 things in my life.  I am not going to do any more.  I began my good
 actions yesterday."

 "Where were you yesterday?"

 "In the country, Harry.  I was staying at a little inn by myself."

 "My dear boy," said Lord Henry smiling, "anybody can be good in the
 country.  There are no temptations there.  That is the reason why
 people who live out of town are so uncivilized.  There are only two
 ways, as you know, of becoming civilized.  One is by being cultured,
 the other is by being corrupt.  Country-people have no opportunity of
 being either, so they stagnate."

 "Culture and corruption," murmured Dorian.  "I have known something of
 both.  It seems to me curious now that they should ever be found
 together.  For I have a new ideal, Harry.  I am going to alter.  I
 think I have altered."

 "You have not told me yet what your good action was.  Or did you say
 you had done more than one?"

 "I can tell you, Harry.  It is not a story I could tell to any one
 else.  I spared somebody.  It sounds vain, but you understand what I
 mean.  She was quite beautiful, and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane.  I
 think it was that which first attracted me to her.  You remember Sibyl,
 don't you?  How long ago that seems!  Well, Hetty was not one of our
 own class, of course.  She was simply a girl in a village. But I really
 loved her.  I am quite sure that I loved her.  All during this
 wonderful May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her
 two or three times a week.  Yesterday she met me in a little orchard.
 The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was
 laughing.  We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn.
 Suddenly I determined to leave her as flower-like as I had found her."

 "I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill
 of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry.  "But I can finish
 your idyl for you.  You gave her good advice, and broke her heart.
 That was the beginning of your reformation."

 "Harry, you are horrible!  You mustn't say these dreadful things.
 Hetty's heart is not broken.  Of course she cried, and all that.  But
 there is no disgrace upon her.  She can live, like Perdita, in her
 garden."

 "And weep over a faithless Florizel," said Lord Henry, laughing.  "My
 dear Dorian, you have the most curious boyish moods.  Do you think this
 girl will ever be really contented now with any one of her own rank?  I
 suppose she will be married some day to a rough carter or a grinning
 ploughman.  Well, having met you, and loved you, will teach her to
 despise her husband, and she will be wretched.  From a moral point of
 view I really don't think much of your great renunciation. [95] Even as
 a beginning, it is poor.  Besides, how do you know that Hetty isn't
 floating at the present moment in some mill-pond, with water-lilies
 round her, like Ophelia?"

 "I can't bear this, Harry!  You mock at everything, and then suggest
 the most serious tragedies.  I am sorry I told you now.  I don't care
 what you say to me, I know I was right in acting as I did.  Poor Hetty!
 As I rode past the farm this morning, I saw her white face at the
 window, like a spray of jasmine.  Don't let me talk about it any more,
 and don't try to persuade me that the first good action I have done for
 years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever known, is
 really a sort of sin.  I want to be better.  I am going to be better.
 Tell me something about yourself.  What is going on in town?  I have
 not been to the club for days."

 "The people are still discussing poor Basil's disappearance."

 "I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time," said
 Dorian, pouring himself out some wine, and frowning slightly.

 "My dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and
 the public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more
 than one topic every three months.  They have been very fortunate
 lately, however.  They have had my own divorce-case, and Alan
 Campbell's suicide.  Now they have got the mysterious disappearance of
 an artist.  Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the gray ulster
 who left Victoria by the midnight train on the 7th of November was poor
 Basil, and the French police declare that Basil never arrived in Paris
 at all.  I suppose in about a fortnight we will be told that he has
 been seen in San Francisco.  It is an odd thing, but every one who
 disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco.  It must be a
 delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world."

 "What do you think has happened to Basil?" asked Dorian, holding up his
 Burgundy against the light, and wondering how it was that he could
 discuss the matter so calmly.

 "I have not the slightest idea.  If Basil chooses to hide himself, it
 is no business of mine.  If he is dead, I don't want to think about
 him.  Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me.  I hate it. One
 can survive everything nowadays except that.  Death and vulgarity are
 the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain
 away.  Let us have our coffee in the music-room, Dorian.  You must play
 Chopin to me.  The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin
 exquisitely.  Poor Victoria!  I was very fond of her.  The house is
 rather lonely without her."

 Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and, passing into the
 next room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the
 keys.  After the coffee had been brought in, he stopped, and, looking
 over at Lord Henry, said, "Harry, did it ever occur to you that Basil
 was murdered?"

 Lord Henry yawned.  "Basil had no enemies, and always wore a Waterbury
 watch.  Why should he be murdered?  He was not clever enough to have
 enemies.  Of course he had a wonderful genius for painting.  But a man
 can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as possible.  Basil was
 really rather dull.  He only interested me once, [96] and that was when
 he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration for you."

 "I was very fond of Basil," said Dorian, with a sad look in his eyes.
 "But don't people say that he was murdered?"

 "Oh, some of the papers do.  It does not seem to be probable.  I know
 there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not the sort of man
 to have gone to them.  He had no curiosity.  It was his chief defect.
 Play me a nocturne, Dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice,
 how you have kept your youth.  You must have some secret.  I am only
 ten years older than you are, and I am wrinkled, and bald, and yellow.
 You are really wonderful, Dorian.  You have never looked more charming
 than you do to-night.  You remind me of the day I saw you first.  You
 were rather cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary.  You have
 changed, of course, but not in appearance. I wish you would tell me
 your secret.  To get back my youth I would do anything in the world,
 except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.  Youth!  There
 is nothing like it.  It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth.
 The only people whose opinions I listen to now with any respect are
 people much younger than myself.  They seem in front of me.  Life has
 revealed to them her last wonder.  As for the aged, I always contradict
 the aged.  I do it on principle. If you ask them their opinion on
 something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions
 current in 1820, when people wore high stocks and knew absolutely
 nothing.  How lovely that thing you are playing is!  I wonder did
 Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round the villa, and
 the salt spray dashing against the panes?  It is marvelously romantic.
 What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not
 imitative!  Don't stop.  I want music to-night.  It seems to me that
 you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas listening to you.  I
 have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of.  The
 tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.  I am
 amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.  Ah, Dorian, how happy you are!
 What an exquisite life you have had!  You have drunk deeply of
 everything.  You have crushed the grapes against your palate.  Nothing
 has been hidden from you.  But it has all been to you no more than the
 sound of music.  It has not marred you.  You are still the same.

 "I wonder what the rest of your life will be.  Don't spoil it by
 renunciations.  At present you are a perfect type.  Don't make yourself
 incomplete.  You are quite flawless now.  You need not shake your head:
 you know you are.  Besides, Dorian, don't deceive yourself.  Life is
 not governed by will or intention.  Life is a question of nerves, and
 fibres, and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself and
 passion has its dreams.  You may fancy yourself safe, and think
 yourself strong.  But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning
 sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings
 strange memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had
 come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased
 to play,--I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our
 lives depend.  Browning writes about that somewhere; but our [97] own
 senses will imagine them for us. There are moments when the odor of
 heliotrope passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest
 year of my life over again.

 "I wish I could change places with you, Dorian.  The world has cried
 out against us both, but it has always worshipped you.  It always will
 worship you.  You are the type of what the age is searching for, and
 what it is afraid it has found.  I am so glad that you have never done
 anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced
 anything outside of yourself!  Life has been your art.  You have set
 yourself to music.  Your days have been your sonnets."

 Dorian rose up from the piano, and passed his hand through his hair.
 "Yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but I am not going to
 have the same life, Harry.  And you must not say these extravagant
 things to me.  You don't know everything about me.  I think that if you
 did, even you would turn from me.  You laugh.  Don't laugh."

 "Why have you stopped playing, Dorian?  Go back and play the nocturne
 over again.  Look at that great honey-colored moon that hangs in the
 dusky air.  She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she
 will come closer to the earth.  You won't?  Let us go to the club,
 then.  It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly.
 There is some one at the club who wants immensely to know you,--young
 Lord Poole, Bournmouth's eldest son.  He has already copied your
 neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you.  He is quite
 delightful, and rather reminds me of you."

 "I hope not," said Dorian, with a touch of pathos in his voice.  "But I
 am tired to-night, Harry.  I won't go to the club.  It is nearly
 eleven, and I want to go to bed early."

 "Do stay.  You have never played so well as to-night.  There was
 something in your touch that was wonderful.  It had more expression
 than I had ever heard from it before."

 "It is because I am going to be good," he answered, smiling.  "I am a
 little changed already."

 "Don't change, Dorian; at any rate, don't change to me.  We must always
 be friends."

 "Yet you poisoned me with a book once.  I should not forgive that.
 Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one.  It
 does harm."

 "My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize.  You will soon be
 going about warning people against all the sins of which you have grown
 tired.  You are much too delightful to do that.  Besides, it is no use.
 You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. Come round
 tomorrow.  I am going to ride at eleven, and we might go together.  The
 Park is quite lovely now.  I don't think there have been such lilacs
 since the year I met you."

 "Very well.  I will be here at eleven," said Dorian.  "Good-night,
 Harry."  As he reached the door he hesitated for a moment, as if he had
 something more to say.  Then he sighed and went out.

 It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm, and
 did not even put his silk scarf round his throat.  As he strolled [98]
 home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him.
 He heard one of them whisper to the other, "That is Dorian Gray."  He
 remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared
 at, or talked about.  He was tired of hearing his own name now.  Half
 the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was
 that no one knew who he was.  He had told the girl whom he had made
 love him that he was poor, and she had believed him.  He had told her
 once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him, and told him that
 wicked people were always very old and very ugly.  What a laugh she
 had!--just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her
 cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had
 everything that he had lost.

 When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him.  He sent
 him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and
 began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.

 Was it really true that one could never change?  He felt a wild longing
 for the unstained purity of his boyhood,--his rose-white boyhood, as
 Lord Henry had once called it.  He knew that he had tarnished himself,
 filled his mind with corruption, and given horror to his fancy; that he
 had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible
 joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own it had
 been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to
 shame.  But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?

 It was better not to think of the past.  Nothing could alter that. It
 was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think.  Alan
 Campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not
 revealed the secret that he had been forced to know.  The excitement,
 such as it was, over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass
 away.  It was already waning.  He was perfectly safe there.  Nor,
 indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his
 mind.  It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil
 had painted the portrait that had marred his life.  He could not
 forgive him that.  It was the portrait that had done everything. Basil
 had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne
 with patience.  The murder had been simply the madness of a moment.  As
 for Alan Campbell, his suicide had been his own act.  He had chosen to
 do it.  It was nothing to him.

 A new life!  That was what he wanted.  That was what he was waiting
 for.  Surely he had begun it already.  He had spared one innocent
 thing, at any rate.  He would never again tempt innocence.  He would be
 good.

 As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in
 the locked room had changed.  Surely it was not still so horrible as it
 had been?  Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel
 every sign of evil passion from the face.  Perhaps the signs of evil
 had already gone away.  He would go and look.

 He took the lamp from the table and crept up-stairs.  As he unlocked
 the door, a smile of joy flitted across his young face and [99]
 lingered for a moment about his lips.  Yes, he would be good, and the
 hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to
 him.  He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.

 He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and
 dragged the purple hanging from the portrait.  A cry of pain and
 indignation broke from him.  He could see no change, unless that in the
 eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle
 of the hypocrite.  The thing was still loathsome,--more loathsome, if
 possible, than before,--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand
 seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt.

 Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed?  Or
 the desire of a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his
 mocking laugh?  Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us
 do things finer than we are ourselves?  Or, perhaps, all these?

 Why was the red stain larger than it had been?  It seemed to have crept
 like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers.  There was blood on
 the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped,--blood even on the
 hand that had not held the knife.

 Confess?  Did it mean that he was to confess?  To give himself up, and
 be put to death?  He laughed.  He felt that the idea was monstrous.
 Besides, who would believe him, even if he did confess? There was no
 trace of the murdered man anywhere.  Everything belonging to him had
 been destroyed.  He himself had burned what had been below-stairs.  The
 world would simply say he was mad.  They would shut him up if he
 persisted in his story.

 Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make
 public atonement.  There was a God who called upon men to tell their
 sins to earth as well as to heaven.  Nothing that he could do would
 cleanse him till he had told his own sin.  His sin?  He shrugged his
 shoulders.  The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He
 was thinking of Hetty Merton.

 It was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking
 at.  Vanity?  Curiosity?  Hypocrisy?  Had there been nothing more in
 his renunciation than that?  There had been something more.  At least
 he thought so.  But who could tell?

 And this murder,--was it to dog him all his life?  Was he never to get
 rid of the past?  Was he really to confess?  No.  There was only one
 bit of evidence left against him.  The picture itself,--that was
 evidence.

 He would destroy it.  Why had he kept it so long?  It had given him
 pleasure once to watch it changing and growing old.  Of late he had
 felt no such pleasure.  It had kept him awake at night.  When he had
 been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look
 upon it.  It had brought melancholy across his passions.  Its mere
 memory had marred many moments of joy.  It had been like conscience to
 him.  Yes, it had been conscience.  He would destroy it.

 He looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He
 had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was
 bright, and glistened.  As it had killed the painter, so it [100] would
 kill the painter's work, and all that that meant.  It would kill the
 past, and when that was dead he would be free.  He seized it, and
 stabbed the canvas with it, ripping the thing right up from top to
 bottom.

 There was a cry heard, and a crash.  The cry was so horrible in its
 agony that the frightened servants woke, and crept out of their rooms.
 Two gentlemen, who were passing in the Square below, stopped, and
 looked up at the great house.  They walked on till they met a
 policeman, and brought him back.  The man rang the bell several times,
 but there was no answer.  The house was all dark, except for a light in
 one of the top windows.  After a time, he went away, and stood in the
 portico of the next house and watched.

 "Whose house is that, constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen.

 "Mr. Dorian Gray's, sir," answered the policeman.

 They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered.  One of
 them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.

 Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics
 were talking in low whispers to each other.  Old Mrs. Leaf was crying,
 and wringing her hands.  Francis was as pale as death.

 After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the
 footmen and crept up-stairs.  They knocked, but there was no reply.
 They called out.  Everything was still.  Finally, after vainly trying
 to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on to the
 balcony.  The windows yielded easily: the bolts were old.

 When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait
 of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his
 exquisite youth and beauty.  Lying on the floor was a dead man, in
 evening dress, with a knife in his heart.  He was withered, wrinkled,
 and loathsome of visage.  It was not till they had examined the rings
 that they recognized who it was.










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