It was almost nine o’clock before he reached
the club, where he found Lord Henry sitting alone,
in the morning-room, looking very much 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 how the time
was going.”
“Yes, 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, you have discovered that?” murmured
Lord Henry. And they passed into the dining-room.
For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from
the influence 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 nine large-paper copies of the first edition,
and had them bound in different colours, 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 and the scientific
temperaments 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 novel’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 beau 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 overemphasized, account
of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost
what in others, and the world, he had most dearly
valued.
For the wonderful 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 rumours about his mode of life crept
through London and became the chatter of the clubs—
could not believe anything to his dishonour 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 memory of 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 sensual.
