That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed
and wearing a large button-hole of Parma violets,
Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady Narborough’s
drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead
was throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly
excited, but his manner as he bent over his hostess’s
hand was as easy and graceful as ever. Perhaps
one never seems so much at one’s ease as when
one has to play a part. Certainly no one looking
at Dorian Gray that night could have believed that
he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any
tragedy of our age. Those finely shaped fingers
could never have clutched a knife for sin, nor those
smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness.
He himself could not help wondering at the calm of
his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible
pleasure of a double life.
It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by
Lady Narborough, who was a very clever woman with
what Lord Henry used to describe as the remains of
really remarkable ugliness. She had proved an
excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors,
and having buried her husband properly in a marble
mausoleum, which she had herself designed, and married
off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men,
she devoted herself now to the pleasures of French
fiction, French cookery, and French esprit when she
could get it.
Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she
always told him that she was extremely glad she had
not met him in early life. “I know, my
dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you,”
she used to say, “and thrown my bonnet right
over the mills for your sake. It is most fortunate
that you were not thought of at the time. As
it was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills
were so occupied in trying to raise the wind, that
I never had even a flirtation with anybody.
However, that was all Narborough’s fault.
He was dreadfully short-sighted, and there is no pleasure
in taking in a husband who never sees anything.”
Her guests this evening were rather tedious.
The fact was, as she explained to Dorian, behind
a very shabby fan, one of her married daughters had
come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make
matters worse, had actually brought her husband with
her. “I think it is most unkind of her,
my dear,” she whispered. “Of course
I go and stay with them every summer after I come
from Homburg, but then an old woman like me must have
fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake them
up. You don’t know what an existence they
lead down there. It is pure unadulterated country
life. They get up early, because they have so
much to do, and go to bed early, because they have
so little to think about. There has not been
a scandal in the neighbourhood since the time of Queen
Elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep after
dinner. You shan’t sit next either of them.
You shall sit by me and amuse me.”
